Street Fight Daily: Leaf Raises $20 Million, AT&T Starts Selling Location Data

Share this:

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

leafSquare Competitor Leaf Scores $20 Million Investment From Payments Giant Heartland (AllThingsD)
The Cambridge, Mass.-based startup has raised a $20 million strategic investment from Heartland Payment Systems, a publicly traded payments processing company that does $2 billion in revenue annually. Heartland isn’t Starbucks, the glitzy partner of Square, but it has a huge and valuable base of small-business customers to which it can introduce the Leaf system.

PlaceIQ CEO: Our Goal Isn’t to Improve Click-Through Rates — It’s to Understand Consumers (Street Fight)
Fresh off of a $6.75 million round of funding earlier this year, targeting firm PlaceIQ is hard at work breaking down the physical world by location in order to analyze data and show the which ads will resonate best with consumers based on where they are at a given time. In a recent interview, the company’s CEO Duncan McCall spoke with Street Fight about where PlaceIQ fits in a crowded mobile advertising industry and how advertisers can use time, location and creative to understand consumer behavior.

AT&T Turns Its Data Into An Adaptive Intelligence Business (ZDNet)
AT&T Business Solutions is embarking on an ambitious plan for sharing its data in a secure programmatic fashion. What data is it sharing? It starts with location-based data and analytics – GPS ping data aggregated to show patterns of mobile movements, followed by the anonymized and aggregated customer data and insights, matching ping data to customer group data such as income, age, type of mobile device used, etc.

8 Strategies for Selling to Local Merchants as an Early Stage Hyperlocal (Street Fight)
Selling to local merchants is a challenge in a post-Groupon world, where many small business owners have grown skeptical of the long-term value that digital marketing solutions can provide. Early stage hyperlocals without established track records have additional hurdles to overcome, as they struggle to prove themselves in a crowded marketplace. All these obstacles are forcing hyperlocal vendors to get creative with the way they target local merchants.

“Showrooming” Is More About Research Than Price Comparison (PandoDaily)
According to a study released by the Columbia Business School and Aimia, a loyalty management company, only 6 percent of people using their smartphones in a store do so with the intent of purchasing a product online. Some 60 percent of shoppers are said to be more likely to purchase a product in-store if they can find online reviews for the item, the study says. Like the millions of microbes that live in your gut, smartphones help retailers more than they hurt them.

Placeable Launches New Feature to Help Fix ‘Dirty’ Local Data (Street Fight)
Two months after a major rebranding, the Denver-based Placeable has launched a new tool to help big brands clean up their location data. The feature, called Placeable Plot, allows marketers to update and manage location data for a brand’s brick-and-mortar stores across apps, search engines, maps, social networks and marketing campaigns.

The Local Marketer’s Guide To Apple Maps for iOS7 (SearchEngineLand)
Andrew Shotland: While the launch of iOS7 has received a ton of press and blogger nitpicking about every last detail, little has been said about how the new version of Apple Maps affects local marketers. The fact is that iOS is well on its way to one billion installations. Oh yeah, and over 200 million devices are running iOS7 only two weeks after it became available.

Digital Ads Will Be 22% Of All U.S. Ad Spend In 2013, Mobile Ads 3.7%; Total Global Ad Spend In 2013 $503B (TechCrunch)
Global ad spend in 2013 will see steady growth of 3.5% to reach $503 billion by the end of the year, and the amount going into internet advertising will continue to get larger, according to figures out today from Publicis-owned ad agency ZenithOptimedia. In the U.S. digital in 2013 will account for 21.8% of all ad spend ($109.7 billion), up from 19% the year before.

Sensorly Adds Mobile Speed Data To Crowdsourced Coverage Map App (GigaOm)
Sensorly, the French platform for crowdsourcing cellular and Wi-Fi coverage maps, has updated its app to also show users what sort of speed they should be expecting. The service, which offers 300 maps across 50 countries, has actually allowed users to test and upload the mobile broadband speeds they receive for a while, but this is the first time that it’s feeding that data back to members of the community so they can see what performance carriers generally offer in a given area.

Tags: