Recently the good folks at the American Press Institute asked if I'd help lead a discussion about "Strategies for Sustainable Hyperlocal Business Models." So I did what I do best: ask other folks what they think. Here are some thoughts on the matter from Rick Blair, ex-CEO of Examiner.com, GoLocal24 co-founder Josh Fenton, Scot Brodbeck from ARL Now, Street Fight columnist Tom Grubisich and Street Fight CEO Laura Rich...

Holidays are a sparkling time to test out the effectiveness of one's local penetration. And it seems Patch is going all in. I asked Mark Josephson, SVP of revenue, to talk about what Patch is pitching for the holiday (among other obvious questions). Turns out the network of local sites has a Ye Olde Fashioned Gift Guide of its own...

Locationary is now unveiling Saturn, its shiny new beta product referred to as a "Federated Data Exchange Platform." I queried Ritchie recently about what the system can do, and how location-based startups can use it. Things get a little wonky here, but bear with us -- Ritchie's new release might actually have something for everyone...

With the dawn of smartphones and geo-fences (a virtual radius that can be used to alert devices when they breach the invisible border) passive mobile computing can be taken to a higher level...

Tweet Ted Leonsis understands social media better than you. Let’s just start there. And he doesn’t just understand it academically, or as a learned practitioner, or even as a social media services innovator (which he was). I’d like to think social media is visceral to Leonsis, but that would miss the mark, too. The truth [...]

I think we may be witnessing a race to see who can capture the consumer on his own time and his own turf -- and his preferred context -- with content (and deals) of specific interest to him a few moments before he realizes he wanted it. The daily deals are just a foot in the door to the broader hyperlocal market. Whatever territory and mindshare the likes of Patch have, Goup-Social wants. All this will be chewed on in my panel session at the Street Fight Summit tomorrow, October 25, with Jonty Kelt, CEO of Group Commerce, Chad Billmyer, CEO of Dealbird, and Perry Evans, CEO of Closely.

Combine digital community journalism and the New York Jets? Jim Brady might call that heaven. The longtime leader in online journalism and hyperlocal endeavors (though he avoids the term hyperlocal) seems to expend as much Twitter juice on the finer points of the team's play as he does on crowdsourcing the news. But just barely. Fact is Brady is one of the most recognized editorial leaders in online news going back to washingtonpost.com (the first time ... ya know, in the '90s) then AOL, then Washington Post 2.0, next TBD and now the Journal Register Company. Before he gets picked up by the Jets as a mid-season PR QB, I thought it a good time to catch up...

Tweet Sometimes when I enter a large space with the intention of performing a specific task I quickly lose all my energy and fall to the ground. For instance looking for a moon rock at the Air and Space Museum, or a particular gift item from a cacophonous mall: Down for the count. Looking for cumin at [...]

For the folks behind AmericanTowns, tackling every corner in this country is work enough. AmericanTowns.com is a work in progress begun over a decade ago in answer to the question of whether an online tool could enable citizens, groups and merchants to build a better community together...

A few weeks back Microsoft’s Bing! was the first search engine to roll out a daily deals search feature. The deals feed includes 200,000 offers perusable by geography and timing. It’s impressive. The Bing! Team has been aggressive about quickly putting in place customer-centric features like enhanced travel search and visual shopping search that address the way we live now with useful tools. This is the logical extension of the daily deal aggregation game, where the big fellas in the online search biz take the lead. And it both validates and improve my deal experience...