Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Shows ‘Check-In’ Ads, LivingSocial Cuts Back

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology

FoursquareFoursquare Starts Showing Ads After You Check In (AdAge)
Foursquare has started rolling out post check-in ads — ads served to users immediately after they check in at certain locations — and Captain Morgan is one of the first brands on board. Foursquare users who check in at certain bars, nightclubs or restaurants will be served an ad suggesting they order a “Captain and cola,” “Captain and ginger” or “Captain mojito.”

How Local Search Looks to the Rest of Us (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: It seems like many recent conversations, webinars, articles, and studies have pointed to the same conclusion: local search as an industry is insufficiently aware of how its products are actually used by consumers and small businesses. Many of the solutions put forward by consumer-facing local publishers and by business-facing services overestimate our appetite for new products and the amount of time and energy we want to spend using online tools.

LivingSocial To Stop Producing Local Events, Cut At Least 30 Jobs (Washington Business Journal)
LivingSocial plans to stop producing local events on its own, a spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday, marking the end of a business that launched two years ago under the “Adventures” brand. As part of the move, the District-based deals company is shedding at least 30 positions.

Local Media’s Data-Driven Future (Street Fight)
Terry Heaton: New value creation is the purpose of media companies today, whether small or big. I genuinely feel sorry for those who believe there is a future in practicing content creation alone. Last week, I called for a strategic makeover. We need a new strategic plan that positions us as more than “just” a media company and behind which our employees can throw their energy. So here are ten things that I view as tactically supporting such a strategy.

How Crowdfunding Is Changing the Way Local Causes Raise Money (Street Fight)
Patrick Kitano: Crowdfunding projects are a form of content marketing, a way to inform a reader about an organization and compel them to give without subjecting them to an explicit sales pitch. It fits in with what donors say they want from the causes they support — more results and less solicitation.

Revamped Google Maps App Aims to Give Users More Content (Wall Street Journal)
The company has overhauled its iOS app in a way that focuses more intuitively on categories of what you want to do, like Eat, Drink, Shop, Play and Sleep. It has a smart way of encouraging discoveries within these categories that made even me—someone who avoided the discovery features in Google Maps—want to use them. And, yes, it still plots your journey, but now it looks ahead for traffic so it can reroute you mid-trip.

Do You Know Where You’ll Be 285 Days From Now At 2 P.M.? These Data-Masters Do (Fast Company)
After collecting over 150 million location points, two researchers developed the first system of its kind to predict with accuracy where someone would be in 20 or 200 days. Called Far Out, the system didn’t even need to be told exactly what to look for–it automatically discovered regularities in the data. Not only did Far Out predict with high accuracy the correct location of a wide variety of individuals, but it did so even years into the future.

Groupon ‘Pauses’ its Rewards Program (Local Onliner)
In a letter to customers and merchants, Groupon has now announced that it is temporarily suspending the Rewards program on Sept.1 as it works on integrating the system into Breadcrub, the company’s point of sale system. The new version of Rewards is being designed to work across Groupon’s new Breadcrumb-branded products; enable a wide range of credit cards, not just those attached to the Groupon account; and also enable an international footprint.

Transitioning To a Mobile Centric World (Above The Crowd)
Bill Gurley: We are now seeing a new transition – away from the browser and back towards stand-alone applications, this time on mobile devices. This critical platform shift should weigh heavily on the minds of all companies that have something to lose; primarily browser-based Internet incumbents. The stakes are quite high, and it may even be too late.

What Happens When Everyone Makes Maps? (Atlantic)
It isn’t that outsiders are coming in and revolutionizing mapping; rather, a new democratization in mapping has occurred. With the tools being much cheaper and relatively easy to learn, you get people who don’t have a professional interest figuring out how to make maps their own.

Clinkle Opens Waitlists To U.S. College Students, Teases A Bit More About What The $25M App Will Look Like (TechCrunch)
Clinkle, the much-hyped mobile payments startup that recently announced a $25 million round, announced today that it is opening its wait lists to college students across America. The company, which has been in stealth mode since 2011, says the students that build the largest wait lists, proportional to their school’s student body size, “will be among the first to experience Clinkle on their campuses.”

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