Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nears Deal For Braintree, Intuit Overhauls SMB Product

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

PayPal Nears Deal for Braintree Payments (Wall Street Journal)
PayPal is near a deal to buy Braintree Payments Solutions, according to people familiar with the discussions, potentially thrusting the online payments pioneer into the center of the burgeoning mobile commerce market. The deal for Braintree would give PayPal access to data and lucrative transaction fees from Braintree’s expanding network, which currently processes more than $10 billion annually for companies like OpenTable, Uber Technologies and Airbnb.

Study: Mobile Users More Willing to Share Location Than Browsing History (Street Fight)
When it comes to mobile marketing, consumers are more willing to share the places they go in the real-world with brands than the websites they visit, according to a new study conducted by Millward Brown. The research, which surveyed 1,572 consumers who have downloaded a mobile app in the past year, found that 43% of respondents were willing to share their location with companies compared to one of every ten who said they would share their browser history.

Intuit Overhauls QuickBooks Online as Competition for Small Businesses Ramps Up (AllThingsD)
Intuit today is unveiling a drastic overhaul of its QuickBooks Online accounting software for small businesses, which lets business owners toggle on Intuit’s payments and payroll tools with essentially one click. The redesign was critical for Intuit, since it expects by the end of this fiscal year to have more new customers sign up for the online version of QuickBooks than the desktop version.

5 Tools for Building a Community Marketplace (Street Fight)
With their built-in audiences already in place, hyperlocal publications are able to easily overcome one of the biggest obstacles to getting a community marketplace off the ground. However, technical challenges still remain, and building a marketplace from scratch can be extraordinarily time consuming and expensive. Now, a handful of vendors are offering a solution, providing publishers with the tools they need to create custom marketplaces that can be up and running in a matter of days.

eBay Unveils Click & Collect Service So Small Merchants Can Offer In-Store Collections (TheNextWeb)
eBay is already known as the leading marketplace for amateur online resellers, but now the company is looking to brick-and-mortar retailers as its next big driver for growth in the UK. Click & Collect is a new initiative that will give eBay customers the ability to buy products from their preferred retailer and then pick them up in store.

Reviewing the Review Reviewers (New York Times)
David Streitfeld: There was a voluminous response to my article Monday morning that said Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, had gone after 19 companies for fake online reviews. Here is how I would sum up the tenor of many of the comments: A good beginning, but in essence a slap on the wrist, with the total amount of fines reaching only $350,000. Regulators should do much more.

The Rise of Mobile Has Nearly Doubled Time Spent Online (MediaPost)
According to a new report from comScore and Jumptap, soaring smartphone and tablet use has doubled the amount of time Americans spend online in the matter of a few short years. As a result, as of April of this year, smartphones and tablets account for approximately half of adults’ time online, a figure which rises to 59% among 18-24-year-olds and 61% among women aged 25-49.

There’s One Good Thing About The Newspaper Industry Decline — More Innovation Is Happening (PaidContent)
Matthew Ingram: There are a couple of different ways that newspapers and other media companies have chosen to respond to the inexorable decline of their former market dominance: one is to moan about how Google is stealing their content, and talk incessantly about the good old days, and the other is to try and adapt to the shifts going on around them. It’s refreshing to see at least a few newspapers choosing the latter path.

Backed By First Round’s Dorm Room Fund, Addy Is A Location-Sharing Service That Goes Beyond Addresses (TechCrunch)
Khaled Naim, CEO of startup Addy, is hoping to create a new way for people to share their location. To address problem of searching for an address, Addy makes it easy for businesses and individuals to share their location with a simple URL. Each URL includes a pin on a map, as well as room for additional directions/instructions, plus options for sharing.