Street Fight Daily: Seamless GrubHub Merge, Wanderful Media Raises $9M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
GrubHub, Seamless, and the Importance of the Purchase (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Besides strengthening their own position, the two companies are betting they can serve as a place for people to rate and discover restaurants, not just order from them. Seamless and GrubHub don’t just feature menus and take credit-card numbers for orders—each restaurant has reviews from other people who have ordered from there.
Waze Builds Out Traffic Maps to Add Context in Location (Street Fight)
Andy Ellwood, the company’s senior director of business development, will be appearing on a panel at Street Fight Summit West in a couple of weeks in San Francisco to talk about how the future of mapping tech plays into hyperlocal marketing. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about how Waze makes money, the vitality of context, and fighting off Google.
Newspaper Companies Invest Another $9M In Local Deal Startup Wanderful Media (TechCrunch)
Wanderful Media has raised another $9 million from the long list of newspaper and media companies that were already backing the startup and its local deal service Find&Save. The service allows readers to browse deals aggregated from newspaper circulars, retailers, and other data sources.
5 Tips For Optimizing Hyperlocal Sites For Tablets (Street Fight)
The real question for hyperlocal publishers isn’t how important tablet readers are, but how best to cater to this group. The publishing standards that work on PC browsers don’t always translate to tablet screens. Here are five strategies that hyperlocal publishers should consider when creating content for readers on tablet devices.
What Patch Employees Were Told During the Friday Evening Conference Call (Romenesko)
Jim Romenesko: On Friday afternoon, AOL president Tim Armstrong announced that Patch was restructuring and laying off some employees. The changes were discussed during an all-company conference call that started at 6 p.m. ET Friday (when most media reporters were already in bars or headed home). I asked one of my Patch sources to brief Romenesko readers on the call. Here’s his report.
LevelUp Partners with NCR to Bring Mobile Payments to More Restaurants(LevelUp)
LevelUp has struck a deal with one of the largest makers of retail point-of-sale systems, NCR, helping the startup make further inroads into its most important market: restaurants. The payments startup is now chummy with the top two POS terminal and software makers used by U.S. restaurants (the other is Micros), and has deals will several smaller suppliers.
Google Testing Ads In New Google Maps, Pushes AdWords Location Extensions (SearchEngineLand)
If you needed another reason to get your location extensions set up in AdWords, Google has announced its testing new ads in the new Google Maps. AdWords search ads set with location extensions can appear directly below the search box and on the map itself. Ads without location extensions can appear below the search box only and not on the map.
Dairy Queen Tries Location-based Advertising to Increase Summer Foot Traffic (Mobile Commerce Daily)
Dairy Queen is running a mobile advertising campaign to lure consumers in-store to try an Orange Julius smoothie. Orange Julius is using mobile ads to promote the fact that its stores are inside the ice cream giant’s locations. The mobile ads are running within Fandango’s mobile site.
Addiply Piloting ‘Virtual Walkthrough Ads’ for Hyperlocals (Journalism.Uk)
Local online advertising platform Addiply is piloting “virtual walkthrough adverts” on Norfolk hyperlocal The Loddon Eye. The ad format allows a hyperlocal website’s readers to get a Google Street View-like tour of the interiors of local businesses. Advertisers are able to show the interior of a restaurant, for example, and viewers are able to benefit from a virtual tour.
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