Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nabs Uber Deal, Facebook Revises SMB Count
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
PayPal Nabs Uber Partnership in Pursuit of Mobile Marketplaces (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Users of Uber’s popular mobile-booking application will be able to pay with PayPal starting today in the U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, David Marcus, president of PayPal, said in an interview. The improvements may help PayPal make headway into other popular marketplaces such as room-sharing service Airbnb, which doesn’t use the company’s payment offering in its mobile app, Marcus said.
Is Variable Product Pricing the Next Horizon in Local Advertising? (Street Fight)
Michael Boland: Proximity-related factors enable predictive modeling around transaction probability. From there, it’s a matter of variable pricing to customers that are new, repeat, faraway, nearby on foot versus driving by at 60 mph, and so on. And that’s the key: though we have time-based variable pricing (a la airlines), proximity-based personalized pricing is the next phase.
Facebook Expands Its Definition Of Small Business Pages, Says It Now Has 25M Of Them (TechCrunch)
Facebook is tweaking the way it counts up the small and medium businesses that have a presence on the social network. Why the change? Well, it increases the count. Dan Levy, who leads Facebook’s small and medium business team, told me there are now 25 million Facebook Pages for SMBs, and 1 million of those businesses are active advertisers.
Study: Mobile Revenues Growing Faster Than Expected (Street Fight)
A new study from BIA/Kelsey projects that U.S. mobile advertising revenues will jump from $7.03 billion in 2012 to over $20 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, local’s share of mobile spending continues to grow, with local targeting set to touch one of every two dollars spent on mobile advertising by 2017.
Digital First Media Will Add Paywalls At Most Of Its Daily Newspapers (GigaOm)
Matthew Ingram: Digital First Media CEO John Paton has made it clear in the past that he is not a fan of paywalls, so the news that he is rolling out metered subscription plans at about 75 of his company’s papers might seem a little surprising. But at least Paton is willing to admit something few other media executives have when put in a similar situation: namely, that paywalls are short-term tactic, rather than a long-term strategy.
6 Strategies for Managing the Expansion of Your Hyperlocal Business (Street Fight)
As the hyperlocal industry continues to flourish, more and more vendors are experiencing growing pains. Oftentimes, expansion means larger offices, more employees, and more headaches from a business management perspective. Here are six strategies for managing an expansion as an early-stage hyperlocal, from executives who’ve made their way through the trenches and lived to tell about it.
The Passive Check In: Is This Foursquare’s Hail Mary Pass? (Entrepreneur)
Foursquare has been known to its users mainly as a check-in app, until now. Instead of having to check-in at each location to see tips and reviews from Foursquare, the app will automatically, or “passively,” give users recommendations based on their current location and past preferences. This new location-recommendation feature could be what helps Foursquare emerge from its somewhat uncertain position in the tech world and join the ranks of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and others.
Mobile advertisers: What do they know about you? (GigaOm)
With the onslaught of new technology and attendant privacy violations, it’s easy to hyperbolize what “they” — the government, big corporations, hackers — know about you. We spoke with Sense Networks, a company that uses mobile data to help ad agencies target their desired users, to find out what advertisers know — and don’t know — about us, and how that relates to the ads we see on our phones every day.
Retail-Data Startup Index Raises $7 Million (Wall Street Journal)
San Francisco startup Index, which wants to make it easier for brick-and-mortar retailers to collect more information about their customers, raised $7 million from a group including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s venture-capital firm and Khosla Ventures. Index helps retailers better analyze customers’ buying habits by linking the credit card they use at registers to their e-mail address, mobile phone and even their home computer.
Instacart Eyes 10 New US Markets For 2014 While Its Relationship With Trader Joe’s Remains On Hold (TechCrunch)
Grocery delivery service Instacart recently opened up shop in Chicago, marking its first expansion outside of the Bay Area. Before the Chicago move, if you asked Instacart why, their answer was simple: They wanted to lock down their model before they took it on the road.
Twitter Data-Mining Startup HipLogiq Nets $7 Million in Series B (AllThingsD)
HipLogiq, a Dallas, Texas, based marketing startup, announced on Monday it had raised $7 million in a Series B round of venture financing. HipLogiq’s main business is centered around self-serve marketing for small and medium-sized companies as well as enterprise-level outfits, offering a tool that lets customers search Twitter for keywords and serve up ads or promotional offers based on the tweets.
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