The end of the year usually means a few things to us: the holidays; our annual predictions; and Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media, the industry’s flagship event.

This year’s event is especially hot — a 2 1/2 day extravaganza taking place Dec. 3-5 in San Francisco. More than 50 speakers have been recruited by the analyst team, and we’ve added some great extra-curricular activities, including a Tech Expo with top companies showing off their wares “Before The Bell” on Day 1; a Women’s Leading in Local networking event on day 2; and an International Roundtable.

Here’s our newest news: BIA/Kelsey Analyst Emeritus Matt Booth (currently CEO, Connectivity) is coming back to moderate one of two Executive Sessions with Google leaders. We’ll kick off with Managing Director of Global Channel Sales Todd Rowe, than go deep in conversations with Head of premier SMB partnerships Christine Merritt; Adwords Express Product Manager Francisco Uribe; Google My Business Senior Product Manager James Croom; and Global Business Leader for Google Shopping Max Frause.

We also have feature presentations set by YP CMO Allison Checchi; Deseret Digital Media CEO Clark Gilbert and President Chris Lee; Yodle CEO Court Cunningham; Pinterest Head of Partnerships Joel Meek; and Salesforce VP Randy Wootton.

We are also set with a great discussion between me and Business Book of the Year Winner Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. And then there are the feature presentations by First Data SVP Krish Mantripragada; InfoGroup CDO Matt Graves; and Go Daddy SVP Raj Mukherjee. And we’ve also got a great, seven company Superforum dedicated to local’s most important issue: “Make the Phone Ring.”

There’s so much more. Check out the Full agenda. Register here.

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Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

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In a deal designed to fuel innovation at First Data, the payments powerhouse has acquired mobile marketing and loyalty start-up Perka for an undisclosed amount. First Data plans to let Perka continue to operate autonomously and service as an “agile product development company led by original management.” This year, Fast Company magazine anointed Perka as one of the “Most Innovative Companies” in local.

Founded with angel money in 2011, Perka is led by CEO Alan Chung and founding partners Robert Bethge, Rob Coury, Jay Harlow and Joe Stelmach. The company offers loyalty programs for local businesses in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Africa and Latin American. Perka has 28 employees.

Perka made a name for itself for innovative thinking around the burgeoning loyalty space. For example, last December we wrote about how Perka was tacking the issue of adapting the buy 10, get one punchcard model to highly variable purchases.

The convergence of payments, loyalty and mobility is clearly on the minds of First Data’s leadership. The company is a world leader in payment processing, handling payments daily for more than 6 million merchant locations. First Data hopes to remain a key player in payments as the space expands further into mobile and tablet based payment processing. First Data made progress in this direction with its recent launch of Clover, a cloud-based point of sale (POS) solution.

In September, First Data SVP Dom Morea spoke at length about how First Data sees the evolution of loyalty at BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing event in Austin. The Perka acquisition, and perhaps more critically the team that comes with it, should help First Data remain at the forefront of the rapidly changing payments space.

First Data Senior VP Dom Morea talked about the future of transaction marketing at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing event in Austin, TX.

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ScoutMob, the two-and-a-half-year-old mobile-centric deals company, has landed a new $3.25 million round to develop its technology base and add more markets. It is currently in 13 cities and has more than 1 million subscribers. The company, which had previously raised $1.2 million, also announced a partnership with First Data and will work to implement its payments technologies, which serve more than 50 percent of U.S. retail establishments.

Investors include AOL Ventures, Capitol Broadcasting (which has been very aggressive online), Cox Enterprises, Ben Lerer of Thrillist and New Atlantic Ventures. At this point, these are purely investments and do not imply integration into Capitol, AOL, Thrillist and the various Cox properties, which include newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, cable systems, Kudzu and AutoTrader.

The company stands out from the pack in many ways. Mobile is becoming more important in deals — Groupon says that 40 percent of its deals are now viewed on mobile devices — but ScoutMob also leverages the geolocation technology found in mobile phones to “check in” when deals are redeemed. With this capability, it has built a merchant-friendly model charging a flat fee for leads of $3 or $4 per lead, instead of taking commissions, which may be 30 percent to 50 percent of voucher prices.

Cofounder Michael Tavani tells us that that he sees the ad hoc investment group as “pretty good validation of the media and payment space. We’ve always considered ourselves a mobile media company, but payment is the future of this space in a lot of ways.”

Tavani says the deal with First Data is not exclusive — “no payment solution gets you all the way there,” he says. But ScoutMob intends to build on top of First Data’s payment products, including the new First Data/CardSpring collaboration on an API that would enable merchants to easily add promotions and rewards to cards with a single swipe.

Some of the more advanced concepts implicit in that technology, however, may be “three to five years away,” Tavani says. Within 60 days, ScoutMob hopes to add more immediate capabilities, including a “post-payment personalization network” that would enable rewards points for meals or miles for every purchase made within the network, he says.

Tavani also chides industry investors who are primarily West Coast based — his investors are East Coast based. “They refuse to believe that local scales,” he says. “They want to see tens of millions (of users) and this isn’t tens of millions. But local decisions are made impulsively,” adds Tavani. “And having just 13 cities lets us be super-curated at the local level. We literally have an editor in each market. Building a brand is the big thing for us.”

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