Poll: For Mobile Payments, Adoption Low But Future Promising
PollA new Street Fight poll of 513 U.S. consumers says close to 77% of respondents do not rely on their mobile phones to pay for goods and services. But our results also illustrate a strong rate of adoption for the key 18-34 demographic that may indicate future growth as the group ages and others move into the demographic…
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Nestle, SessionM
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan find that it ain’t only rock and roll when the Rolling Stones start doing augmented reality; Nestle goes all Willy Wonka on us; Square closes a trillion more dollars and SessionM co-founder & CEO Lars Albright gives us some mobile advertising advice…
Street Fight Daily: DNAinfo Preps Expansion, Google Rethinks Local Discovery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Joe Ricketts ready to launch DNAinfo in Chicago (Chicago Business Journal)… A New Google App Gives You Local Information — Before You Ask for It (New York Times)… Amazon Could Be Working On A Square Competitor (TechCrunch)…
New Jersey Hyperlocal Network TAP Celebrates 4 Years, Continues to Expand
Former lawyer Mike Shapiro’s The Alternative Press has now grown to 18 separate hyperlocal publications, including licensees, and is preparing for another major expansion. How does Shapiro do what some news industry experts have said is next to impossible for independent community sites like his? Street Fight caught up with him recently to find out…
Street Fight Daily: Pew Studies Local News, LevelUp White Labeled
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… New Pew study: Where You Live Helps Shape Your News Diet (Nieman Journalism Lab)… LevelUp Arms Merchants With White Label Payment Apps (GigaOm)… Local Corp., a Web 1.0 Company, Thrusts Itself into Mobile Era with New iOS and Android Apps (Pando Daily)…
How Restaurants Can ‘Listen’ to Location-Based Services
Many restaurants take a pulse of the Twitter and Facebook conversation about them, but how is that information being combined with and understood alongside location-based services like Foursquare? Perhaps the bigger question to ask is, if you’ve invested in social media fan building, how are you correlating that social data with the behaviors of those fans in the physical world?
Extending User Reviews to Places, Block by Block
Block Avenue launched last week with an offering that gives locals the opportunity to grade their neighborhoods, blocks and businesses down to the building level. Users assign grades from A to F on specific blocks and for businesses, which are displayed on maps to show the destination spots (A’s) as well as danger zones (F’s)…
Case Study: Boston Tattoo Shop Uses Deals to Build Email Database
At Stingray Body Art in Boston, events and promotions manager Adam Femino takes a more-is-more approach to hyperlocal marketing. In the past few years, Femino has used digital platforms like Groupon, LevelUp, and Privy to acquire new customers, promote brand awareness, and grow his company’s email database…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Sees Talent Drain, Analyst Slams Zillow
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… As Groupon Struggles, Some of Its Brighter Talent is Walking Out Door (Chicago Sun-Times)… Shares of Zillow Sink After Analyst Says Prospects Stink (GeekWire)… Apple v. Google Will Define the Fourth Wave of Online Mapping (Venture Beat)…
Apple Maps: Taking the Long View
There’s no dancing around the fact that the much-anticipated launch of Apple Maps has turned into a fiasco for the company. Yet there’s little doubt Apple will buff out this particular blemish with time. The interesting part will be seeing exactly how the company chooses to address the gap in expertise that led to the current sub-par product. A big acquisition of talent or technology seems likely…
We’ve Seen the Past — And It Is ‘The Neighborhood’
For the past few years, social startups have been spiraling inward toward a smaller and smaller target: your neighborhood, your block. Now Patch is going all in by to leverage neighborhoods through communities of interest. But maybe neighborhoods are an artificial constructs, with borders that mean little even to those they bind. If that’s the case, we need to rethink a lot more than design and tools and lessons of the past…
Nimble Commerce Expands Off of White-Label Model, Launches Deal Exchange
White label deal purveyor Nimble Commerce has taken a page from the online advertising industry’s book, rolling out an offers exchange this morning to play matchmaker between local publishers and sales forces. Called Nimble Network, the product takes much of the thinking from only ad exchanges and applies it to the deals space…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Snaps Up Savored, Ebay’s Mobile Momentum
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Groupon Moves Into Restaurant Reservations With Savored Deal (New York Times)… EBay’s Mobile Momentum: 100M App Downloads, 100M Items Listed (All Things D)… Data Firm Hits Craigslist With Monopoly Claim (GigaOm)…
iOS6: Can Google Beat Apple in its Own Backyard?
Mapping is a game ultimately won on function rather than form. This requires lots of listings data and search algorithms; in other words, things that are non-core to Apple. Relative to Google’s tenure in this area, Apple is only starting to stitch together local vertical content partners like Yelp and TomTom. And it’s already starting to show…
7 Reporting Tools for Hyperlocal Journalists
It can be difficult for journalists covering hyperlocal news events to find enough relevant information and quality sources to generate the types of comprehensive articles and reports that readers find useful. Here are seven tools that hyperlocal journalists can use to streamline the process of gathering data and generating the types of multiplatform content that readers embrace…
Street Fight Daily: Village Voice Sold, Groupon Cuts Loom
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Village Voice Media Execs Acquire The Company’s Famed Alt Weeklies, Form New Holding Company (TechCrunch)… As Groupon’s New Operations Czar Seeks to Streamline, Job Cuts Loom (Crain’s Chicago Business)… Local Search Cage Match: Google Vs. Apple Maps (And Siri) (Search Engine Land)…
Patch Redesign Emphasizes Social as Path to Revenue Growth
AOL’s hyperlocal news network released a major redesign Sunday evening, pushing the platform away from a traditional editorial news property and into a more social, user-driven service. The move marks the beginning of what AOL CEO Tim Armstrong called “phase two” in the company’s evolution…
Why Wall Street Should Be Paying Attention to Hyperlocal Analytics
The correlation between directional trends and sales trends appears to be quite strong. That’s great for marketers — but could be pure gold for Wall Street or for just about anyone trying to analyze how a company is doing on a month-by-month or week-by-week basis. In the future, hyperlocal could become not just a way to understand customers but a way to invest smarter and way to level the information playing field…