Street Fight Daily: LivingSocial Mulls Ticket Monster Sale, Patch Postmortem In St. Louis
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Despite Hedging, LivingSocial Is in Discussions to Sell Korean Deals Site Ticket Monster (AllThingsD)
LivingSocial is engaged in serious talks to sell its Korean deals business Ticket Monster, which it bought in 2011, according to sources familiar with the discussions. At this point, sources said, it appears more that it’s a matter of when the deal gets done, not if. Sources noted that the troubled daily deals site has been engaged in discussions with a number of possible buyers over the past months, but declined to name them.
Could Simple Website Builders Be the Next Hyperlocal Superstars? (Street Fight)
Sean Barkulis: Where is the next billion-dollar opportunity in hyperlocal? You might be surprised by the likely answer. Assuming they play their cards right, simple website builders like Wix, Weebly or SquareSpace — and not the traditional hyperlocal platforms — have the best shot.
Patch’s Closure In St. Louis (And My Closure After Patch) (Ryan Martin)
Ryan Martin: Launching Patch was a big gamble for AOL, and it’s a gamble that didn’t pay off. Would the gamble have turned out differently if Patch addressed any of the criticisms mentioned below? Maybe, but I’m not sure how all that adds up to an additional $100-$150 million in revenue each year.
In Push to Measure Mobile ROI, Marchex Beefs Up Call Analytics (Street Fight)
Marchex, the publicly-traded call analytics firm, has released two new products this morning aimed at improving its ability to attribute calls to mobile actions and to determine the actual quality of a call. The move comes as a number of advertising technology firms have launched new attribution services in recent months, scrambling to measure return on investment for an increasingly interested, but skeptical, brand advertiser.
Operation Clean Air: Clearing Up Misconceptions of Yelp’s Review Filter (Moz)
David Mihm: While the amount of the fines levied against fake reviews is hardly Earth-shattering, the outcome of the lawsuits should give pause to any SEO or reputation-management company considering quick-and-dirty, underhanded tactics to boost their clients’ rankings, “improve” their clients’ reputations, or launch negative attacks on competitors. I hope to dispel four misconceptions that it would be easy to conclude from these recent publications.
The Future Of Mobile Taps And On-Demand Services (TechCrunch)
Semil Shah: One of the hottest trends in “mobile consumer tech” is the idea where one can simply just tap their phone and receive a range of services in the form of on-demand labor. Consumers love the ease and simplicity of these check-out and delivery service flows, so it’s no surprise legions of entrepreneurs are riding on the back of the mobile wave and Uberizing other daily tasks.
Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers (New York Times)
Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualized, hypertargeted ads. And they are doing it without cookies, those tiny bits of code that follow users around the Internet, because cookies don’t work on mobile devices.
Urban Compass, A 5-Month-Old Startup Worth $150 Million, Will Help New Yorkers Buy — As Well As Rent — Homes (Business Insider)
Ori Allon’s young startup, Urban Compass, has found early traction helping New Yorkers rent apartments. Soon, Urban Compass will help them buy apartments too. And in a few months, the company be launching Urban Compass Network, a city guide to help people adjust after a move, in the next few months.
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