Local’s Sleeping Giants; A Tale of Two Keynotes

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We’re at the height of keynote season, and in the past month Apple, Amazon and Google, have all carted out their wares. Local was understated at each, but below the surface were huge implications…

Google Hooks Up with Aisle411 to Map Stores

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The company will partner with Walgreens to test an in-store service that helps shoppers navigate store aisles. Throughout the shopping experience, shoppers can be introduced to personalized coupons and other promotional offers, as well as rewards that can be accrued just by browsing…

Street Fight Daily: Tech Helps Small Business, Inside Uber’s War Machine

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyStartups’ Modern Tools Help Small Merchants Compete (New York Times)… Inside Uber’s Political War Machine (DailyBeast)… Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages (Atlantic)…

LBMA Podcast: Glympse, Blippar, and Esri

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Top stories of the week feature McDonalds Canada, Pinterest, Food Network, Lowe’s, Naziha Mestaoui, Match.com, Amazon, Oman, Kraft, and Wal-Mart.

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Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Charges Fees, Intuit’s M&A Machine

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyFoursquare Will Start Charging the Heaviest Users of its Places Database (TheNextWeb)… With Its M&A Train Rolling, Intuit Looks to Prove the Big Company Can be a Good Home for Small Firms (Pando)… Apps Now Account for Half of All Digital Media Time (MarketingLand)…

Despite Many New Local News Sites, ‘Media Deserts’ Are a Stubborn Reality

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More than 120 newspapers have shut down in the U.S. since 2008. Surviving papers have been forced to cut their local news budgets in the implosion of old media ad revenue. Hundreds of digital community news sites have been launched in the meantime, but journalist and educator Dr. Michelle Ferrier from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University says that millions of Americans have ended up in a “media desert.”

Is the U.K. Moving Ahead of the U.S. in Location Targeting?

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If the American Revolution were fought based on technological powerhouses alone, we’d win in a heartbeat. Yet some advertisers in the U.K. are pulling off the sorts of campaigns that we only dream of here. It’s easy to chalk that up to the comparatively small size of the market, but that’s selling ourselves short. There’s no good reason that we can’t roll out the same location-based ad tech that has proven so successful in the U.K…

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Plans Grubhub Competitor, Google Moves to the Car

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyAmazon Is Quietly Launching A Local Takeout Service To Rival Seamless And DeliveryHero (TechCrunch)… Google Moves to the Car with Android Auto (Recode)… Uber: The Great Disruptor of Pizza Delivery? (Fortune)…

How Retailers Can Bridge the Gap With Beacons

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Using beacons, content can be delivered to a consumers’ mobile device that augments the shopping experience and bolsters the relevancy of the merchant’s real-time communications based on the consumer’s location and real-time behavior. As a result, the messaging can be perceived by the consumer less as “marketing” and more as “helpful.”

8 Strategies for Reaching Out to Online Influencers

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Rather than sitting idly by while influencers dictate what’s being said about their businesses on social media and review websites, merchants are beginning to reach out to these social media users on a personal basis. Here are eight strategies that marketers should consider when reaching out to influencers online…

Street Fight Daily: ZocDoc Raising $152M, FAA Bans Delivery Drones

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyZocDoc Raising $152 million at $1.6 Billion Valuation (Fortune)… FAA Bans The Use Of Drones To Deliver Packages (TechCrunch)… RelayRides’ Altered Future Points To A Ride Sharing World Dominated By Lyft And Uber, Not Zipcar (Forbes)…

Shopkeep Founder: Micros/Oracle Deal Won’t Help SMBs

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With its acquisition of Micros, Oracle is affirming its commitment to making, selling, and continually repairing outdated technology that has far outlived its usefulness. This approach, while wasteful, works for big companies with million-dollar IT budgets — but small businesses neither want nor need technology that sits in a room and takes up space…

At Indochino, A Retail Model Built to Order

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When the founders of Indochino, a startup that sells custom suits online, began to drum up strategies to enter brick-and-mortar retail, they found some surprising fat in the model: the store itself. What they came up with in response is an ephemeral alternative to offline selling that draws on some of the flexibility of ecommerce while retaining the experience of a physical presence…

5 Self-Serve Solutions for Creating Location-Targeted Mobile Offers

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Locally-targeted mobile ads are expected to reach $4.5 billion in the U.S. this year — an increase of $1.6 billion in the last year alone. As merchants search for creative ways to take advantage of location-targeted advertising, many are turning toward self-serve solutions for creating location-based mobile promotions…

Street Fight Daily: McDonald’s Orders Ahead, Oracle Puts Micros On Menu

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyMcDonald’s Is Secretly Testing Its Own Order-Ahead And Payments App(BusinessInsider)… Oracle Puts Micros on Menu as Restaurants Eat Up Software (Bloomberg)… Google Is Getting Into Domains. Should GoDaddy Worry? (Mashable)…

No, the Amazon Smartphone Isn’t Going to Kill Retail

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The in-store experience provides tremendous benefits to shoppers, and the Amazon Fire phone further illustrates the opportunity to use innovative mobile solutions to improve and influence the shopping experience…

LION-Borrell Revenue Survey Unravels

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A revenue benchmarking partnership between the Local Independent Online News publishers association and Borrell Associates is coming apart because too few of LION’s publishers want to share their information with the the local media research company…

Is ‘Efficiency’ at Odds with Your Local Sales Force?

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With the economy on the uptick, businesses in local should have more wiggle-room in how they choose to increase efficiency. Whereas fear may have motivated them to move towards labor cuts in the past, now they should feel the freedom to invest in long-term solutions…

Street Fight Daily: Oracle Poised To Buy Micros, Ad Spending Jumps In Q1

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyOracle Poised to Seal $5 Billion Deal for Micros Systems (Wall Street Journal)… Ad Spending Jumps in First Quarter, Fueled by Olympics and Early Political Ads (AdAge)… Uber Plays Hardball With Early Shareholders (Fortune)…

Openings and New Hires at Facebook, 4INFO and WhitePages

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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, moves and new openings at Mobee, Turner Broadcasting, hibu, Angie’s List, Signpost and more…