Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s Hyperlocal Ads, Yext Hires for IPO

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

FacebookFacebook Launches Hyper-Local Ads Targeted To People Within A Mile Of A Business (TechCrunch)
Facebook’s mobile ubiquity and push for always-on location sharing came to fruition today with the launch of hyper-local advertising that could convince people to visit stores they’re nearby. Soon, brick-and-mortar businesses will be able to target ads to anyone who lives or was recently within a specific distance of their store.

Former Visa Exec Wants Mobile Shoppers to Make the First Move (Street Fight)
Dave Wentker, the former director of Visa’s emerging technology division, is questioning whether beacons are truly enough to really change consumers’ shopping habits. Wentker’s company, Tapcentive, has developed a system that lets consumers choose when to receive messaging, content, and deals.

With This Hire, Yext Seems Poised for IPO (New York Business Journal)
Yext named Steven Cakebread as its new CFO on Monday. Cakebread served in that capacity at Salesforce.com amid its initial public offering in 2004 and at Pandora Media went it went public in 2011. The hiring follows a $50 million Series F financing round in June, which CEO and co-founder Howard Lerman called a “pre-IPO” round.

The Benefit of Beacons Is in the Past and the Future — Not in the Present (Street Fight)
The discussion around bluetooth beacons and other proximity messaging technologies has largely centered on real-time advertising. But the benefit of beacons extends well beyond the “here and now” scenario with new opportunities for marketers to build deeper audience segmentations and more advanced location targeting that we’ve barely begun to explore.

San Francisco Legalizes Airbnb (Recode)
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to formalize short-term rentals like Airbnb. Under the new law, hosts will be able to rent for smaller time periods, but they also have to register, pay taxes, and rent for no longer than 90 days total per year. In a statement, Airbnb called the legislation “a great victory.”

Beepi Pulls In $60m For Its Peer-to-peer Auto Marketplace (VentureBeat)
Beepi, a peer-to-peer marketplace that touts itself as a hassle-free way to buy and sell cars online, raised $60 million in venture funding Tuesday. Rather than getting ripped off by a dealership or having to deal with the hassle of selling via marketplace like Craigslist, Beepi helps sellers make more money by listing their cars on its marketplace and taking a small portion of the sale.

Google Rolls Out Local News & Weather App For iOS (The Next Web)
Google just introduced a new app for iOS that displays local news and weather. It’s like the nightly local news except on your iPhone or iPad. The free app pulls from 65,000 publications with 60 country-specific editions. For hyper-local news, you can drill down and see local opinions and perspectives.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Yik Yak? (Washington Post)
In the past week alone, more than a dozen high schools and universities have had high-profile incidents with the app. None of this bodes well for Yik Yak’s grand ambition, which is to become a kind of hyperlocal news and community network — think the coffee shop cork board for the digital age.

Scare Stories about Ad Beacons Don’t Help Us Talk About the Risks of Digital Surveillance (GigaOm)
Mathew Ingram: BuzzFeed got a lot of attention for a story about a secret network of location-tracking devices hidden in New York City phone booths — but the truth is a lot more mundane, and pumping up the hysteria doesn’t help the discussion of these technologies.

Open Data Beyond the Big City (PBS MediaShift)
One way we can use standards to drive the adoption of open data is to partner with companies like Yelp, Zillow, Google and others that can use open data to enhance their services. But how do we get companies with 10s and 100s of millions of users to take an interest in data from smaller municipal governments? In a word – standards.

BloomNation, A Marketplace For Local Florists, Raises $5.6 Million Series A (TechCrunch)
BloomNation, a Santa Monica-based startup offering florists and floral designers a platform for running their business online, as well as a marketplace that connects florists and consumers, has now closed on $5.55 million in Series A funding.

Sprint’s Top Digital Marketer Decamps to Mobile Ad Firm xAd (AdAge)
Scott Zalaznik, a 15-year veteran of Sprint, who spent the last two years running digital marketing, has left the carrier for the mobile ad-tech firm xAd. His exit occurs amid an overhaul at the telecom, which is juggling a massive network upgrade as it competes with Verizon, AT&T and ascendant rival T-Mobile.

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