Street Fight Daily: New York’s Ad Network, Adobe Bets on Location

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

Times Square. New York City 2005Ads Will Fund New York City’s Plan For World’s Fastest Municipal Wi-Fi Network (AdAge)
New York City is converting obsolete payphones into a mega-fast municipal Wi-Fi network — and ads are funding the whole thing. Titan will sell ads for the digital displays on the sides of the physical “Links” – the physical hubs for the network.

The Growing Market for Networked SMB Software (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: A resurgent business software sector has started to use cloud computing to bring cheaper, simpler accounting, point-of-sale and even marketing software to brick-and-mortar businesses. With their advances, the era of entrepreneurship has come to the real world.

Adobe All-In With Location-Based Marketing (CIO Today)
An array of updates to Adobe’s Mobile Services will make it easier for businesses to engage with app-using customers on the go, according to the company. The new features are designed to give marketers, rather than app developers, personalize messages based on where customers are and what they are doing at the time.

Sponsored Post: Case Study — MEDIATA Sees 20% Campaign Lift Through Skyhook Partnership (Street Fight)
In an effort to reduce wasted spend, MEDIATA partnered with leading location network Skyhook, testing its Hyperlocal IP feature. Skyhook has differentiated itself from other IP positioning providers by taking an empirical approach to location.

Restaurant Discovery Service Zomato Raises Further $60M (TechCrunch)
Zomato, the restaurant search and discovery service, has closed a further $60 million in funding, giving the company a post-money valuation of $660 million. New Delhi-headquartered Zomato began as a menu card scanning service in India, sending people out to collect menus from restaurants and then scanning them using OCR.

How Personalization And Security Will Coexist in Local Commerce (Street Fight)
Nick Hughes: There seems to be a splintering where on one side app developers are continually making it easier to accomplish real world tasks and on the other side one finds an increasingly insecure environment for our personal information due to those very same highly personalized applications.

Apple Pay Rolling Out To Hundreds Of U.S. Grocery Stores (Mashable)
With Thanksgiving just more than a week away, Apple announced on Tuesday that a number of grocery chains with stores in New England, southeast Texas and Chicago now support Apple Pay. The expansion comes as major chains like Safeway continue to sit on the sidelines in the mobile payment war.

Target Flips the Switch on New In-Store Navigation Features (Street Fight)
“We want to build mobile experiences that Target guests will love,” Alan Wizemann, VP of product and mobile for Target.com told Street Fight. “We believe the new shopping lists and maps make it easier than ever to shop Target. … We’ve got a lot more mobile innovation to come…”

Square Goes Old-School With Physical Gift Cards (Recode)
Two years ago, Square introduced a digital gift-card program that never took off. This holiday season, it’ll try its hand at physical gift cards. The local-commerce company announced this morning that it will start offering gift cards to businesses that run on Square’s point-of-sale software.

This Man Says He Was Screwed Out Of One-Third Of The Super-Hot Startup Yik Yak By His Frat Brothers (Business Insider)
Yik Yak and its cofounders Stephen Brooks Buffington and Tyler Steven Droll are being sued by a fellow Furman University alumnus Douglas Warstler, who says he helped cofound the increasingly popular anonymous gossip application. Yik Yak is reportedly raising a new ~$75 million round of financing.

OrderWithMe Raises Another $28M To Help Small Businesses Procure Like Big Ones (TechCrunch)
OrderWithMe, a startup based out of Las Vegas that has built a platform for small businesses to come together to effectively act like big ones to source, order and pay for supplies and components – has raised another $28 million in funding.

Helping Local Services Adapt to the Instant Gratification Economy (Recode)
Many service providers would rather not be a cog in some startup’s workforce. And some older established businesses are getting hip to the value of the better customer experience that apps help provide.So guess what — there are startups for them, too.

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