Street Fight Daily: 05.18.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

LivingSocial CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy talks about why there are so many daily deals sites and why his company is at the top of the mountain with Groupon. In short, he says that while there’s not much of a barrier to entry into the daily deals market, there is a huge barrier to scale. (Business Insider)… The Matchbook iPhone app allows people to bookmark places they intend to visit. Users walking by a location, viewing a website, or simply recalling a place can add it to their automatically-organized Matchbook list by clicking a button. (Business Insider)…

Main Street Connect’s Tucker: Hyperlocal Needs Scale

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A veteran in the community news business, Carll Tucker founded the community news company Trader Publications in 1981, built it up, and sold out to Gannett in 1999. Then, two years ago, he came to the conclusion that the community news model he’d been so successful at offline hadn’t really been replicated on the Web. And so he founded Main Street Connect, a small-but-growing collection of community sites that began in Connecticut and soon will expand into Westchester (N.Y.), and beyond…

Street Fight Daily: 05.17.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Local directory company Yell Group has set a July timetable for announcing the conclusion of its strategic review, which it set in motion early this year in the face of continuing declines at its printed Yellow Pages business. (Paid Content)…

Groupon and Scvngr’s moves last week demonstrated how daily deals and geo-social are on a collision course. Here’s why Facebook might be a step behind other marketing options for deals and geo-social. (Clickz)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.16.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…

Google announced Friday that its “News Near You” product, tied into Google News, will be available from Android and iPhones browsers. If you visit Google News from your phone it will prompt you for location and ask for news categories that interest you. (ReadWriteWeb)…

There’s no doubt that the future of eBay is based on both online to offline purchases, local and mobile commerce. But as retail evolves, it will be interesting to see if the company can connect the dots with all these acquisitions and technologies to create a powerhouse in mobile and local commerce. (TechCrunch)…

Geomentum’s Lisa Bradner: Thinking Differently About ‘Scale’

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When she joined the hyperlocal marketing firm Geomentum in the summer of 2010, Lisa Bradner had worked for two decades in consumer marketing, most recently as an analyst for Forrester Research. With the hyperlocal advertising market expanding rapidly, the move put her in a great position to explore the ways that micro-targeted location-based ads can create more relevant consumer engagement…

Street Fight Daily: 05.13.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.Group Commerce has raised an additional $10 million in funding to help quickly ramp up a platform that enables publishers and media partners to get into the daily deals market. (AllThingsD)…

FreeMonee is neither daily deal service nor mobile coupling app, but instead a self-proclaimed “cash-gift network.” Essentially, your bank will recruit you to shop with a local retailer, and in exchange for your patronage, you’ll get free cash to spend as you’d like. (Mashable)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.12.11

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Murphy USA, a gas station chain with 1,000 locations situated in the parking lots of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, announced Wednesday that it’s offering $2 off a $20 purchase of gas with a Foursquare checkin. (Mashable)…

Gannett Co. is in the process of launching dozens of hyperlocal Web sites in 10 different markets, in a bold and risky initiative. DataSphere handles ad sales for Gannett’s hyperlocal sites, which are viewed as a growth medium because they provide smaller local businesses with an affordable, highly targeted ad platform. (NetNewsCheck)…

Yelp’s international sites have been growing like crazy, with non-U.S. traffic doubling in the past year….

Street Fight Daily: 05.11.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Groupon has just launched Groupon Now, the company’s much-anticipated time-based deals app that wants to redefine how society eats and shops. The simple application within Groupon’s mobile apps gives a user the ability to find local deals in realtime. (Mashable)…

Google has announced the opening up and general availability of the Google Places API. The service gives developers access to Google’s database of restaurants, bars, hotels and various other points of interest. (ReadWriteWeb)…

Empowering Local Restaurants Online

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In 2011, pretty much every restauranteur knows that their business needs some sort of Web presence. They may just need a functional way to let people know their address and menu, or they may want a more sophisticated marketing outreach, but online is certainly part of the equation. The problem is that most restaurateurs aren’t versed in Web design, and many don’t know exactly what they should be doing online and why…

Street Fight Daily: 05.10.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Foursquare and Google are joining forces to enable a trial of Foursquare checkins via near field communication (NFC). The test starts Tuesday at Google I/O, the annual developer conference in San Francisco. (Mashable)…

LocalResponse takes the location data from other services and combines it with implicit location information, gathered from status updates, to create a marketing platform that lets companies target consumers wherever they are in real time. (GigaOm)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.09.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Groupon is preparing to launch Groupon Now, a mobile app that will connect customers with real-time coupons for retailers in their vicinity. Tap the app’s “I’m hungry” button, and you might be offered a discount on a slice at a pizza parlor a few blocks away. But you’ll have to move fast: The deals will be time-sensitive and good for just a few hours. (CNN/Money)…

Lauren Fisher writes that “2011 could be the year that the check-in arrives, albeit differently to how we thought it might look.” (The Next Web)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.06.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

AOL’s Tim Armstrong just keeps piling his chips higher and higher on his Patch bet, but the odds of winning continue to be extremely slim, writes Matthew Ingram. (GigaOm)…

