Street Fight Daily: 04.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
Arianna Huffington says that AOL will hire as many as 800 full-time employees at its Patch sites across the country, reducing the use of freelancers and beefing up local content. (Bloomberg)
Will 2011 be “the year the check-in died?” Mark Watkins thinks services like Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla need to find a way to deliver deep value to people beyond the check-in. (ReadWriteWeb)
Google has decided to take its Google Latitude Check-In offers nationwide. The service allows users share locations on a map, rewarding frequent users with exclusive discounts. (Daily Deal Media)
Microsoft’s Bing search engine has replaced its local listings interface with a new service called Bing Business Portal, which will help small business owners create and maintain their business information. (Mediapost)
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes that that Foursquare popularized the check-in, but it was never about the check-in, it’s about what happens after people check-in. (Business Insider)
Dailyplaces, the social recommendation service for places, has added realtime chat to its iPhone and Android apps. Dubbed ‘Places Chat’, users can communicate directly and in realtime with other users that are checked-in at the same location. (TechCrunch)
Is the daily deals explosion a bubble that’s about to pop? The consensus seems to be “maybe.” Groupon and LivingSocial are radically altering local advertising and marketing. But the network effects that early movers create can become bubble effects for clones and stragglers. (BIA/Kelsey)
The next revolution in advertising is buzzing in your pocket or purse, writes Alan Mutter. A host of new technologies is converging on the opportunity to use smart phones to intercept – and influence – the consumer as she walks past a store, wheels through a supermarket or reaches toward a product on the shelf. (Newsosaur)
Ad network NAVTEQ LocationPoint says its first few campaigns using location- and contextually-aware ads performed three to five times better than the industry average. (Mobile Marketing Watch)
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