Street Fight Daily: Facebook Reaches 1M Advertisers, Waze Deal May Invite Scrunity
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Facebook Reaches 1 Million Active Advertisers As Small Businesses Adopt (Reuters)… Google’s Effort to Skirt Regulation May Invite More Scrutiny (New York Times)… Groupon Pivots Amid Management Upheaval, Lagging Stock Price (AdAge)…
Street Fight Daily: Square Redesigns Wallet, Why Facebook Passed on Waze
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Square Wallet Gets a Major Redesign (CNet)… In Passing on Waze, Did Facebook Make a Big Mistake or the Right Call? (AllThingsD)… Foursquare Tries To Find Revenue By Turning Your Data Into A Samsung Galaxy S4 Ad (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Open to Graph Search, Foursquare’s Flaw
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp Open to Partnering With Facebook’s Rival Offering (Reuters)… Foursquare Is Generating Too Much Useless Noise (AdAge)… Nesta Research: Public Interest High, Advertiser Interest Low for Hyperlocal Media (London School of Economics)…
Street Fight Daily: Waze Gets Social with Facebook, Spun Upgrades News App
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Postmates’ Local Delivery Service Hits New York City (HuffingtonPost)… Waze Mapping App Gets a Little More Social with Facebook Events (VentureBeat)… 70% Of Mobile QSR Campaigns Use Location Targeting (MediaPost)…
Street Fight Daily: Waze Talks Collapse, Wikipedia Launches ‘Nearby’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Facebook Acquisition Talks With Waze Fall Apart (AllThingsD)… Wikipedia Debuts ‘Nearby’ Feature to Find Pages Around You (VentureBeat)… As Software Trumps Hardware In The World Of Payments, VeriFone Partners With CardSpring For Card-Linked Services (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: Phone Firms Sell Data, A Day in Court for Yelp
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Phone Firms Sell Data on Customers (Wall Street Journal)… Another Day in Court for Yelp (New York Times)… Hyper-Local: Not A Behavioral Disease (Medium)…
Waze Builds Out Traffic Maps to Add Context in Location
Andy Ellwood, the company’s senior director of business development, will be appearing on a panel at Street Fight Summit West in a couple of weeks in San Francisco to talk about how the future of mapping tech plays into hyperlocal marketing. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about how Waze makes money, the vitality of context, and fighting off Google…
Street Fight Daily: Square Unveils New Hardware, PayPal Offers Cash for Registers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Square Unveils Hardware for iPad Registers (New York Times)… PayPal’s Cash For Registers Tries To Outdo Square And Groupon With Its Own Bid To Rule The Register (TechCrunch)… Facebook, Waze at Odds Over Liquidation (Business Insider)…
Facebook, Waze and the Falling Cost of Mapping Technology
A lot of digital ink has been spilled about why Facebook would want to snap up Waze — namely, the company’s 40 million mobile users. But the discussions also verify the once-unthinkable reality that a startup could scale a navigation and mapping service into a billion-dollar business in five years. A number of technological trends have set the stage for Waze and other mapping and navigation startups to compete. Here’s a look at a few of them…
Case Study: Local Deals Site Increases Subscribers With Offerpop Promotions
When Matt Toomey set out to launch a daily deals site in California’s Bay Area in September 2011, he knew he’d be challenged with competing against industry giants like Groupon and LivingSocial. What Toomey has learned in the 20 months since his company’s launch is that it takes more than just a great idea and close relationships with local businesses to make a deal site profitable — it also takes subscribers…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Reportedly Circles Waze, Klout Dips Into Local Commerce
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Reports: Facebook Is Buying Social Mapping/Traffic App Waze For Up To $1B To Court Mobile Users (TechCrunch)… Klout Dips into Q&A and Local Commerce with Launch of New Questions Feature (GigaOm)… Trulia Agrees to Buy Real-Estate Software Maker Market Leader For $355 Million (Wall Street Journal)…
Local Search Is Becoming a Mobile Experience With a Social Layer
One of the more surprising revelations from a recent comScore study is that Facebook is now the #2 mobile app for local search, behind Google Maps. This puts it ahead of Mapquest, Bing, and Apple Maps. Yelp isn’t even in the top five. Are people really using Facebook for local search? This may seem counter-intuitive to some, but consider that Facebook is by far the most popular mobile app in the world…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Adds Yext Data, DexOne Emerges from Bankruptcy
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Facebook to Add Yext’s Business Data as It Touts Search Feature (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Dex, SuperMedia Close Merger and Emerge from Chapter 11 As Dex Media (Screenwerk)… Google Calls Reports that Google Now for iOS Srains Batteries “Incorrect” (TheNextWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: Twitter Brings Local Trends to Mobile, Square Poaches PayPal Exec
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Twitter Updates Its Apps with New Trends Locations (TheNextWeb)… Square Hires An Exec From PayPal To Form Payments Partnerships With Retailers (TechCrunch)… Brownstoner Founder Jonathan Butler’s Venture-ing into Queens (Daily News)…
Local Search for Events: The Great Missed Opportunity
My jumping off point for this week’s column is a recent post from Greg Sterling, where he observes that despite all the impressive innovation around local search in recent years, no one has launched a truly useful local events service. I have had this feeling for years and wasn’t sure if it was just me. But if Greg doesn’t know about a local events service that truly works, I think it’s fair to say one doesn’t exist. So pay attention, developers and entrepreneurs: local events need a killer app…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Challenges Yelp, Foursquare Rethinks the Web
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Facebook Challenges Yelp With Mobile Pages Redesign Featuring Actions, Local Biz Details, And Ratings (TechCrunch)… Foursquare Revamps Business Pages to Take on Yelp as Web Visitors Hit 50 Million per Month (Verge)… Can Yelp Hold Off Foursquare and Facebook? (Screenwerk)…
How Marketers Can Help Merchants and Consumers Win With Local Search
For the sake of local businesses and local searchers, marketers need to come to the rescue. vSplash estimates that there is a $3.2 billion opportunity for local marketers to help clean up local search and help local businesses with their digital marketing efforts. And in that number there is some low-hanging fruit — especially for marketers that already have a foothold in local markets…