Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Acquires Euro Rival for $1.8 Billion, How Foursquare Tackles Attribution

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

GoDaddy Acquires Rival Host Europe Group for $1.79 Billion (VentureBeat)
GoDaddy has been pushing to infiltrate the broader small-to-medium sized business market for some time, and HEG already serves a  customer base similar to GoDaddy’s — small companies and web professionals.

PlaceIQ’s New Service Looks to Give Brands the Full Competitive Picture (Street Fight)
As more and more brands invest in location-based marketing campaigns, there’s a crucial need to zoom out and see the big picture. In an effort to bring marketers to this full circle moment, PlaceIQ today is debuting LandMark, a new data-as-a-service capability that allows brands access to their location-based audience and insights platform.

How Foursquare Leverages Location for Attribution (eMarketer)
Brick-and-mortar attribution can often be a black box for marketers—it’s hard enough to determine whether a digital channel drove a consumer to a retail location, let alone which specific channel delivered the most impact. Foursquare is working to change that with Attribution Powered by Foursquare.

Why Omnivore’s POS-Connection Platform Is Really An App Store for Restaurants (Street Fight)
The platform, which connects apps to POS systems, is making it easier for restaurants to find and test new technology. We recently caught up with founder and CEO Mike Wior to talk about the unique issues facing restaurant tech, and how Omnivore’s service can enable more experimentation and innovation.

Don’t Expect To See Amazon’s Checkout-Free Grocery Store Mirrored by Local Retailers Anytime Soon (Wired)
Davey Alba: In fact, retail tech specialists and computer vision experts agree that Amazon’s advertised system is entirely plausible given the state of artificial intelligence, RFID, sensor and machine learning technologies today. No one’s put all of the pieces together in the way Amazon appears to have done—but then again, nobody else is Amazon.

The 6 Location Tech Tools That Will Shape Marketing Next Year (GeoMarketing)
The marketing roles of virtual reality, beacons, and chatbots became clear in 2016. Here’s how the uses of those tools are likely to evolve over the next twelve months.

Loyalty Should Be Simple — It Should Be Mobile (MediaPost)
If only we had some device, some smart little thing that we kept in our pockets that could store all these cards electronically. Oh, hang on — we do. Brands just choose to ignore it.

GroupM Global CEO for mPlatform: ‘We Link Different Data Assets and Activate Them’ (Digiday)
MPlatform, GroupM’s new data and technology unit debuted last week, and is already generating buzz as a potential rival to Facebook and Google. The secret sauce? A piece of code — internally called mID — that effectively replaces the cookie, identifying a given consumer across multiple devices.

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