Street Fight Daily: Apple Building New iBeacon Device, Square Eyes Another Acquisition
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Apple is Building a New iBeacon-powered Device, FCC filing reveals (VentureBeat)
Apple is gearing up to launch a new product that will utilize its location-aware iBeacon technology, according to a filing. The purpose of the device could vary greatly; it could serve as a replacement to the third-party sensors used in Apple stores since last December, it could be sold directly to retailers, or it could take the form of Apple’s first smart-home device.
Why Yelp Is Steadily Becoming a Force in Local Data Aggregation (Street Fight)
David Mihm: Unlike traditional aggregators like Infogroup, Acxiom, Neustar Localeze, and Factual, which provide basic listings for a very broad range of something like 20 million businesses in the U.S., Yelp is primarily focused on popular businesses — especially reviews of, and deals at, those businesses.
Curated Food Delivery Startup Caviar In Talks To Be Acquired By Square For $100 Million (TechCrunch)
Curated food delivery startup Caviar is in talks to be acquired by Square in a deal that could be worth at least $100 million, according to several sources. While we’ve heard the deal is slated to take place over the next couple of weeks, these things could always fall apart.
5 Platforms to Help SMBs Identify High-Value Customers (Street Fight)
In the eyes of local merchants, not all customers are created equal. Frequent customers who spend big and tip well are the gold standard for small business owners. Here are five platforms that merchants can use to identify high-value customers worth targeting.
Pew: Only 2 Alt-Weeklies Saw Circulation Gains in 2013 (Poynter)
Many of America’s biggest alternative weeklies saw circulation fall or remain stagnant in 2013, but there were two exceptions: The Chicago Reader and Miami New Times. The gains show that those two papers were the only two to buck the trend of frozen and declining circulation that affected almost all of the top 20 largest alt-weeklies
Heineken Opens ‘Real-Time’ Discovery Twitter Service to Inspire Nights Out (MarketingWeek)
Heineken is letting city dwellers worldwide plan their nights out directly from Twitter using real-time location-based social activity to recommend where they should go next. The company is using an R/GA developed algorithm to serve night spots that are trending based on tweets, check-ins and photos across social networks Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.
How LivingSocial Collects Data on Its Customers and Plans to Turn it Into Profit (WashingtonPost)
The discount purveyor is putting renewed emphasis on the daily e-mail deals that LivingSocial once tried to distance itself from by offering a broad range of products, including consumer goods, travel getaways, live events and more. The return to daily e-mails comes in the form of the Daily Gem, a morning e-mail that has a discount specifically suited for the recipient.
Everybody Needs Local SEO (Moz)
Greg Gifford: I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point in your SEO career, you’re going to do some SEO for a business that has a physical storefront: that means Local SEO. Sure, you’ve still got to do all the traditional SEO things that you do every day for all your clients, but when you’re talking about a physical location, Local SEO is absolutely necessary.
Travel App Can Recommend Places by Looking at Them (MIT Technology Review)
Jetpac provides a consumer guide to local restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, but unlike competitors such as Yelp, it doesn’t rely on customers writing up reviews. Instead the company uses software to process public Instagram photos tagged with the business’s name and measures things like the number of smiles in the picture or amount of blue sky.
Search, Beacon, and When To Click On The Light (MediaPost)
Some 58% of retailers believe loyalty campaigns have a positive impact on sales, but only 34% plan to run one during the back-to-school shopping season. With the holiday shopping season approaching, marketers should start thinking about how to integrate search campaigns with check-ins over location-based technology to improve the entire online and offline experience.
Microsoft Quietly Shutting Down MapPoint in Favor of Bing Maps (Recode)
For years, Microsoft has supported its older MapPoint technology in addition to its online Bing Maps product, but that duality is coming to an end. The company has posted a notice to its website that it plans to end work on MapPoint technologies, though online support will run through at least July 2015.
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