Street Fight Daily: Facebook Ads, Groupon Investor Exits
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Facebook Working on Location-Based Mobile Ad Product (Bloomberg)
Facebook Inc. (FB), owner the world’s largest social network, says it’s working on a location-based mobile-advertising product that will allow companies to target users with real-time data showing their whereabouts.
Groupon Shareholder Kinnevik Heads for the Door (GigaOm)
Swedish investment group Kinnevik has cut its ties to Groupon, selling up its remaining stake in the daily deals company for $81.5 million. It’s a significant return for Kinnevik, which invested just $2.9 million two years ago in German company MyCityDeal, shortly before it was purchased by Groupon.
The Future of News: Mobile, Video, Data — And Crowdsourced (GigaOm)
Matthew Ingram: The Knight Foundation, a non-profit entity that is one of the biggest funders of journalism and media-related projects in the United States, announced the winners of the first round of its Knight News Challenge on Monday in Massachusetts — a contest aimed at funding the next generation of news entrepreneurs.This round was aimed at startups that are taking advantage of existing networks such as Ustream and Twitter, and the winners who are sharing the $1.37 million in prize money are trying to develop video, mobile and crowdsourced solutions to the problem of filtering the vast ocean of news that washes over us every day.
Could Mobile Apps Save Local News? (CNN)
New research from Localytics shows that mobile users spend roughly the same amount of time with news apps as they do with Twitter’s mobile app, about 115 minutes per month. Localytics’ data implies that smartphone and tablet apps for news could indeed offer an advantage to mobile advertisers.
Foursquare CEO Details Stress, Chaos of Starting Up (Inc.)
“Running a successful start-up is no walk in the park. You may have a hockey-stick looking growth chart, but there’s always chaos in the middle of it,” Crowley said. “The more I talk with other folks from start-ups, I learn we’re all going through the same stuff.”
Brooklyn Site Plants Defiant Digital Flag (NetNewsCheck)
In Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, Ned Berke, a former trade media reporter and the founder of Sheepshead Bites, is finding that a low budget, hyperlocal approach to neighborhood news can outlast and outmaneuver the big guys. Berke, a defiantly proud Sheepshead Bay native, former trade media reporter and founder/editor of the neighborhood news site Sheepshead Bites, has an axe to grind with corporate news chains and an insistence that his low budget, hyperlocal approach to local news can outlast and outmaneuver the big guys.
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