Street Fight Daily: Revel Raises $10M; LevelUp: We’re ‘Android,’ Square is ‘Apple’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Revel Systems Raises $10.1M To Help It Grow iPad Point-Of-Sale Business (TechCrunch)
Revel Systems, purveyor of iPad-based point-of-sale systems for restaurant, retail and other customer-service facing businesses, announced its $10.1 million Series B funding round today. The company has talked previously about its success and ability to stand on its own, but taking on additional investment really opens up what it can do in relatively little time.
Nextdoor: Where Privacy Is a Double-Edged Sword (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Nextdoor has some issues to sort out in whether and how much neighbors want to be walled in from adjacent, or even non-adjacent, communities. In researching this story, I signed up for the service and discovered firsthand its power of engagement — but found its walls dampened the enthusiasm it had engendered in me, and I wondered if the latter will impact the potential of the former to make good on the company’s $100 million valuation.
LevelUp: We’re ‘Android,’ Square is ‘Apple’ (Local Onliner)
LevelUp CEO Seth Priebatsch says his loyalty/transaction marketing company will emerge as a partner for SMBs — think authentication, orders and refunds and analytics — in the same way that Facebook Connect is a partner for media sites. Speaking during an analyst presentation, Priebatsch thinks of it as a two horse race between LevelUp and Square, which gets most of the buzz in the space.
The Good and Bad of Local Discovery on Our Summer Road Trip (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: Greetings from a summer road trip in the Pacific Northwest. Amid games of twenty questions and alphabet animals that blur into one another and mix with the beauty and tedium of the I-5, we have faced the typical needs of the traveler: shelter, food, gas, and fun. Naturally, we’ve turned to local search to find the best, the most affordable, or at least the nearest.
Why Angie’s List Hires an Auditor to Read its Business Reviews (Bloomberg)
The investment firm Citron Research recently published a report advising readers to bet against shares in Angie’s List—which publishes consumer reviews on such local service companies as plumbers, roofers, doctors, and dentists—in part because Citron says the site’s refusal to publish anonymous reviews leads to a preponderance of positive comments. In the case of Angie’s List, the company hires an outside auditor each year to certify its reviews “as a fair, impartial and trustworthy resource.”
Mobile Payments and the ‘Wow’ Factor: Q&A With Square CFO Sarah Friar (Harvard Business Review)
While marketers strategize heavily around how to help consumers decide what to buy, how much time do they spend thinking about how they will pay? We asked Square’s CFO and Operations Lead, Sarah Friar, for perspectives on the company’s technology, what it means for marketers, and how to manage in the world of mobile innovation. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Study: Google Local Carousel Results Win 48% Of Clicks, While Only 14.5% Of Clicks Were On The Map (SearchEngineLand)
When using heatmaps to gauge interest levels for Google Local Carousel results, search marketer Matthew Hunt discovered that 48 percent of searchers surveyed clicked the Carousel results, while only 14.5 percent clicked on the map. According to Hunt’s study, 40 searchers clicked on Carousel results, while 12 of the 83 searchers clicked on the map.
Glympse Is Snapchat For Location-Sharing (Forbes)
“There is only a small number of people in the world that you might want to share your location with all the time. There are many more situations in any given day where you might want someone – a stranger or someone close to you – to know where you are for a short amount of time,” says Glympse VP of Product Darren Austin. “The app rose out of that — emulating with technology how we share our locations with others in the real world.”
Why Placemeter Abandoned The Buzzed-About “Omnichannel” Category For A More Ambitious Goal (PandoDaily)
Depending on who you ask, omni-channel is the buzzword du jour in retail marketing. It represents the new frontier of integrated marketing, where social, email, TV, and display advertisements all work together with in-store promotions and analytics. But Placemeter, a member of the latest TechStars New York class that began as one of them, has shifted directions. Here’s why.
How to Use Hyper-Local Content Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Business (Social Media Today)
Whether it’s called local search, targeting, or pinpoint marketing, it all boils down to one thing: emphasizing relevancy. If you’re a local business, it’s crucial to your long-term growth that you seize this opportunity. You absolutely must show up in all the ways that Google and other search engines allow you to show up: through organic search results, directories, maps, and more.
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