News Recap: Twitter Teams Up With AmEx to Help SMBs
As part of a new partnership with American Express, Twitter announced this week that it will now use its ability to draw attention to certain topics to help advertise local businesses. Basically, this means that in addition to the “promoted tweets” seen by users, now ads from small businesses will also appear in their feeds…
Loopt and Green Dot: A Storified View
What’s the future of location-based services? One path may be mobile commerce, where LBS platforms bring a key loyalty tool. That seems to be one explanation for the $43 million acquisition of LBS Loopt last week by banking company Green Dot, which is known mainly for its prepaid cards for retailers.
So how did it shake out in the Twitterverse, in blogs and general media? Here’s our Storified roundup:
Local Quotables: Stangel, Biggs, Hyslop and More
The best words about and around the hyperlocal industry. Luke Stangel thinks augmented reality development could mean huge things for hyperlocal; John Biggs blasts hot new app Highlight for sharing users’ information without permission; Kate Hyslop reinforces the importances of an online presence for local businesses; and more…
Steve Outing: No One’s Got a ‘Magic Bullet’ for Hyperlocal Revenue
The founder and program director at the Digital News Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder studies the places where journalism and technology collide. Here he talks with Street Fight about where the concept of hyperlocal has been, where it’s going, and how technology is increasingly impacting how journalists do their job…
UK Location-Based App Uberlife Comes Stateside for SXSW
Instead of letting users check-in or constantly broadcasting their location, uberlife works like a hybrid between Facebook events and Foursquare. If an uberlife user wants to meet people in their vicinity, they can create a hangout on the app and followers in the nearby area receive a notification about where that user is or is going to be…
Local Quotables: Mason, Sheetz, Evans and more
The best words about and around the hyperlocal industry.
Andrew Mason realizes Groupon has fallen short with its social media presence; Ashley Sheetz from Gamestop explains why she backed out of Facebook’s failing virtual market; Perry Evans discusses the changing relationship between local businesses and consumers; and more.
Comparing the Pros and Cons of 5 Top Location APIs
With the rise of location-based services and apps, the availability of geo-specific data has grown more important than ever. With the recent sale and shuttering of SimpleGeo, a start-up that was beginning to turn heads in the geo-data field, many are wondering where to go for the location data they need. Here are five major services offering similar types of location data feeds…
Tagwhat: Creating Location-Based Stories
Foursquare gave us location-based community and merchant information and established check-in behavior among consumers. Now Tagwhat, a Colorado-based company, hopes to build on that legacy by enhancing users’ location experience with what they call a “mobile encyclopedia of where you are.”