Openings and New Hires at Topix, Angie’s List, Drawbridge, PlaceIQ and More
Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new hires at Topix and Local Corp., plus jobs at BuzzTown, Yahoo, Yext, WorldNow, and more…
With $2.5M in the Bank, Trover Eyes ‘Phase Two’ of Its Photo-Sharing Community
With 130,000 monthly users, Trover’s numbers aren’t enormous, but the community is engaged and growing. And for now that’s just fine for CEO Jason Karas. He spoke with Street Fight recently about the company’s recent fundraise, how to eventually monetize the power of passion, and the strengths of a tiny team…
LBMA Podcast, Google Patents Your Gaze, QR Code’s Plight
On the show: GoDaddy acquires Locu; Coors Light’s Refresh the Night campaign; Placeable emerges from LocationInsight to normalize location data for enterprises; Coca Cola uses location to help charities with Movement for a Movement campaign; Apple acquires Embark; Google chokes on Yahoo!’s dust; Chuck Martin looks at the plight of the QR code…
Street Fight Daily: Microsoft Eyes Foursquare Investment, Nokia Unveils Connected Car
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Microsoft Vying With American Express for Stake in Foursquare (Bloomberg)… Nokia Unveils Its Connected Car Platform: Here Auto (GigaOm)… Apple Sued Over ‘Find my iPhone’ In New Patent Campaign Against Location Apps (PaidContent)…
What Will It Take to Bring All Businesses Online?
Many small businesses are claiming their Google and Bing listings, interacting with reviewers on Yelp, and using social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Inside the local bubble, it might seem as though the importance of these activities has been long established. Surely only a business stuck in the stone age would ignore the statistics we all know and love about searches with local intent, the explosion of mobile, and the critical need to be well represented in Google search results. How, then, are we to take a report showing that 52% of SMBs still don’t have a website?
After Latest Woes, Can Community News Hit the ‘Re-imagine’ Button?
In the two years since Mike Fancher’s “Re-Imagining Journalism” was published, there have been a succession of upheavals in community news, almost all of them about sites closing or retrenching. Can publishers of community news still manage to develop a model that works within the brutal economics of today’s digital space? I went to “re-imagineer” Fancher for answers…
Case Study: Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Campaign Performance
In Greg Bucko’s world, data is king. As the manager of customer insights for Southern States Cooperative, a farm supply and service cooperative with $2.5 billion in revenue, Bucko is responsible for making sure his company is targeting its most profitable customers with direct mail and other marketing calls to action. His company uses predictive analytics tools to analyze variations in marketing campaigns, with the goal of being able to improve customer targeting…
Street Fight Daily: Gannett Cuts Jobs, Fandango Acquires Quantum
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Gannett Cuts Jobs At Some Local Papers (USA Today)… Fandango Acquires Promotional Ticketing Company Quantum (Wall Street Journal)…
Joe Trippi: Local TV’s Biennial Political Cash Bonanza Is Going to Fall Off a Cliff
In an recent interview, the presidential campaign guru told Street Fight that while it would be business as usual for broadcasters next year, 2016 would likely see the beginning of the end of TV’s dominance in political advertising: “There’s a growing number of people who get it,” he said, “that there’s a better way to deliver a more targeted and relevant message without having to buy all that broadcast reach. It’s going to come. … It’s just a matter of time and innovation.”
5 Hyperlocal Platforms To Improve Store Operations
Using indoor positioning and navigation tools, retailers can pinpoint traffic backups, improve store layouts, and deploy additional cashiers when checkout lines have reached certain maximum thresholds. They can also boost sales with merchandising displays that have been specifically designed to combat the dreaded “showrooming” effect. Here are five tools that retailers can use to upgrade the shopping experience inside their brick-and-mortar stores…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Eyes Warehouse Network, Belly Raises $12M Round
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Groupon Eyes Warehouse Network For Goods (Wall Street Journal)… Big Retail’s Interest in Loyalty Startup Belly Grows: 7-Eleven Chips In On $12M Round (GigaOm)… Forget Tablets. Nokia Has A Bigger Connected Gadget In Mind: The Car (GigaOm)…
Infographic: Breaking Down The Local Stack
A stack of technologies has emerged to quietly reinvent the way business and consumers interact locally. One by one, technology firms have recreated the way we find, buy and retrieve goods and services locally as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers. Siloed early on, these industries are starting to coalesce, working together to form layers in a coordinated Local Stack.
In Local Sales Effort, Foursquare Looks to Strike a Balance
Foursquare is trying to find a new path for local sales. The embattled check-in-turned-local-discovery startup has started to build out its local sales organization, focusing on a combination of technology and customer service rather than door knocking and hand-holding. This summer, the company began the challenging processes of developing a local sales effort that can reach mom-and-pop shops from New York to New Delhi…
Grasping for a New Way Forward at Local Media Conferences
At several recent conferences, the overriding, anxiety-producing theme has been the development of new revenue models for media — whether from foundations to support nonprofit news services, or from advertising, or from something else. But the disquieting fact is that a cure-all response to what ails local media can’t be identified…
Street Fight to Participate at Loco Connect Conference in Amsterdam
Street Fight co-founder David Hirschman will be moderating a panel on indoor mapping and location services at the Loco Connect 2013 conference, which is taking place on November 12th in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Hirschman’s panel on indoor mapping and location services will look at the next frontier for the location services market…
BlockAvenue Pivots From Utility to Media, Becomes CO Everywhere
Tony Longo and Dan Adams, the founders of Block Avenue, are doubling down on media. Two years after launching the service as a tool to rate locations, the company has rebranded as Co Everywhere, and released a mobile app to help people explore the world around them. Users can pick a featured place, or outline a geography on a map, and peruse content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and a other sources that come from within the area…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp-Google Rivalry Heats Up, A Hard Sell Gone South
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Google’s Local Business Is “Really Struggling,” in “Constant Chaos,” Yelp CEO Tells Charlie Rose (AllThingsD)… When the Hard Sell Goes South (Blumenthals)… Navigating The App-Data Explosion: Localytics’ Raj Aggarwal (ReadWrite)…
What’s Apple’s Mapping Shopping Spree Really About?
Moreso than the features, Apple’s post-Mapgate acquisitions are all about what’s behind the scenes in this age of big data. This goes back to what a lot of people don’t realize about Apple Maps: it’s is actually a pretty slick mapping tool. But what it has in dazzle, it lacks data; things like place listings, navigation and public transit…
How Local Sites Can Win the War on Fake Reviews
This week Edmunds, the auto and car dealer review site, announced that it had settled a lawsuit it had filed against Humankind, a firm accused of submitting fake reviews for a fee to about a dozen review sites on behalf of businesses. Humankind was accused of creating fake user accounts and attempting to submit glowing reviews of their clients’ car dealerships. Here are some methods for to your site or app that will catch a high percentage of fake reviews…