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Street Fight Daily: Microsoft Invests in Foursquare, Target Turns to Chip and Pin

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

FoursquareFoursquare Teams With Microsoft for Dollars and Data (Wall Street Journal)
Microsoft has invested $15 million and agreed to a strategic partnership with the New York-based startup, Chief Executive Dennis Crowley said in an interview. The investment will be added to the $35 million investment round Foursquare announced last December and which valued the company at about $650 million.

As Offline Purchase Data Comes Online, Changes in Store for Local Marketing (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: If exchange is the purpose of a marketplace, transaction data — information about who bought what from whom, and for how much — is its pulse. With 90% of transactions occurring offline, the growth of connected payments, and the subsequent ability for businesses and consumers to understand who’s buying what in the real-world, has deep implications not only for the local marketplace, but for the wider digital economy as well.

Satya Nadella: Our SMB ‘Ringer’ at Microsoft (Local Onliner)
Peter Krasilovsky: Microsoft’s announcement that it would bring in Satya Nadella as CEO is a real milestone, as he handles the transition of the company from one that is primarily based on software to one that is cloud based and oriented towards mobile experiences. Nadella has been a true believer in the importance of enabling SMBs with rich software from the start of his career.

Marketers Battle the Elements on Mobile (AdAge)
Mobile is one of the more obvious sources for weather information, but are marketers making the most of the possibilities that meteorological data and GPS offer? John Mew, director of mobile and operations at the Internet Advertising Bureau U.K., thinks not.

The Hacker Way Hurts Facebook in Local, Payments and Search (Sulia)
Rocky Agrawal: “Move fast and break things” is Facebook’s motto. It’s been incredibly successful in getting Facebook to where it’s at today. But you can’t hack your way in payments, local and search. Especially when you’re competing against entrenched players worth billions of dollars. To win — or even to be a contender — in these spaces, you have to have commitment.

Fair Competition Or Foul Play? Rival Car Service Fires Back At Uber Over Alleged Attack (TechCrunch)
Gett, a rival taxi service, alleged that Uber employees launched the “real world” equivalent of a DDoS, or denial-of-service, attack, ordering and canceling more than 100 of its cars. Evidence provided to TechCrunch at the time showed that more than one dozen Uber employees had worked simultaneously to request rides from its competitor, in some cases waiting until the cars had nearly arrived before canceling their orders.

Target Vows to Speed Anti-Fraud Technology (New York Times)
A top executive of Target told a Senate committee on Tuesday that the company was accelerating plans to adopt a technology widely used in Europe but rare in the United States that reduces potential for credit card fraud, and lawmakers from both parties called on other businesses to do the same. Much of the discussion focused on a technology widely used in Europe called EMV that basically amounts to a small chip embedded in each card that creates a new code for each transaction.

Shopcloud Unveils its Inside Indoor Navigation Technology (VentureBeat)
Shopcloud is launching a new indoor location technology that it says will deliver “breakthrough” accuracy for finding your way inside big buildings, and it says it relies entirely on sensors already built into modern smartphones. Shopcloud claims it can fix your location with one-meter to six-meter accuracy, using nothing more than available technologies.

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