Conference Notebook: Mobile Commerce Without the Wallet
During a conversation at the M1 Summit in New York Tuesday, American Express’s CEO Kenneth Chenault attributed the recent failure of some of the most-hyped mobile payments products to a lack of focus and an inability for these services to equal the established ease of the credit card. But he remained confident that a fundamental transformation in the payments industry was still underway…
Study: Rampant Data Fraud Poses a Threat to the Mobile Advertising Industry
According to a new report, roughly two-thirds of the location data which mobile publishers pass on to advertising exchanges, and eventually to marketers, is inaccurate. The report, released by Thinknear, the mobile advertising wing of Telenav, found that of the 67% of mobile advertising impressions, which include a latitude-longitude data, only a third can accurately predict the location of a user down to 100 meters…
Report: Mobile Will Account for Half of Social Advertising Revenue by 2017
Mobile is poised to account for a majority of spending on social media advertising in the U.S. by 2017, eclipsing spending on desktop a year later, according to report from BIA/Kelsey released this morning. The research firm estimates that spending on social advertising in the U.S. will nearly triple over the next five years, swelling from $5.1 billion last year to $15 billion by 2018. In 2017, the firms expects that marketers will spend $6.7 billion — or half of all social media advertising revenues — on mobile ad formats.
At Microsoft, a Renewed Push for Small Business
Over the past year, Microsoft has managed to grow Bing’s market share — albeit, marginally — while investing in expanding its advertising presence among small business. Part of the effort is to use its search business as a springboard to bring advertising to a host of other platforms, many of which have never before been a home to ads…
Report: Local Media Ad Revs Will Climb to $158.6B By 2018
Local media ad revenues are set to increase 19% by 2018, according to new figures released by BIA/Kelsey, climbing from $133.2 billion in 2013 to $158.6 billion in 2018. The compound annual growth rate of 3.6% represents faster growth than previously expected, strengthened by political and Olympic advertising. Meanwhile, local digital media is set to continue its increase in market share, increasing from $31.7 billion (23 percent) in 2014 to $52.7 billion (33.2 percent) in 2018…
Newspaper Companies Make Another Big Investment in a Circular Startup
Gannett, Hearst, Belo, and others have invested another $15 million in Wanderful Media, a service that digitizes and distributes the millions of merchandizing ads that go out every weekend in local papers across the United States. The deal, which brings the startup’s total funding to over $50 million, highlights the newspaper industry’s struggle to find an answer to a depreciating revenues after technology companies have picked off many of its valuable assets…
Connectivity Raises $6 Million to Make Marketing Automation Work for Small Businesses
The Los Angeles-based startup has raised $6.35 million in funding to help small businesses structure and draw insights from digital interactions. The company is developing software to identify and analyze references to brick-and-mortar businesses in social media, reviews and other user-generated content, and then aggregate that data into a dashboard for small businesses to monitor their presence online…
Shopkeep Raises $25M to Build a Better Cash Register for Indie Retail
The New York-based startup that builds point-of-sale software for mobile devices has raised $25 million in its third round of funding. The new capital thrusts the company to the forefront of a busy pack of upstarts looking to rethink the point-of-sale. It also sets the stage for a drawn-out fight between a handful of well-funded startups, the legacy point-of-sale providers who control much of the market, and a number of other tech giants looking in…
Street Fight Daily: LevelUp Eyes ‘Zero Interchange,’ Zuckerberg on Graph Search
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 
LevelUp Thinks It Has Found A Way To Charge Merchants A 0% Credit Card Processing Fee (Business Insider)… Zuckerberg: Facebook Graph Search Is ‘A Five-Year Thing’ (SearchEngineLand)… Seamless Delivers Tips Agreement (WSJ)…
Mobile Ad Revenues Growing Faster Than Previously Expected
A new study from BIA/Kelsey finds that mobile advertising revenues may be picking up at a faster clip than previously thought. In the U.S. Local Media Forecast, the research firm projects that mobile ad spending in the U.S. will rise from $7.22 billion in 2013 to $25.47 billion in 2017, a 20% increase from what the company projected last year. Meanwhile, the share of mobile ad spending spent on locally-targeted ads continues to grow as well — albeit at slightly slower rate than previously expected…
Study: 80% of Mobile Searches Result in a Purchase
Brand marketers have started to catch up with consumers on mobile, but small businesses still remain far behind — and it may be starting to affect their bottom line. A new study finds that consumers are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to search for local businesses when they are ready to buy, but the information they want is often inaccurate, incomplete, or non-existent.
Closely Raises $3M to Turn Its Social Analytics App Into a Business
Closely, the maker of Perch, a social analytics app for small businesses, has raised $3 million in a series A round of funding led by Grotech ventures. Amid a chaotic local marketing industry, the company has quietly built out a novel business model which draws on learnings from the consumer world to solve one of the most dire problems in the business technology industry: selling to small businesses…
Walmart.com VP: For Consumers, The Digital Divide Does Not Exist
In the war to win the digital consumer, Walmart is betting that an all-of-the-above strategy will win out. During a speech at AdAge Digital in New York Tuesday, Brian Monahan, vice president of marketing at Walmart.com, said that world’s largest retailer remained committed to its brick-and-mortar stores and is focused on using technology to bridge the company’s digital and physical assets…
A ‘Connected’ Closet? As if — or Maybe Not
DigitasLBi Labs, the agency’s tech incubator in Paris, has built an in-store shopping assistant that uses image recognition software and Bluetooth low-energy beacons to match, recommend, and display possible additions to a shopper’s wardrobe. The group developed the “inspiration corridor” in conjunction with Klépierre, a french real estate company that operates malls across the country, and has installed the prototype in a Parisian shopping center…
Charting Consumer Behavior In the Real World
At Street Fight’s Local Data Summit on Tuesday, LocalSEOGuide proprietor Andrew Shotland started off a morning panel discussion on charting consumer behavior in the real world by asking panelists how close the local data industry is to being able to collect and aggregate the location of consumers, and then sell that information directly to marketers…
Street Fight Daily: Location Analytics CEO Arrested, Mobile Commerce Heats Up
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Former Motionloft CEO Jon Mills Arrested By The FBI (TechCrunch)… Rapid Growth of Mobile Commerce Fuels Rash of Competing Solutions (Financial Times)… MasterCard Dives Deeper Into Mobile With In-app Payments, C-SAM Acquisition (GigaOm)…