Street Fight Daily: 06.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
Foursquare is introducing its largest partnership to date: a national deal with American Express to offer discounts to cardholders when they check in on their cellphone at certain shops and restaurants. Substantial deals like those being offered to American Express cardholders may bring Foursquare and other location-based services further into the mainstream. (New York Times)
Foursquare simply doesn’t have the salesforce to craft the same kind of deals that Groupon can. Groupon’s deals tend to be more alluring with deeper discounts. AmEx is helping Foursquare here by sourcing many of these deals itself through its own salesforce and existing relationships with local and national merchants, but it also gets to keep all the revenue. At least for now. (TechCrunch)
U.S. mobile ad spend is expected to balloon to $4 billion in 2015, up from just $790 million last year, according to the latest projections by forecaster BIA/Kelsey. One of the key drivers of the growth will be targeted local ads, which will account for $2.8 billion, or 70 percent of total spend, compared to $404 million, or 51 percent, this year. (PaidContent)
Mere hours after announcing U-Deals, Loopt took the first step towards silencing its critics, as its first U-Deal sold out in under an hour. The first U-Deal, made in partnership with Virgin America, offered $35 for a Virgin America ticket voucher valued at $100. 500 deals were offered, and 500 deals sold in 48 minutes. (TechCrunch)
A new wave of social networks is hoping that people will be into “friending” their location. These services are identifying the disposable, the elastic and the ephemeral social networking that occurs – or could occur, given the right technology – when tied to a particular location at a particular point in time.(ReadWriteWeb)
IAC’s local advertising network CityGrid Media’s latest mobile ad effort involves enticing app developers to do more of the work by including more local businesses within their apps. The incentive is pretty simple: if developers feature local businesses, they’ll get earn direct ad dollars. (Paid Content)
According to a study by ForeSee, 38 percent of the people purchasing daily deals were already frequent customers of the merchant in question. However, 31 percent are brand new business, and 4 percent were former customers, which translates to 35 percent new business. (TechCrunch)
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