Street Fight Daily: Groupon Partners With Verifone, Smartphones Take Market Share
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Groupon Goes Beyond the Dongle, Links Up With Verifone, Ingenico Terminals for Breadcrumb Mobile Payments (TechCrunch)
Groupon has announced integrations with Verifone and Ingenico, two of the biggest producers of payment terminals used at the point of sale, so that merchants can use these to process card payments instead of dongles attached to their iOS or Android smartphones and tablets. In the past, companies like Verifone have positively butted heads with the likes of Square, accusing it of being an insecure alternative, before subsequently (and unsuccessfully) trying to compete with like-for-like services.
Hyperlocal Leaders Weigh In on Impact of Bezos’ Wash Post Buy (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post is sure to have ramifications all the way down to the hyperlocal level. With all the retail and media disruption, and more on the way, I asked leaders in hyperlocal news how they see Bezos’ purchase of the Post playing out in their territory.
Smartphones Outsell Feature Phones Globally for First Time (Mashable)
A 46.5% jump in sales prompted smartphones to outsell feature phones globally for the first time, according to a Gartner study. Assessing sales for the second quarter, the researcher estimated that smartphones accounted for 51.8% of mobile phone sales across the world.
Case Study: Supermarket Chain Increases Basket Size With Card-Linked Coupons (Street Fight)
At Lunds & Byerly’s, a chain of 22 upscale grocery stores in the Twin Cities region, marketing manager Dan O’Rourke faced certain operational limitations that made it difficult for his company to expand into the digital arena. To overcome these challenges, O’Rourke looked into vendors that offered card-linked coupons.
No, Craigslist Is Not Responsible for the Death of Newspapers (GigaOm)
Matthew Ingram: A new study by two business school professors examined the issue and concluded that, indeed, Craigslist took a giant bite out of newspapers’ revenues — some $5 billion between the years 2000 and 2007. And that’s not even looking at the Times, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, which the authors left out in order to have a more homogeneous sample.
Salvaging Something From the Rubble of Patch (Media Nation)
Dan Kennedy: The end seems to be near for Patch, AOL’s network of hyperlocal websites, which never had a business model that made sense. At this point, the most merciful thing Armstrong could do is shut down the whole thing and help the hard-working local editors become owner-operators.
Mobile Conversions Rise, Most At Home (MediaPost)
The mobile shift is leading people to spend more time on devices, upping the conversions taking place on mobile. Nearly a third (31%) of online conversions across the telecom, retail, auto, and travel verticals occur on mobile devices, according to a new study by AOL and the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Yelp Joins With Advocacy Group ALEC to Fight SLAPP Lawsuits (Daily Beast)
While companies like Yelp are immunized from a lawsuit over a bad review, the user posting the review is not. And while the First Amendment allows people to post bad reviews online, paying thousands of dollars in lawsuits to do so tends to be a major deterrent The result, as Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University notes, is that any website relying on “user-generated content” has a strong interest in promoting anti-SLAPP legislation.
Sosh’s Data-Based Personal Concierge Points To Predictive Future (Forbes)
Startup Sosh is aiming to be a mobile “concierge” to help people find unique personalized things to do in a city. But it wants to do much more, predicting what you want to do and with which friends–and arrange the activities for you.