Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Revisits Ad Consortium, Yelp Goes To Washington
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Newspapers’ Ad Consortium With Yahoo Reboots (Poynter)
An early attempt to boost digital advertising at newspaper organizations by cross-selling local advertising with Yahoo will be attempting an update and relaunch over the next several months. The goal remains to use the local sales force of 700 participating dailies to sell retail ads to an expanded audience including those who go to an aggregator like Yahoo as their gateway to finding news.
Openings and New Hires at ShopKeep POS, Rocket Fuel, Angie’s List and Groupon (Street Fight)
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 and moves at BOND, Demandbase, Shopkeep POS, Guavus, Spafax Networks and more.
Yelp Just Got Its First D.C. Lobbyist (Fast Company)
Yelp has hit the mark of maturity for a tech company: It hired its first official lobbyist in Washington. Laurent Crenshaw is a former legislative aide to Rep. Darrell Issa who will be Yelp’s first representative in D.C. and will lead Yelp’s Washington efforts on issues like free speech, consumer protection, and online competition and that the popular listings-and-reviews service has been searching for a representative since at least May.
Gauging Hummingbird’s Impact on Local SEO (Street Fight)
Chris Marentis: Standardization of data structure on simple things like name-address-phone number (NAP) information, mapping, local business category, organization (micro-formats) are now starting to pick up steam and become increasingly important for local search and discovery. Now with Hummingbird, things are about to get even more interesting.
WhitePages.com Fulfills Its Enterprise Destiny, Launches WhitePages PRO Identity Verification Platform (PandoDaily)
While the company is the number one destination for consumers searching for personal contact info, attracting more than 50 million monthly unique visitors and 15 million monthly active users of its mobile apps, while processing more than 2 billion searches annually, that’s not the full story. Today, the company officially addressed this increasingly valuable audience with the launch of WhitePages PRO, a premium service targeted at business users.
What Candy Crush Is Teaching Us About Mobile Payments (Harvard Business Review)
What if we took a cue from Candy Crush, the popular game that’s made big money on in-game currency, and created more fluid points of purchase, using phones or other technologies? Theme parks and nightclubs have begun to adopt experiences that allow you to link your credit card to an NFC chip, creating cashless transactions at registers. Imagine redesigning other experiences so that cash registers went away completely.
Have We Hit Peak Advertising? (Nieman Lab)
Tim Hwang: Peak Advertising will drive the formation of highly monopolistic or oligopolistic market structures for advertising, since only the largest companies will have the scale of advertising inventory necessary to remain profitable. Smaller companies that are especially reliant on advertising will have difficulty remaining profitable and will face incentives to sell to companies with larger aggregate volume to sell.
Elevate Digital Adds $1.5M For Kiosk Rollout (Crain’s Business)
Elevate Digital is getting another $1.5 million to build out its network of interactive kiosks. The startup has installed more than 70 interactive, ad-supported information kiosks across Chicago, partnering with Groupon, Tribune, World Business Chicago and BMO Harris and plans to announce deals soon with Cisco Systems and Clear Channel.
Google’s Matt Cutts: User Redirection Based On Location Is Not Spam (SearchEngineLand)
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video yesterday clearly stating the geo-location or redirecting users based on their location is not spam. Google will not consider a site that uses geo-location techniques as spam.
LBMA Podcast: Rogers Partners With Sprint, RevTrax CEO Jonathan Trieber (Street Fight)
Citi Field tests Apple’s iBeacon; Placeable helps you “Plot” your data; Metaio gives us car manuals in Google Glass; Footlocker gives you 46 quadrillion shoe choices; and EyeQuant raises money to take eye tracking into the real world.
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