ReachLocal CEO: Digital Ad Industry Has a ‘Very Poor Reputation’ Among Small Businesses

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Turnarounds take time — and no one is more aware of the challenges than Sharon Rowlands, who took the helm at ReachLocal almost a year ago. In an interview with Street Fight, Rowlands talks why she thinks ReachLocal is not the only company in small business marketing industry with brand problem, fixing the sales culture in local, and the need to move beyond top-line thinking.

Mobile Has a Fragmentation Problem — Here’s the Technology That Could Fix It

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More than a decade ago, Google solved one of the most frustrating characteristics of the web: its fragmentation. Now, the mobile industry faces an even more striking crisis as mobile users spend more and more time in array of applications. The San Francisco-based URX is one of handful of companies using web crawlers to index the information within applications and allowing developers to find and link to content in other applications.

Street Fight Daily: Inside Apple Watch, Uber’s Growth Numbers

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyApple’s New Watch: Here’s What Matters for Local (Street Fight)… Uber Gives Sneak Peak Into Growth (USA Today)… Just 20 Percent Of Retail Consumers Want Location Divulged (Mobile Marketer)…

Apple’s New Watch: Here’s What Matters for Local

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Here, we take a look at some of the potential impact of the Apple Watch on the local technology industry, and breakdown some unexpected, yet potentially important, other announcements made during the company’s busy news conference Monday.

How Google Is Fixing Its Small Business Problem

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A few years ago, the paradox threatened to undermine the fundamentals of one of Google’s core revenues-generating products, AdWords. In 2011, the churn rate in its search advertising product spiked, leaving managers, including Joe DeMike, now the head of the customer experience lab at Google, scuttling to find a solution…

Booker Raises $35M More From First Data, Bain Capital and Others

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The New York-based Booker, a software firm that built a big business selling to the service industry, has raised $35 million more from a range of investors, including a strategic investment from payment processing giant First Data…

Local Media Companies Now Need a Digital Business to Survive

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For years, the traditional businesses have generated the majority of revenue, leaving some executives to drag their feet. But now, the door for legacy business to exit the market is closing and the conversations about the digital transition have become increasingly existential.

5 Things You Need to Know About Selling to Local Consumers [SLIDESHARE]

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Toward the end of last year, american shoppers reached a remarkable milestone: consumers spent more in retail stores on products, which they had researched on the Internet, than those they had not. According to eMarketer, Web-influenced offline sales now account for the largest category of retail spending in the american economy…

Yelp VP Mike Ghaffary: We Are Now a Household Name

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Mike Ghaffary, vice president of business and corporate development, spearheaded the acquisition of Eat24 and has led the Yelp Platform from the start. We caught up with Ghaffary to talk about what the acquisitions means for its Platform initiative, concerns among investors about slowing growth and what makes local, local.

Bing’s Stefan Weitz Thinks Search Is About to Change Dramatically

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The company’s director of search believes an explosion of passive data will reshape the search business, creating new ways for consumers to find local information and forcing the industry to rethink one of the most successful business models from the Internet-era…

4 Hot Startups Using Big Data in Local Contexts

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Technology companies, both big and small, are creating new ways for marketers and consumers to connect locally. These startups, who will be speaking at the Local Data Summit next week, are using local data to reinvent the way we travel, market and even park…

Study: Franchises Spend ‘Nearly Half’ of Marketing Budgets on Digital

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Franchises, equipped with the resources of a large brand but the flexibility of a small business, could help provide a critical stepping stone for vendors looking to reach SMBs. New data shows they are substantially more digitally advanced than their independent counterparts…

Factual CEO: Machine Learning Could Upend Local Search

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We sat down with Gil Elbaz, the chief executive at Factual who made his name building the technology behind AdSense, to talk about the future of search, what role Yelp may play in it, and why he thinks we machine learning will create a game changing product in the next 18 months…

Groupon Plans to Start Selling Beacons to Merchants

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The deals company announced solid fourth quarter earnings Thursday evening, finishing the year with gains in both revenue and gross billings. During the earnings call, CEO Eric Lefkofsky announced its latest project: a redemption system that uses beacons to allow merchants to track and communicate with Groupon customers in their stores…

Florists Hate Valentine’s Day — BloomNation Thinks It Can Change Their Mind

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Americans will spend $18.9 billion on flowers, candy and more for the holiday — but the spike in demand typically does not translate into big profits for small flower shops…

Yelp Acquires Eat24, Bringing the Battle to GrubHub

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The company announced Tuesday it had acquired Eat24, a food ordering service, for $134 million in both cash and stock. The acquisition positions Yelp on a collision course with GrubHub, the online ordering firm that went public last year after merging with the New York-based Seamless.

CEO Says Yelp Is at ‘Peak Desktop’ — Is It Also Nearing Peak Growth?

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Yelp posted its first-ever annual profit Thursday, but sluggish user growth sent shares of the reviews company tumbling in after-hours trading. As much as Yelp may want to rid itself of its dependency on Google, the search giant has provided a critical platform for it to grow its user base…

Grubhub Has Made Its Biggest Move Since the Seamless Merger

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In the most important move since its merger with Seamless, Grubhub has acquired two delivery companies in an effort to build its own delivery network. The move marks a transition in strategy…

Marketers Know Even More About Offline Behavior Than You Think

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An explosion of cloud-connected devices is spawning a new dataset of offline behaviors — what we called local data — that could help local marketers, sellers and economies better compete with the ecommerce industry…

Study: Mobile’s Data Problem Is Getting Worse

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In the mobile advertising industry, where data is harder to come by, location data has emerged as a pricey asset. But a new report from Thinknear suggests that the quality of the location data on major exchanges is actually on the decline…