SMBs Now Spend More Than 1/4 of Marketing Budgets on Digital Media

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A new report released by Borrell Associates paints a rosy picture for the immediate future of local marketing — as long as the industry can overcome a few barriers. The report, which drew from a survey of over 2,000 small businesses, found that they now spend more than a quarter of their budgets on digital media with robust growth in the social media and mobile advertising sectors…

At GoDaddy, CEO Blake Irving Searches for a New Domain

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Irving has an ambitious plan to turn GoDaddy into a much larger, and more profitable, company. The strategy begins with the company’s 12 million domain customers and ends with a constellation of concentric services intended to serve an increasingly entrepreneurial, and distributed, global economy…

How Y Combinator Grad Estimote Plans to Turn Beacons Into a Big Business

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When Estimote graduated from Y Combinator in July of 2013, the startup was riding one of the hottest trends in tech: beacons. By the end of the year, the company had raised $3.1 million to turn its fist-sized adhesive proximity beacons into an “operating system for the physical world.”

Street Fight Daily: eBay Spins Off PayPal, Waze Crowdsources Places

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology]EBay to Spin Off PayPal With New CEOs for Two Publicly Traded Companies (Recode)… With Places (and Your Help), Waze Mapping Gets Smarter On Android And iOS (GigaOm)… Yelp and Tripadvisor Launch Joint Campaign Against Google (Financial Times)…

Millennial SVP: A ‘Broad Evolution’ Beyond Geo-Fencing Coming in Mobile

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Street Fight recently caught up with Matt Tengler, SVP of product at Millennial Media, to talk about the way in which location figured into the company’s strategy, the impact location data could have on the broader digital advertising marketplace, and whether small business matters (yet) in mobile advertising.

Is Apple Pay Fixing a Problem Consumers Don’t Have?

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Paying with a credit card isn’t broken. So mobile payments have to offer something greater than reducing my wallet by the atomic weight of a credit card. We’re talking tangible benefits like skipping store lines, saving time, or monetary rewards. Without these benefits, I don’t see how the masses will be compelled to change such an entrenched habit…

Street Fight Daily: SK Telecom Buys Shopkick, Facebook Launches Atlas

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologySK Telecom Agrees to Acquire Shopkick (Wall Street Journal)… With New Ad Platform, Facebook Opens Gates to Its Vault of User Data (New York Times)… OpenTable CEO on How Its Game Changes Within Priceline (Skift)…

Openings and New Hires at YP, Hailo, Google, and LivingSocial

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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, new jobs and hires at Advance Visibility, Hearst, Cross-Post, Placed and more…

Why Marketers Need to Consider Context — Not Just Audience

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In a Street Fight webinar Tuesday sponsored by Skyhook Wireless, Aaron Strout of marketing agency W20 Group and Skyhook’s Mike Schneider discussed the growing role of contextual targeting, and outlined a few steps that brands can use to create meaningful mobile experiences. …

LBMA Podcast: Google Outside, Urban Airship, and Thinknear’s Eli Portnoy

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On the show: Geotargeted ads to help The Times Newseum; Weve is dead; Pigeonly’s Photopigeon; MoodMedia rolls out presence; and the strategy behind Macy’s committing 4000 stores to Shopkick…

Street Fight Daily: FiveStars Raises $26M, Postal Service Eyes Grocery Delivery

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyFivestars Raises $26m to Build Up its Digital Loyalty Program (GigaOm)… Postal Service Seeks to Extend Grocery Deliveries (Wall Street Journal)… The Newsonomics of Auctioning Off Digital First’s Newspapers (Nieman Journalism Lab)…

Will Local Media Consortium Save Lee From Knife’s Edge?

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Lee Enterprises is meeting its Chapter 11 debt obligations, recently stretched out debt payments at lower interest, and has cut expenses by $285 million — albeit at cost to editorial quality at the local and community levels. But with the company likely having done much of the cost cutting available, the pressure is on to keep increasing digital ad revenues…

5 Local Marketplaces for Housecleaners

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Marketplaces aimed at providing consumers with easy ways to quickly find and book local housecleaners and home services providers are heating up, with frontrunners like Handy and Homejoy enjoying major investments from well-known venture firms like Revolution (led by AOL co-founder Steve Case and Groupon chairman Ted Leonisis), Google Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures. Here are […]

Street Fight Daily: Pro.com Raises Another $14M, Uber Talks to Regulators

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyBezos-Backed Pro.com Raises Another $14 Million to Help Renovate Your Home (Businessweek)… Uber Open to ‘Debate’ With European Regulators Over Ride-Sharing Rules (Wall Street Journal)… Bringing Tablets To Restaurant Tables Nationwide Nets E la Carte $35 Million (TechCrunch)…

In Navigating Supply and Demand, Groupon Hopes for New Life

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During a presentation at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local event in New Orleans Tuesday, Dan Roarty, vice president of local commerce at Groupon, positioned the company’s deal marketplace as one part of a much more ambitious effort to create a platform that connects local supply and local demand well-beyond the confines of an email blast…

Selling to Small Businesses: Getting Your Pitch Past the Gatekeepers

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Having better conversations with gatekeepers is one way to improve the sales process. Most inquiring sales reps tend to ask a gatekeeper when the decision maker will be available and then quickly end the sales call. This is a waste of a great opportunity to gather valuable intel. A gatekeeper can be your unwitting scout, giving you the information you need to better serve your prospective client…

Street Fight Daily: Clinkle Finally Launches, Ron Johnson’s New Startup

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyClinkle Finally Launches Its Payments Service (But Not The One Originally Promised) (GigaOm)… Former Apple Exec, J.C. Penney CEO to Launch Delivery Startup (Business Insider)… Macy’s Aims to Become Retail Tech Powerhouse With Latest Moves (Fortune)…

Yellow Pages Publisher Acquires LocalVox

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TBC Holdings, the parent company of The Berry Company, announced earlier today the purchase of NYC-based LocalVox Media. LocalVox, which provides a wide range of marketing software platforms designed specifically for local and hyperlocal marketing, sees the deal as an opportunity to become the go-to app for hyperlocal marketers from coast to coast…

Five Lessons Google Learned About Selling to Small Businesses

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For Google, the shift to mobile presents an opportunity to learn from mistakes made during the desktop internet boom. James Croom, head of marketing for the project, has spent five years in the company’s small business team. He said Monday that the company’s new Google My Business project builds on some learnings from the company’s Get Your Business Online effort launched in 2009 to drive business across the world to build websites…

Street Fight Daily: Radius Raises $55M, Square’s New Register

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyRadius Raises $54.7 Million to Improve Sales Leads Using Big Data (Wall Street Journal)… Square Is Making a Register That Takes Bitcoin and Apple Pay (Wired)… Hotels Use Online Reviews as Blueprint for Renovations (New York Times)…