Booker Eyes New Markets, More Capital

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Sixteen months ago, Bain Capital’s venture wing made a $27 million bet on Booker. Now, the company says its gearing up to raise another big round in order help propel it into a number of new appointment and class-based verticals and hold off a bevy of increasingly well-capitalized competitors…

What Booker’s New Partnership Says About GrubHub’s Future

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Booker has announced a new partnership with Como to use the firm’s technology to allow businesses to instantly generate a customized consumer-facing mobile application with full booking capability. The move offers an insight into how back-office software companies could undercut commerce companies like Grubhub…

Why Booker Wants to Blur the Line Between Marketing and Operations

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Last year, Bain Capital poured $27 million into Booker, a company that builds scheduling and business management software for small and medium-sized salons. Today, the New York-based startup is working to push deeper into the front office, building a new suite of tools that use a business’s operational data — booking data, payment information and the like — to engage with existing customers, and in some cases, find new ones…

Why HouseCall Thinks Taxi Apps Are Just The Tip Of The Iceberg

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Last year, four engineers from Qualcomm, who were responsible for the company’s location sensor product Gimbal, left the company to start HouseCall, a system that helps users find and book local providers who service home-related projects like plumbing or audio/visual installation. The company has built a similar marketplace model as Seamless in the food delivery sector, providing enterprise software for free to merchants and then selling leads generated by its consumer product…

Hyperlocal Execs’ 2014 Predictions (Part One): Moz, Foursquare, Booker

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As we have for the past couple of years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2014. We’ll be running their responses in two installments, today and tomorrow…

There’s a New ‘Local’ Industry in the Making

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Call it local media, marketing, or commerce — but the existing terminology and classifications used to describe the “local” industry simply do not fit anymore. What’s emerged in 2013 is a community of technology companies, organized around the idea of creating a better, more connected local marketplace…

Watch Out Intuit — Booker Guns For Demandforce With New CRM Tools

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Eight months after raising a massive Series A round, Booker is making its push into a new, and potentially massive, market: CRM. Today, the New York-based company, which began selling booking and business management software to service businesses, rolled out Promote, a Demandforce-like product that allows businesses to tie email messaging and social media campaigns to the goings-on of their business…

Why It’s So Hard to Create Marketplaces for Local Commerce

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Recognizing the success of Uber, startups and incumbents alike rushed to replicate the company’s model in other verticals, developing new products to help business and consumers buy and sell local services like car repair, house cleaning, and haircuts. MyTime, the 9-month old project launched by RedBeacon founder Ethan Anderson, is one of these and is staying the course. When I spoke with Anderson last week, he outlined a few key strategic decisions and clever hacks, which have helped the company get some early traction for its marketplace..

Chart: The Local Marketing Landscape

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The shift from print to digital is old news, but what’s shaking up the industry is the introduction of cloud-based business management systems — for everything from payments and point-of-sale to schedule — into the marketing mix. Marketers can write algorithms to connect supply and demand, automating the way businesses and consumers interact locally. Yelp meets Booker. Facebook meets OpenTable. These combinations will bring together consumer data from every stage of the purchase funnel, automate marketing plans and messaging, and reduce implementation and sales costs for both marketers and solutions providers…

In Search of the Checkout Pixel for Local

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Until recently, the “last mile” offline had been considered the most challenging step to solve for. But today, it’s increasingly where most of the action is happening. Consideration starts online, but picking up the sushi or the TV, or getting the bridal party fitted, occurs offline — and that involves not just more steps, but also more room for attribution. What was opaque previously is now fertile ground. The race is underway to plant flags at every step and, to make things interesting, with each flag planted consumer behavior is changing…

With Strong Earnings, Yelp Nears Profitability

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The reviews site brought in $55 million in revenue during the quarter on a $878,000 loss, the closest the company has come to run-rate profitability since going public. The results come on the heels of a busy past few weeks for the company as it began to stake its position in a local market that’s increasingly shifting toward commerce technologies…

Hyperlocal Industry Leaders to Gather in NYC on Oct. 24-25

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Street Fight, the leading voice of the hyperlocal industry, will host its third annual Street Fight Summit in New York in October, bringing together decision makers and influencers from key areas of local marketing and commerce. Topics will focus on the most dynamic areas of hyperlocal, such as indoor targeting, mobile payments, hyperlocal advertising models, and local commerce strategies…

VIDEO: The Pains and Promise of an ‘Amazon’ for Local Services

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As investors continue to pour funding into the local services space, the competition over one of the last white spaces of the consumer web is heating up. During a session at Street Fight Summit West earlier this month in San Francisco, Ethan Anderson, founder at booking service MyTime, and Booker CEO Josh McCarter debated the dynamics of building an “Amazon for local services”…

Booker Closes $27.5 Million Round, Seeks to Be the ‘Amazon of Services’

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The service management and marketing platform for SMBs has gotten a big financial boost. Booker announced today that it has raised $27.5 million in a Series B round led by Bain Capital, which it will use to continue building out its small business scheduling and marketing offerings.

6 Platforms For Booking Local Services

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Platforms that allow consumers to book appointments with service-based professionals (like plumbers, electricians, and mechanics) are disrupting the way local services have traditionally been scheduled. Here are six platforms working to change the way local, service-based businesses schedule appointments with consumers…

Openings & New Hires at Locu, Groupon, Patch, Signpost, and More…

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There’s lots happening in hyperlocal as the year comes to a close: Locu snags PayPal vet Mok Oh as an adviser, plus lands a hot ex-Googler. Booker brings on a dynamic duo in its hiring spree. Patch sees big moves at the top. And there are some shifts at Groupon and open gigs at Telenav, Signpost, Swipely, Yellowbook, Yelp, and more…