Street Fight Daily: Twitter Eyes SMBs, 7-Eleven Creates Venture Arm

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

twitter-bird-blue-on-whiteTwitter Learns From Facebook by Revamping Its Advertising Fees for Small Business (Wall Street Journal)
Twitter is remodeling the way it charges advertisers, a move designed to court more small businesses in a bid to battle Facebook. The San Francisco company currently receives payments if a user interacts in any way with its sponsored ads, which look like tweets and appear in the main content feed.

How Innovation in Payments Can Drive Local Marketing (Street Fight)
The changes in payments that Seth Priebatsch foresaw three years ago are certainly underway, but it remains more of a revolution than an evolution. Street Fight caught up with the LevelUp CEO recently to talk about why he thinks transaction data is the foundation of the next big wave of innovation in the marketing industry.

Oh Thank Heaven, Even 7-Eleven Has a Venture Capital Arm (Recode)
It turns out that 7-Ventures is looking at new ways to interact with customers as well as ways to take advantage of its biggest asset — its 8,500 stores across the United States. The company sees itself not just as a place to get a hot dog or nachos, but potentially as the first or last mile for all manner of commerce.

What Foursquare’s Looming Data Mean to Advertisers  (AdAge)
So now that Foursquare Labs Inc. has two mobile apps, the newest version of the Foursquare namesake and the two-month-old Swarm, what do the moves mean to advertisers? Quite a bit. But let’s start with its emerging mobile-social data.

Hyperlocal Companies Among 500 Startups’ Latest Batch (Street Fight)
Silicon Valley seed fund 500 Startups has announced a new round of startups it will be helping navigate through the tough road to sustainable profitability — and they include a number of brand new companies in local commerce, marketing, and tech. Here are a few interesting hyperlocally focused companies from the latest batch.

Turning a Profit in the Netherlands: How a Dutch Hyperlocal Network Has Grown (Neiman Lab)
While lots of U.S. media companies are still struggling to figure out how to make hyperlocal news financially viable, in the Netherlands, a four-year-old network of hyperlocal sites began turning a profit earlier this year. And now its corporate parent is turning to its traffic to help boost struggling newspapers.

Yelp CEO Reviews His Own Business After 10 years (Associated Press)
Yelp’s success has left Stoppelman, with company stock worth about $400 million. Stoppelman mused about Yelp’s past and present during an interview with The Associated Press as the San Francisco company prepared to celebrate its 10 anniversary.

Instant Replay: The Second Coming of On-Demand Delivery (Recode)
“Instant gratification” was the mantra of Kozmo.com founder Joseph Park in 1999. And people did — the press loved the story, and “instant” caught the fancy of a suddenly Internet-infatuated nation. Fifteen years later, along comes a new set of startups, which are doing virtually the same thing as Kozmo back in the bubblicious day.

Lord & Taylor Sees Promise In Beacons (MediaPost)
Lord & Taylor is among the national retailers getting on the beacon bandwagon. HBC, which owns Lord & Taylor, in May began testing location-based coupon app SnipSnap to send users “mystery” coupons when they passed within 500 meters of a store.

LBMA Podcast: Stores Commit to Beacons, Verizon Launches Rewards (Street Fight)
Top stories of the week include: Instagram launches its Snapchat competitor; Medialets helps with attribution; Glympse embeds itself within Kik messenger; Nike gives away merchandise with FuelBox; and Andrew Mason emerges with Detour.

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