Street Fight Daily: Ebay Buys Braintree, Square’s Next Move

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

Baskets vector illustrationEBay Buys Braintree, a Payments Start-Up (New York Times)
EBay said Thursday that it was acquiring Braintree, a Chicago payments start-up, for $800 million in cash. Braintree provides technology to an impressive roster of companies to help them process payments on the Web and mobile devices inlcudign Rovio, Uber, OpenTable, Fab, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Heroku.

In Fight Against Amazon, Retail Finds New Ally In Tech (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: Nearly two decades after the launch of Amazon.com, brick-and-mortar retailers still face a very real threat from the Web. But today, the industry has a critical new partner: the tech community. Retail has emerged as one of the fastest growing sectors in the technology industry, with venture capitalists, startups and retailers themselves, building products to fuse the web with our in-store experience

Square’s Next Move: Jump On A Platform (ReadWrite)
Owen Thomas: PayPal wasn’t the only company having conversations with Braintree, a Chicago-based startup known for its appeal to app developers. Square, a mobile-payments company focused on elegant design and smaller merchants, appears to have been interested in Braintree, too. And that suggests that Square is rethinking what it is and how it should play in the vast, convoluted world where money moves.

Openings and New Hires at YPG, Living Social, BrightRoll, Act-on, Neustar (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new hires at Mediative and Brightroll, plus jobs at Yext, The Weather Channel, LinkedIn and more

Clinkle Becomes a Tech Celebrity Magnet, Landing Richard Branson As An Investor (GigaOm)
The hype keeps building around Clinkle, a still-secretive Palo Alto mobile payments startup founded by 22-year-old Lucas Duplan. It’s already raised $25 million in seed funding from an impressive list of Silicon Valley backers, and that list just got even more impressive. Clinkle announced Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson has made a personal investment of an undisclosed amount in the company.

Why PayPal Should Buy Foursquare (ReadWrite)
Compared to other potential buyers, PayPal seems like it might be a more benevolent owner, less likely to squash Foursquare by integrating it into existing maps and commerce services. Foursquare considered offering payments services early in its life, but decided to avoid the cost and complexity—so while there’s good strategic fit, there’s relatively little overlap.

Ford Deal Signals New Push for Common Car Apps (Wall Street Journal)
Ford, seeking to forge a common way for mobile phone applications to work with its and other auto makers’ digital systems, on Monday purchased a small Michigan software company for less than $10 million. The purchase of the Ferndale, Mich.-based company shows how important developing applications for Ford’s Sync AppLink system has become.

MLB Tests iBeacon App Feature To Send Mobile Coupons (MediaPost)
Major League Baseball likes to be on the cutting edge when it comes to adopting the latest mobile innovations. So it’s hardly surprising the league is among the first to test the buzzed-about new iBeacon feature in iOS 7 in a commercial application.

Location-aware Mobile Savings App Shopular Gets $6.4M From Sequoia To Help Save Brick-and-Mortar retail (PandoDaily)
Shopular, the company behind the intelligent mobile shopping concierge app by the same name, has raised $6.4 million dollars in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Sequoia’s Tim Lee will join the company’s board of directors. The company has built a service that automatically notifying its users of available discounts whenever they are in the vicinity a store that matches their personalized profile.

LBMA Podcast: Zipments, ExactTarget, and David Shalaby of TapTrack (Street Fight)
On the show: Facebook uses your data to help carriers market to you better; Zipments proves we are in a bubble by raising $2.25M; ExactTarget moves into location; ESA partners with DMTI; SpeakGeo launches; Intersec gets their Weve on; Bump acquired by Google; a Lowe’s case study; and app of the week Basewarp.

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