Street Fight Daily: California’s ‘Yelp Law,’ Apple Pay and Brands

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

yelp-sticker California Protects the Right to Yelp Without Penalty (Washington Post)
California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed into law a measure that protects the right to leave bad reviews online. The bill bans businesses from forcing consumers into contracts in which they waive their right to comment on the service they receive, and it also bars businesses from otherwise penalizing customers for such statements.

Where Online Ordering of Local Products and Services Is Headed (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: Any local search site that sets its sights on powering transactions will need to take into account the broad range of consumer needs in the local space. But some products are likely much better suited to online purchasing than others.

What Apple Pay Means for Marketers (AdAge)
Brands should take another look at Passbook — how and where their apps can offer promotional integration that drives brand preference and purchase. And could this integration finally mean the end of direct mail? I wouldn’t be sad if it did.

Revived EveryBlock Looking to Work With Community News Sites (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: EveryBlock is back in business under its new operator, Comcast. Re-launched in Chicago last January and in Philadelphia in August, it will be expanding to five more cities this year. Here, Comcast Local Media Director Paul Wright defends the old EveryBlock, and details new features of the resurrected data aggregator.

Guardian Space & Guardian Membership, Playing the Physical/Digital Continuum (Nieman Journalism Lab)
Ken Doctor: Can it be that the solution to newspaper companies’ digital woes lies in the physical world? The Guardian, the world’s third largest news site, is acting on that principle with a big announcement today that it plans to redevelop 30,000 square feet of falling-apart old warehouse to host dozens of events a week after the scheduled 2016 opening.

Retailers Look For Digital Magic As In-Store Sales Decline (Wall Street Journal)
Beset with an ongoing decline in store traffic as consumers increasingly shift their purchases online, big U.S. retailers need to rethink their marketing. “Instead of fearing showrooming, I think retailers can leverage mobile as a bridge between offline and online worlds,” said Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research.

Study: 85% of Mobile Apps Fail to Disclose How They Use Consumer Data (Pando)
So many applications require access to location history, contact information, and other data that the idea that we even have any privacy left can seem ridiculous. The Global Privacy Enforcement Network studied 1,200 mobile apps and found that many of them gather data without a consumer’s informed consent.

At the Uber for Home Cleaning, Workers Pay a Price for Convenience (Washington Post)
Theoretically, Homejoy is just organizing the masses of people who already offer their cleaning services independently — people who didn’t have the benefits of full-time employment — and taking a cut in exchange for access to an attractive marketing platform. But the it’s still unclear who wins in the long run: the customer, the cleaner or Homejoy.

Cartodb Takes $8m in Funding to Build Platform for “Thousands” of Niche Mapping Apps (GigaOm)
Interactive map maker CartoDB has had a high profile of late, creating interesting visualizations of geospatial data for Twitter, Nokia and even the White House. Now it’s picked up $8 million in Series A funding to help make CartoDB the platform for thousands of niche, simple-to-use mapping applications.

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