Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Raises Another $35M, eBay’s Strategy for Offline Commerce

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.

Foursquare Raises a $35 Million Round and Adds DFJ’s Schuler to the Board (AllThingsD)
Foursquare, the iconic social location service, has raised $35 million in a Series D round, led by DFJ Growth and the Capital Group’s Smallcap World Fund. The company confirmed the raise, which has been the subject of intense scrutiny amid many reports that the New York-based company was in big trouble and likely to have to take a down round to garner funding.

DemandForce CMO: There’s No Limit to Where We Will Want to Go (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: If Google’s acquisition of Waze was the biggest exit in local tech over the past few years, Intuit’s buy of Demandforce was arguably the most important. Since shelling out nearly half of a billion dollars for the retention marketing software provider, the company has quietly executed on a strategy to position itself an integrated solutions provider for small businesses.

EBay’s Strategy for Taking On Amazon (New York Times)
Online companies collect all of this information and use it. Offline retailers — physical stores — do not have these advantages. They don’t know who you are unless you use your card to buy something, and that’s only after the fact. They can’t target you or make you any kind of specific offer, as online retailers can. The technology on display in eBay’s Commerce Innovation Showcase is designed to try to close that gap.

Openings and New Hires at Patch, Callfire, Kenshoo and Radiate Media (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 and jobs at BIA/Kelsey, AOL, User Friendly Media, and more.

Nextdoor Talks Growth, Now Being Used In One In Six Neighborhoods In The US (TechCrunch)
Nextdoor, the fast-growing startup that has been compared to a Facebook for your neighborhood, has revealed some new numbers today in a TCTV interview with co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia and Greylock partner and Nextdoor investor Josh Elman. As Tolia tells us, Nextdoor just launched its 25,000th neighborhood (up from 22,500 neighborhoods in October, and 6,000 neighborhoods a year ago.) He also said that the network is now being used in 1-in-6 neighborhoods.

GrubHub Puts Data on Its Menu (Bloomberg Businessweek)
The company’s endgame is to embed further into restaurants’ operations to help justify its commissions, which cost at least 10 percent of the food order and can run more than twice that, past a certain order volume or in exchange for better placement in search results. In the last year and a half, GrubHub Seamless has developed a smartphone app for delivery drivers and begun giving restaurants tablets to handle orders.

Apple Patent Shows Off ‘Layered’ Maps (AppleInsider)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday published an Apple patent application that takes the company’s existing mapping apps and extends them to new levels of interactivity with data-rich layered viewing modes. Apple’s “Interactive Map” patent filing details a mapping program that enables users to dynamically adjust and view different “layers” of content pulled from the Internet. Examples include commuting, tourism and weather map layers, among others.

Google Again Updates iOS App With Improved Maps Integration (SearchEngineLand)
On the heels of a very recent iOS Maps update, Google has further updated and optimized its search app for iOS 7. Some of the changes are cosmetic: “iOS 7 styling and true full screen browsing” for example. There’s also improved image search for the iPad and better integration with Google Maps.

Top 10 Location-based Mobile Advertising Campaigns of 2013 (Mobile Marketer)
Marketers significantly beefed up their mobile advertising this year with tactics that go beyond driving in-store traffic and instead use branded apps, search and integrations into third-party navigational apps such as Waze to lure in interested consumers. This will continue into 2014 as marketers tie in additional pieces of data indicating intent to make mobile campaigns more contextually-relevant.

WunWun, The Uber For Anything, Implements Surge Pricing (TechCrunch)
WunWun, the on-demand delivery service for anything, is changing things up a bit to streamline operations. The company is introducing some version of surge pricing, wherein users can pay an extra $10 to “get it now”, rather than wait for free delivery. Both the free delivery ETAs and the “get it now” prices are subject to change based on demand, with a cap at six hours for waiting and $30 for immediate service.

LBMA Podcast: LIVE From MoDevEast! (Street Fight)
On the show: UC Berkeley tests image-based indoor location; Qualcomm’s Gimbal sensors hit the street; Mojiva partners with Retailigence; and Pitney Bowes partners with Twitter. Special guest is Barg Upender, founder of Mobomo.

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