The hyperlocal interface will overwhelmingly revolve around a mobile experience with advertising and commerce tied to location and in-the-moment activities or sentiments. By ceding that real estate to Google with a sub-par user interface and experience, Apple is handicapping its future efforts to earn a significant chunk of that market...

A data-driven wire service would — through a cooperative model or other collaborative form of consumption — help pool the costs of complicated technology development and integration across numerous parties while yielding scalable, customizable results. Put the wired in wire service and let the database masters rule the new media universe...

Next year, merchants will start to gain the upper hand in online marketing. That gain will come from lessons in the consumer market, where simple UI and UX have become paramount for success and sophisticated filtering has given way to three-click processes.

It’s entirely conceivable that fast-growing ranks of Uber users would not be averse to other commerce offerings that could be paid for through the phone app. In fact, these users are probably even more used to the idea of paying over the phone than people who use Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook, neither of which has achieved wide adoption or even viral growth...

Hyperlocal video has, until now, been basically an oxymoron. The local television stations push out a decent amount of video but it has a metro rather than a hyperlocal focus. Patch.com and other hyperlocal news networks have done a bit of video, but it remains expensive to produce and comparatively hard to monetize at lower traffic levels. This is why a platform like Glocal looks really, really interesting...

Election coverage at the local level is going to grow in importance., Here’s why: The shift from air attack to the tech-enabled ground game means that, in all likelihood, the era of declining voter turnouts are over, in my opinion. With growing turnouts come a more broadly-engaged electorate not just on political matters but on local politics that constitute the true bread-and-butter issues for many towns and small cities...

Local offers Yahoo one of the few great markets where no obvious winner has emerged. Yes, Google owns Maps, Android and local search. Meanwhile Apple is moving to lock up the mobile local search segment (including voice recognition with Siri). But neither has really owns local content yet...

We all know that small papers have suffered far less than major metros in the advertising bloodbath. And talk to anyone in a small town and these papers continue to have tremendous relevance. Small papers have mostly slashed extras costs, if they ever grew bloated in the first place. And today, more than ever before, the tools for easily putting a small-town paper on the Internet have become incredibly simple...

The correlation between directional trends and sales trends appears to be quite strong. That’s great for marketers — but could be pure gold for Wall Street or for just about anyone trying to analyze how a company is doing on a month-by-month or week-by-week basis. In the future, hyperlocal could become not just a way to understand customers but a way to invest smarter and way to level the information playing field...

Hyperlocal news sites are struggling to earn money. In part, that’s because they have imposed the artificial burden of a full church-state separation (ads / news) like the New York Times and other top-flight pubs. In an ideal world, this separation works. But in small town papers or small papers covering hyperlocal areas, church and state will never be separate – and never have been.