Street Fight Daily: PayPal Tracks You In-Store, Twitter Buys MoPub

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

Screen Shot 2013-09-10 at 7.53.33 AMNow PayPal Aims To Track You In Real Life (AllThingsD)
PayPal has launched Beacon, a piece of hardware built for merchants with the aim of making retail in-store transactions hands-free. Plug the small, attractive piece of PayPal-designed hardware into a power outlet at your retail store and it taps into the point-of-sale software at the store and will auto-recognize when customers walk into their store. From there, customers can pay via their PayPal accounts at the point of sale, without having to pull out their phones or wallets.

5 Things SMBs Can Do to Optimize for Mobile Search (Street Fight)
Corey Quinn: Recent data from Google found that 94% of smartphone users have searched for local information, 70% have called a business after searching, 66% visited in person, and 90% of these users acted within 24 hours. So what do SMBs need to do to ensure they’ll get calls from potential customers who are searching on mobile?

Twitter Plans to Sell Ads for Other Companies With MoPub Acquisition (New York Times)
Twitter announced on Monday that it had acquired MoPub, a mobile ad technology firm whose offices are a short bike ride from Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Neither company disclosed the price, but a person with knowledge of the deal said it exceeded $300 million. Twitter plans to use the company’s real time bidding technology very quickly to automate bidding for ad space on Twitter.

Case Study: Managing Online Reputation in a Healthcare Setting (Street Fight)
As the healthcare industry evolves, it’s becoming increasingly common for physicians to utilize hyperlocal tools for both patient acquisition and retention. As the public relations director at Nova Medical Group, one of the largest integrative primary care practices in Northern Virginia, Melanie Schmidt is responsible for spearheading the group’s digital marketing initiatives.

Foursquare Now Lets You Search for Individual Menu Items (Mashable)
Starting Monday you can search on Foursquare for individual menu items. Whether you’re looking for FroYo or fried chicken, you can search through Foursquare’s database of 500,000 restaurants to find that dish near you. Foursquare is able to perform the searches through a partnership with Locu and SinglePlatform, which provide the company with 43 million menu items.

Yelp’s CEO on Expansion, ‘Community’ (Wall Street Journal)
Yelp, the big reviews website, serves as an online guide to a world that is largely offline. So when it wants to move into new territory, it makes sure to keep a foot in both worlds. In an interview with the Journal’s Ben Rooney, Yelp co-founder and Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman said that expansion requires tapping into one of the company’s “most underappreciated” elements: its community.

Location-Based Marketing Startup Placecast Is Moving Into Mobile Ads (And AdTech) With PlaceAd (TechCrunch)
Placecast is now taking the next step to link up advertisers and mobile consumers. It is launching PlaceAd, a demand-side platform that connects Placecast’s location technology with mobile ad networks so advertisers can deliver campaigns based on location, as well as other user-specific criteria like age, gender, interests, device type/operating system, time of day, and weather.

The Mobile Local Opportunity, By the Numbers (SearchEngineWatch)
Michael Boland: The excitement and attention paid to mobile local search continue to ratchet up. But we still haven’t seen the equivalent ad dollars follow. Mobile local search is now $1.3 billion in the U.S., according to BIA/Kelsey, but that pales in comparison to the overall $132 billion local ad pie.

Google Tests Links to Rival Local Sites in UK Search Results (Screenwerk)
Google UK local search results page now displays three links to competitor local services. These three “rival links” are part of a package of formal concessions Google has offered to the European Commission to settle the antitrust case against the company. After intense lobbying by Microsoft and other companies, the European Commission has asked for additional “concessions” from Google.

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