Storming the ‘Geolocals’ in the Eye of Irene
How did some of the clever new geolocation/geosocial applications take advantage of a situation where people suddenly needed to find and purchase things they normally would not? For intel on this I chatted up a couple young guns in the space and found, unsurprisingly, weather is still a money maker…
Street Fight Daily: 08.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“The golden age of daily deals, led by the unprecedented growth of Groupon, seems to be coming to its end,” writes Ben Parr. “That’s not to say daily deals won’t be sticking around for a long time — clearly there is a business in it — but when two major players withdraw from the space and its biggest player experiences a 50% traffic decline, it’s a clear sign that the daily deals market is no longer in its heyday.” (Mashable)…
A little over a year after Gannett and Yahoo teamed up on local ads sales primarily for the publisher’s 81 community newspapers, the two are extending their partnership to include all of Gannett’s 19 local TV stations. (PaidContent)…
Managing the Data Infrastructure Behind Hyperlocal
As more and more location-based apps and services pop up, one of the major issues that developers at these companies face is the need for accurate, updated, geo-coded information about all of the businesses out there. Data provider Factual is kind of a clearinghouse for the data sets that these developers need…
Case Study: P.F. Chang’s Jumps Into Location-Based Marketing
P.F. Chang’s China Bistro is giving away free happy hour dishes to customers who checked-in on Foursquare, Facebook, and Yelp this summer as a way to promote its new Triple Happiness Happy Hours. Brand director Dan Drummond says location-based marketing was a no-brainer for the national restaurant chain…
Why Facebook Killed ‘Deals’
Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook operates on the premise that “everything is more fun when it’s social.” In his mind, things like music, photos, events and even simple thoughts, were inherently more enjoyable when shared with others. It’s precisely for this reason that I believe the company killed its Deals service…
Street Fight Daily: 08.30.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local reviews network Yelp is preparing to cut staff and “scale back” its one-year-old Yelp Deals service. About 15 sales staff currently working on the Deals service are getting redeployed to other parts of the organization; another 15 will remain working on the service, and the number of offers sent to users is “unlikely to grow.” (PaidContent)…
By 2015, small and medium-sized businesses will spend only 30% of their marketing budgets on traditional media with the rest going to digital and online media, according to BIA/Kelsey. (NetNewsCheck)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is getting out of the daily deals business after four months of testing, a move that may ease some competitive pressure on industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. (Reuters)…
The global location-based advertising market will reach $12.8 billion by 2017, according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts. (Press Release)…
Who Will Eat the Hyperlocal Donut?
In big, dense metro areas, dailies are struggling but will likely survive. Or, savvy hyperlocals will be able to capitalize on urban density to maintain coverage and still run viable businesses. In the rural areas, where newspapers are still the only game in town, local media continues to do pretty well and hold their own. But gaps are starting to show in the zone between the cities and the sticks…
Facebook Replaces Places
Just a year after launching its location-based service, Places, which let people use their mobile devices to post their whereabouts to their profiles, Facebook is killing it off. FourSquare and its ilk shouldn’t be too psyched. While Places wasn’t a hit—did you use it?—Facebook is planning to include location features all over the, er, place. Users can add locations to photos and to their profiles, and do it from smartphone, desktop and everything in between. Considering that plenty of people are complaining about social networking overload, that’s smart
Street Fight Daily: 08.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local business reviews site Angie’s List filed for an IPO yesterday. The company will raises as much as $75 million. Angie’s List offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web. (TechCrunch)…
Yipit’s data report revealed substantial shifts in the daily deal space occurring over the past month: Daily Deal industry revenue declined 7% in July in North America’s largest markets. Groupon’s revenue declined 4% while LivingSocial’s revenue declined 18%. (Yipit Blog)…
CityPockets Acquires DealBurner for Location-Based Deal Alerts
Citypockets, the site that began as a niche tool for deal hounds to manage and track purchased deals, has taken a big step towards becoming a full-service offers provider, acquiring Dealburner – an application that alerts users of nearby deals via SMS – in an all-stock transaction yesterday…
Case Study: Tracking the Success of an Online Ad
For Richard Stromberg, owner of Chicago Photography Classes, hyperlocal news sites and blogs have taken the place of traditional print publications. To track the effectiveness of his online ads, he uses printable coupons that new clients are encouraged to bring to class for discounted rates...
Street Fight Daily: 08.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Amazon.com is rolling out its daily deals offerings in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. One thing AmazonLocal can do, which Groupon and other deals sites cannot, is promote still more deals on Amazon itself. (New York Times/Bits)…
Local news remains – oddly – one of the final frontiers not yet conquered under the Internet’s mighty dominion. But its time seems to be arriving, and experiments abound. (American Journalism Review)…
Harnessing Geo-Location Data to Profile Places
PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall talks about how his company’s technology collates geo-location data sets to give profiles of specific places. By tracking and deciphering patterns of foot traffic, mobile searches, and even weather data, he says his company can give advertisers and merchants a deeper understanding of the opportunities around them.
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is killing off Places. To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. (TechCrunch)…
Group Commerce, which sells a software platform to let publishers host their own daily deal applications, has acquired geo-location startup Socialight. The Socialight team and technology will be put toward fleshing out Group Commerce’s mobile strategy. (GigaOm)…
What Motivates Yelp’s Power Users?
In an effort to dig a little deeper into what motivates Elite Squad-ers and other active Yelp users — beyond the free beer and crudités — Street Fight spoke with three power users who approach the service with differing goals in mind, but all of whom view Yelp as an integral part of their decision-making process.