Street Fight Daily: Apple Plans iBeacon Expansion, Airbnb Tests Conceirge

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

apple_logoApple’s Latest Offering Explores the Great Indoors (Wall Street Journal)
Apple’s latest product to carry the “i” prefix — following the iPhone and iPad — promises to do for indoor spaces what GPS did for the outdoors. Apple is expected to reveal more iBeacon plans at its World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco starting Monday, where it also intends to preview new versions of its iOS mobile-operating system and Mac OSX software.

At Mindbody, a Lesson in Focus (Street Fight)
After a decade with little outside capital, MindBody has raised over $110 million dollars in the past four years to compete with the likes of Square and a deluge of smaller entrants. Street Fight recently caught up with the company’s founder Rick Stollmeyer to talk about the blurring line between marketing and operations, and what the explosion of local technology today spells for small businesses tomorrow.

Airbnb Testing In-App Concierge Feature That Connects You With Real People at Your Destination (TheNextWeb)
Airbnb has been testing a new feature called “Local Companion” that connects you with real people that live at your holiday destination and allows you to ask questions like ‘where’s the best sushi?’ The feature appears in the Airbnb inbox for iOS and allows you to ask any questions, like a concierge service but instead connects you to normal people at your destination.

30 Days Into Foursquare’s Great Schism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Street Fight)
Mike Boland: Vitals include whether or not Foursquare die-hards will migrate to Swarm. More importantly, will peeling off social and location tracking features to Swarm make Foursquare proper the more broadly applicable and mainstream-friendly local discovery engine it’s hoping to be?

Nokia Here Buys Desti to Build Personalized, Contextual Maps (GigaOm)
No longer a handset company, Nokia is turning its focus to the products and technologies that remain, starting with its mapping division Here. Nokia has bought a virtual travel agent, one that just happens to have deeper insight than a typical search engine into travel destinations and your own personal preferences.

Quantifying Privacy: A Week of Location Data May Be an ‘Unreasonable Search’ (New York Times)
When does the simple digital tracking of your location and movements — the GPS bleeps from most of our smartphones — start to be truly revealing? The answer, according to a new research paper, is about a week, when the data portrait of a person becomes sufficiently detailed to qualify as an “unreasonable search.”

In Taxis’ Battle With Uber, Ugly Endgame Looms (Boston Globe)
It’s easy to mock the taxicab drivers who encircled Uber’s Boston offices about a week ago. But many people have a lot of money invested in the status quo. They will fight to keep what they can. If the taxicab industry is to die, its death will not be pretty.

Here’s How Bots Scam Advertisers By Pretending to Be Human (AdAge)
Scammers sending fake traffic to websites can make their bots move around web pages exactly as humans would — with mouse movements, clicks and all — causing problems for anti-fraud software working to ferret out malicious traffic.

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