Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Talks ‘Localization,’ Smartphone Adoption Reaches Majority
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Checking Into Foursquare? Yahoo’s CFO Talks About Next Mobile M&A — Including Importance of “Localization.” (AllThingsD)
Kara Swisher: During a tech investor conference held by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch yesterday in San Francisco, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman would continue to do acquisitions and of most interest is “localization of the space,” especially in providing search and content to consumers. Foursquare and its founder Dennis Crowley have always been a favorite of Mayer, including an interest in buying the company when she was an exec at Google, which never came to pass, for various reasons.
5 Reasons to Add Gift Cards to a Digital Loyalty Program (Street Fight)
Promoting customer loyalty is a broad goal that local merchants are tackling in many different ways. While plenty of platforms utilize mobile redemptions and out-of-the-box rewards or coupons to curry favor with consumers, an increasing number of loyalty providers are moving outside the virtual environment with pre-loaded physical gift cards.
Pew: 61 Percent In US Now Have Smartphones (MarketingLand)
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released new survey data on smartphone adoption, which finds that 56 percent of all US adults now have smartphones. However, among the population of mobile phone owners (91 percent of US adults), the smartphone penetration number is now 61 percent.
Hyperlocal Sustainability (Round 2): Upbeat ‘Indies’ Say They’re Winning (Street Fight)
Following up on my column from last week, here are more unvarnished thoughts from “indie” hyperlocal editors and publishers I’ve been talking to about sustainability (a word, by the way, that sets the teeth of some of these entrepreneurial journalists on edge).
Yelp Eyes Shopping On Site (SocialTimes)
Yelp is perhaps best known for bar and eatery reviews, but shopping is the dominant category on the site, leading the company to consider supporting e-commerce on its side, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a presentation at the LeWeb conference in London today. “We have all these people who are essentially shopping for something online that they’ll buy offline but they’re not closing the transaction,” CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said
With Disparate Data, Factual Founder Sees Opportunity (Street Fight)
In a fireside chat with Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs at Street Fight Summit West Tuesday, Gil Elbaz, chief executive at Factual, the location data company, said there’s a massive opportunity for startups to help digest and analyze the massive amount of data coming from mobile devices. The challenge, says Elbaz, is folding additional information into location data to help better understand the context of the user.
Google Launches Google Maps Engine API for Enterprises Doing Big Data Mapping (TheNextWeb)
Google launched its new Google Maps Engine API today, enabling developers with large amounts of location-based data the chance to show that information through a mobile or Web app with the Google Maps or Google Earth interface. The API means that developers can access Google’s cloud infrastructure and easily layer their own data on top of the now widely recognized Google Maps experience.
FCC to Clarify Rules on How Carriers Can Use Customer’s Call Data (AllThingsD)
The Federal Communications Commission is gearing up to issue a ruling explaining just how cellphone operators are able to use a customer’s call data. The so-called declaratory ruling will clarify when carriers need a customer’s consent for collecting private information such the time, duration, and location of calls from a mobile device.
Fresh Out Of The Oven: Contextual Tastes Way Better Than Cookies (SearchEngineLand)
In recent years, using cookie data in behavioral targeting strategies has been heralded as a game-changer by online marketers. Although this has led to noted improvements in ad effectiveness for national campaigns, we posit that locally-targeted ad campaigns with strict geographic limits do not see as much of a benefit as from other targeting techniques, such as page-level semantic analysis, or contextual targeting.
eBay To Make True Window Shopping A Reality With New NYC Virtual Retail Stores (TechCrunch)
eBay is debuting new “shoppable window” virtual stores over the course of this month and next to help retailer Fifth & Pacific Companies Inc. sell its new line of Kate Spade Saturday clothing on window display screens measuring 9 feet by 2 feet, which cover the windows of closed stores and allow passers-by to browse and order a catalog of 30 items for same-day delivery.
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