Street Fight Daily: Facebook Partners With OpenTable, Groupon Acquires Plumfare

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

facebooklikebuttonFacebook To Offer OpenTable Restaurant Bookings Via Mobile (Reuters)
Facebook struck a deal with online restaurant booking service OpenTable that will allow users to reserve tables at restaurants via a Facebook app, as the world’s No. 1 social network continues to expand its mobile services. In an announcement on its website, Facebook said the feature would be available on its mobile pages for more than 20,000 OpenTable restaurant customers across North America.

Why Intuition Fails Us in Mobile Advertising (Street Fight)
Eli Portnoy: When mobile was in its infancy, it was appropriate to use intuition and past experience as a guide for how to run mobile ad campaigns. However, the time has come for us as an industry to evolve and begin to use data and empirical evidence to guide our mobile advertising. We need to test and validate our intuitions with unique mobile data to optimize campaign performance.

Plumfare Acquired By Groupon (VentureBeat)
Groupon is continuing to build out its restaurant-focused services by acquiring social gifting app Plumfare, a Groupon spokesperson confirmed. Plumfare prompts restaurant goers to photograph a drink or food item and then send it to a friend as a symbol of a gift. Plumfare, which launched last year, takes a cut of the transaction when the gift recipient redeems it.

5 Tools Businesses Can Use for Predictive Analytics (Street Fight)
Consumers are creatures of habit, and the behaviors they demonstrate today will oftentimes indicate the actions they’ll take tomorrow. A number of hyperlocal vendors are helping businesses create customer profiles based on in-store activities, purchase histories, and demographics. Now, predictive analytics tools are finally putting these customer profiles to use

How Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley Lost The Narrative to Yelp’s Keith Rabois (Fast Company)
Austin Carr: The company thrived off of its positive attention in the beginning–from the magazine covers Crowley was featured on after Foursquare surpassed a million users to the television coverage he received for raising a $50 million round from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. But when the narrative flipped in the past year, Foursquare and its star started to fade from the attention.

Turns Out Using a Smart Trashcan to Randomly Track Passersby Isn’t OK (GigaOm)
The local authority in London’s financial district has put the brakes on a startup’s pilot program, which used smart recycling bins to log the identifiers of passing mobile devices. A company had started to use these bins to track the smartphones of passersby, logging the devices’ unique MAC addresses in order to figure out who the manufacturer is – the idea was to more accurately target the ads on the bins’ screens at the people around them.

Yelp Outs More Businesses With Another Batch Of Paid Review Alerts (SearchEngineLand)
Yelp’s battle against phony reviews and unacceptable tactics to earn reviews continues today with the company posting another batch of “Consumer Alert” messages on business profile pages. It tells consumers that Yelp “caught someone offering up cash, discounts, gift certificates or other incentives in exchange for reviews about this business.”

More Bad News For LivingSocial – Its Big-Ticket Acquisition Is Reportedly Up For Sale (PandoDaily)
Daily deals company LivingSocial’s recent troubles have been well-documented, but now its pain appears to be going international. One of South Korea’s leading business newspapers has reported that LivingSocial is looking to sell Ticket Monster, which had been considered one of South Korea’s biggest tech success stories.

Carrier-Backed Mobile Wallet Isis Ties Up With Chase, Amex, Ahead Of Nationwide Expansion (TechCrunch)
Carrier-backed mobile payments initiative Isis is gearing up support for its mobile wallet platform ahead of the nationwide launch later this year. Today, Isis is announcing Chase has signed on to be a part of the national rollout, following the pilot trials in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City.

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