Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Dive, Big Brands Look Local

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Ding Dong, Daily Deals Are Dead (Slate)
Farhad Manjoo: The fact that even Groupon is no longer banking on Groupons is fantastic news for everyone, especially all of us who are sick of morning email deal spam. But the biggest beneficiaries of Groupon’s problems are the world’s small-business owners, people who will no longer be taken in by its terrible deals.

Media Companies Are Betting on Local, But Will Brands Follow? (Ad Age)
Antony Young: There’s no doubt that local will be an increasing play for national marketers. It’s what brands need to do to engage consumers and grow. However, it is going to be more challenging for marketers to execute and more costly and complex to orchestrate. But the possibilities are exciting.

Yelp Makes Its Homepage More Social (ScreenWerk)
Yelp is rolling out a new homepage over the “next few weeks.” The company says the changes were motivated by discussions with “hardcore Yelpers” plus observation and research about how the homepage was being used. The new design is much more “social” and features an activity update stream from your network (assuming you’re signed in).

Why Google Bought Frommer’s (For Nothing) (AllThingsD)
Liz Gannes: The reason Google wants to bring this particular type of content in-house? Search is increasingly about answers. That’s especially true on mobile. When you’re traveling and you just want to find a good restaurant nearby, you don’t want to scroll through links. You want a paragraph that tells you where to go and what to order.

Social Deals With Less Pain, More Gain (ReadWriteWeb)
For businesses that have tapped into social media to find more customers and instead have found a lot of pain, a new twist on an old business concept may bring them what they really need for social media deals: control. The concept is known as yield management, something already familiar to hotels and airlines, and an idea that’s getting a lot of traction through a new generation of social startups.

G+ Posts Show Your Exact Location On A GMap, And That Shouldn’t Scare You (TechCrunch)
Now when you post to G+ from mobile and you enable automatic location sharing or geo-tag yourself at a local spot, a big Google Map of your exact location is shown in the G+ stream on the web. The combination of exact geo-tagging and these maps give Google+ much more aggressive location sharing than Facebook or Twitter. That shouldn’t scare us, though, as long as we’re conscious and use the tools to control what we expose.

Mobile Local Data Galore: A Conversation With Telmetrics (BIA/Kelsey)
Mike Boland: It’s clear that tablets are being used much more in-home than on the go, while smartphones are the opposite (though the latter contradicts some data we’ve seen). Regardless, the differing user behavior between the two — behavior, context, time frame, etc. — suggest advertisers should be present in both.

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