Street Fight Daily: 02.16.12

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Groupon: Offering Deals With No Time Limits? (TechCrunch)
Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits. Like Groupon’s mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not have timeouts on buying them.

Building Location-Based Social Networks in Egypt (TheNextWeb)
Adel Youssef, a heavyweight in the LBS space, says that what’s hot today is hyperlocal information and social check-in services where users need to sign in to let their friends and acquaintances know where they are. This is what he hopes to develop in Egypt.

Localmind Gooses Location-Advice Service by Broadening Focus (CNET)
Rafe Needleman: Localmind is an intriguing little mobile app that has big potential. It’s a live Q&A service about locations. If you want to know how crowded a bar or restaurant is, you pose the question on Localmind. People (but not all of them) who have checked in at that location on Foursquare get an alert and can reply to your query. Yesterday, Localmind 2.0 launched, with yet another way to spread the use case out a bit. Now you’ll be able to ask questions about entire areas

In New Haven, a Crisis of Confidence Over User Comments (Nieman Lab)
Dan Kennedy: If Paul Bass can no longer handle online comments, has public participation reached the end of the line? Like many observers, I was stunned last week when I learned that the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit local news site that Bass launched in 2005, had suspended comments. “The tone of commenting on the Independent … seems to have skidded to the nasty edges and run off the rails,” Bass wrote on Feb. 7. “We’re responsible for reading, vetting, and posting all comments on the site. We’ve failed in our responsibility to keep the discussion on track.”

The $600 Million Social Life Of Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley (Business Insider)
Alyson Shontell: Crowley is the poster child for New York’s burgeoning tech scene, but his success didn’t happen overnight. It was a series of failures and disappointments. Crowley chronicled the experience on a personal blog, Teendrama. We’ve read through that archive and spoken to Crowley, his family and his friends to learn how the party-prone teenager became one of the youngest, most successful entrepreneurs in the world.

Will Facebook Advertising Fail? (MediaPost)
Tracy Gross: The filing of the Facebook IPO has caused many to speculate about the future of Facebook advertising. With a new focus on revenue generation — a continuous pressure for any company, especially a publicly traded one — what will this mean for marketers who previously leveraged Facebook as a relatively low-cost tool for consumer engagement?

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