Street Fight Daily: Dow Jones Sells Local Media Group, ReachLocal CEO Resigns
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Dow Jones Sells Local Media Group (Poynter)
Fortress Investment Group will buy Dow Jones’ Local Media Group, the company announced Tuesday afternoon. The group’s 8 daily and 15 weekly newspapers “were not strategically consistent with the emerging portfolio” of News Corp., chief executive Robert Thomson said in a statement. GateHouse Media will manage the papers, the company said.
Here’s What A Good Lead Looks Like in Local (Street Fight)
Radius uses the core technology developed at Fwix — a system for aggregating and structuring the billion of references to places across the web — to track the activity of local businesses, and then packages the information in a business intelligence product for firms looking to sell to local businesses. Street Fight recently caught up with Darian Shirazi, the company’s founder, to discuss the digital traits of a great prospect and who’s winning (and losing) in the local marketplace.
ReachLocal CEO Gordon Resigns, Chairman Steps In As Interim (MediaPost)
ReachLocal announced the resignation of CEO Zorik Gordon Tuesday, naming the company’s chairman David Carlick as interim CEO, effective immediately. The statement gave no reason for the departure other than the desire to “pursue other entrepreneurial opportunities.”
Geo-Intent: Going to Where the Puck Will Be (Street Fight)
Jason Klein: So what can make a business geo-disruptive? Beyond location awareness, it is far more important to know where a person is headed and his needs and wants at the destination. For the geo and mobile world to move towards its promise, web designers should be focusing more on creating engaged, opt-in behavior, and gaining robust information on geointent.
Making Its First Acquisitions, Eventbrite Buys Ticketing Service Eventioz And Event Data Company Lanyrd (GigaOm)
Eventbrite has acquired its first startups, the company announced on Tuesday morning, including London-based social event site Lanyrd and Eventioz, an Argentinian startup that sells online tickets across Latin America. Eventbrite didn’t release terms of the deals but said the acquisitions would help the company grow internationally, and will be fueled by the company’s $60 million fund raise in the Spring.
Let a Thousand Flours Bloom: One Local Bakery’s Opinions on Technology (Hunter Walk)
Hunter Walk: Despite all the noise about the local vertical, it feels like I rarely see the press actually ask a business owner about their tech usage and needs. We get relatively breathless coverage of how Startup X is going to disrupt something, but the person behind the counter who owns the purchase decision receives zero column inches. Someone needed to right this wrong (or err, write this wrong) and I was up to the challenge.
The CRM Of The Future Will Recommend New Customers To You Automatically (Forbes)
The future of CRM will be a complete solution that marries Structured Contact Management and Lead Data together. It’s important to remember that this marriage will have to allow specific data to be shared across customers. In a nutshell, this is what I think the future of CRM for sales and marketing ought to be.
OpenStreetMap Founder Steve Coast Leaves Microsoft For Telenav (TechCrunch)
In the shadow of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, Steve Coast, the founder of OSM, announced that he is moving to Telenav to work on OSM and to lead Telenav’s crowd-sourced mapping initiatives for its Scout navigation services. Coast joined Microsoft in late 2010 to become the principal architect for Bing Mobile to develop “better mapping experiences for our customers and partners, and lead efforts to engage with OpenStreetMap and other open source and open data projects.