Google’s Marissa Mayer — who took charge of Google’s Location Services division in October — yesterday described Business Photos, a new product that will take Google Maps indoors. She also spoke with Jason Kincaid about the problems facing Google Latitude, and how Google Places is going to differentiate itself from Yelp in the future. (Paid Content, TechCrunch)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.05.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Those who use social location-based apps such as Foursquare or Facebook Places represent just 17% of the mobile population, according to a new study. Of those opting out of participating in the checkin craze, or any other social location behavior for that matter, 48% cited privacy concerns as their primary reason for not doing so. (Mashable)…

During AOL’s earnings call, one of the top questions from analysts was what is AOL’s plan with Patch? The company dumped $40 million into the hyperlocal network for the second quarter in a row, and it didn’t generate much revenue. Here’s Tim Armstrong’s explanation. (Business Insider)…

IAC-owned local media and advertising property CityGrid Media is acquiring social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform BuzzLabs. The company allows publishers to leverage social content, keeps consumers better informed, and helps local businesses monitor their presence across the web. (TechCrunch)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.04.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… E-commerce giant eBay said in February that it is eying deals that more closely link the online and brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Hyperlocal has become a common phrase for the company as it targets firms that can connect shoppers to local merchants. (The Street)…

AOL HuffPo is launching three new Patch sites geared towards Latino readership in Southern California by the end of the year. No decisions have apparently been made yet regarding which communities those sites will cover. (FishbowlLA)…

“People love getting advertising that is applicable to them, and 90% of every dollar is spent offline within 10 miles of the home,” says Topix CEO Chris Tolles. “Great hyperlocal advertising works to connect consumers to applicable business where they live.” (The Next Web)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.03.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Add another big player to the list of Groupon competitors: AT&T. The telecom giant Monday began pre-registration to consumers in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth for a service via the company’s yp.com that will send daily deals to consumers. (Mashable)…

New York magazine is about to launch a weekly “deals” e-newsletter and online adjunct, but instead of matching offers play to advertisers, it will aggregate “the best of the best” of other e-commerce sites’ picks. (PaidContent)…

“Location is a serious battleground, and whoever has the best handle on it, both gathering it and using it, is best positioned to reap a lot of money as we build a lot of services based on location,” writes Ryan Kim. (GigaOm)…

CityGrid’s Herratti: Local Is Becoming More and More Fragmented

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Jay Herratti has been working in the local advertising space for decades. Previously the CEO of IAC-owned destination guide CitySearch, he currently serves as CEO of CityGrid Media, a “location-aware” advertising network that aggregates local advertisers and extends them across a network of 300+ publishers, including Urban Spoon, Insider Pages, and many others. Street Fight caught up with Herratti recently to talk about the fragmented nature of the local online advertising marketplace and why the Groupon phenomenon is an example of the kind of “closed-loop” advertising model that small businesses love.

HuffPo Harnesses Patch Hyperlocals for Bin Laden News

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In the months since AOL bought The Huffington Post, the company’s execs have talked a number of times about plans to incorporate coverage from Patch’s network of hyperlocal sites into HuffPo’s national report. Arianna Huffington herself recently said she expects Patch will be a key element of HuffPo’s coverage of the 2012 presidential election, and Patch local reports from California were recently used in stories about the Japanese tsunami. But last night we really saw that collaboration in action, as HuffPo drew on Patch’s network to flesh out out its coverage with hyperlocal reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden…

Street Fight Daily: 05.02.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Online local media and search company Local.com has acquired location-based shopping data aggregator Krillion for $3.5 million in cash. The company provides local shopping information on over 70,000 consumer products from over 50,000 retailers, including in-store availability, comparison pricing, current discounts and images. (TechCrunch)…

Startup thruSocial offers neighborhood pizza places and Pilates studios a one-stop platform to create their own promotions, which the company distributes to social-networking sites, as well as its own consumer-end deals site, thrupon.com. (GigaOm)…

AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal blogs, which has suggested that a number of initiatives are coming to increase community engagement with its sites, has hired well-respected Brooklyn hyperlocal blogger Liena Zagare to lead the effort. (PaidContent)…

Study: FB ‘Likes’ Driving Buzz for Local Biz

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The Facebook “like” button, which has been around for just over a year, has already become an important cultural phenomenon. A couple of months ago, a study by Yahoo Labs’ Yury Lifshits looked at how “likes” affect traffic to news stories by reinforcing memes, making the most popular content even more popular as it is passed around.

Street Fight Daily: 04.29.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

For AOL to have real success with Patch, the company will need to employ the model of companies that probably want Patch to fail. (Forbes)…

“The problem with local is that everything is local,” writes CityVoter’s Josh Walker. “An agency should be able to talk intelligently about the combination of these approaches and be comfortable working with multiple vendors to reach the audience in the geography a client needs to activate.” (Business Insider)…

In the midst of a busy month of expansion, LivingSocial has announced its expansion into nine new U.S. markets. (Daily Deal Media)…