Street Fight Daily: 09.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
With Foursquare having won the battle for the check in, Gowalla has undergone a serious transformation. Technically version 4.0, the new version bears little resemblance to the previous versions of the app. Gowalla is no longer predominantly a check-in service. That’s still one aspect of it, but the idea is now to focus on two key areas: travel and storytelling. (TechCrunch)…
The daily deals market is still a bit chaotic, but it’s opening up opportunities for companies that can make sense of it all. That’s true of CityPockets, which offers a digital wallet for storing past deal offers as well as a secondary market for buying and selling discounts. (GigaOm)…
Loopt CEO: Turning the Deal Around
When Loopt introduced its new U-Deals program earlier this year, our guest columnist, Doug Stephens hailed the concept as a “profound” shift in the consumer dynamic. Street Fight recently caught up with Loopt’s founder and CEO Sam Altman to talk about U-Deals, location privacy, and where he sees location-based services headed.
Foursquare’s Merchant API Lays Groundwork for Monetization
Amid the fanfare over Foursquare’s new features, the July release and August update of the company’s Merchant API went largely unnoticed. Eric Friedman, Foursquare’s director of business development, talks about why the offering marks a big step toward improving merchant services and laying the groundwork for future monetization.
Street Fight Daily: 09.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A Groupon deal might boost sales but, it can also lower a merchant’s reputation as measured by Yelp ratings, say computer scientists who have analyzed the link between daily deals and online reviews. (Technology Review)…
Patch is looking for adolescent contributors from high schools — and even middle schools — as it seeks to recruit thousands of community bloggers. (Forbes)…
Mission Local: A Hyperlocal that Does It Right
Over the course of the past few weeks the Mission District of San Francisco has been rocked by two shootings. Mission Local was all over it.The publication is a public-private partnership that publishes stories in English and Spanish focused on this district, which still has a strong Latino population…
Groupon Backs Off Offering
The best or biggest deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week.
Who: Facebook
What: Pulling back on the IPO throttle
This week Groupon said it would cancel the roadshow for its long-touted IPO, which was set to take place this fall and will now be postponed indefinitely.
Street Fight Daily: 09.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Zagat gives Google the best local content in one fell swoop, as well as relationships with thousands of local advertisers, writes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. “Now Google can plug the best local content into its many products and have the best local search product. … This is important because local is the next big online advertising opportunity. Daily deals are just the tip of the iceberg.” (Business Insider)…
“Local is going to be big; I think everyone realizes that,” says Sameet Sinha, a senior analyst at B. Riley. “But in this sort of capital markets environment, long-term projects aren’t given much leeway, especially a project like Patch that is much more people intensive than tech intensive.” It’s just “not something that should have been undertaken by a company the size of AOL.” (PEHub)…
Recommendation Engine Bizzy Couples Check-outs With Foursquare Check-ins
ReachLocal subsidiary Bizzy has released an update to their recommendation application this morning that integrates Foursquare check-ins with their trademark rating feature, the “check-out.” Like SpotOn, Bizzy allows users to rate and share their opinions of local businesses with followers and friends as well as discover cafes, bars, and restaurants through personalized recommendations that draw on users social graphs and previous ratings…
Street Fight Daily: 09.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Echoecho is a simple service that lets people request location updates from friends in their phone address book, who then can decide whether to respond with their coordinates. The company announced yesterday that it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Google Ventures and United Kingdom-based PROFounders Capital. (GigaOm)…
“It seems to me that Digital First is much more likely to solve the problem of building strong — and profitable — web-based local media than is AOL’s Patch,” writes Felix Salmon. “The first and most important reason is that local newspapers are, and always have been, the first best source of local ad-sales talent. … On the other side of the editorial divide, local newspapers are also the first best source of local news, and are generally much more respected and trusted in local communities than any cookie-cutter Patch site is likely to become.” (Reuters)…
Daily Deals 2.0: Card-Connected Offers
Banks now know more than practically anyone about consumer spending behaviors and they are rapidly entering the digital marketing and local commerce space. Many have rolled out programs that leverage technology to offer customers truly digital deals from merchants of all types via their existing credit or debit cards…
Street Fight Daily: 09.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Add Groupon Inc. to the list of hot new Web companies having second thoughts about whether now is a good time to go public. The daily deals website, which is expected to fetch a $20 billion valuation upon its stock-market debut, canceled its investor roadshow and is reevaluating plans for an initial public offering in the face of stock-market volatility. (Wall Street Journal)…
Location-based services are becoming more commonplace tools for mobile users, but check-in services appear to be facing a tough road to adoption, according to new figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The organization found that 28 percent of American adults use some form of mobile and social location-based services to get directions or recommendations, or to check into a location. But Pew found that only 4 percent of adults use their phones specifically for check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla, the same as in November. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.05.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
GPS navigation services provider TeleNav has completed the acquisition of goby, a local search engine and mobile application developer. goby provides services that allows users to explore events and activities based on location. (M&A Deals)…
Nonprofit news site The Bay Citizen got a jump start to success early in its life with a unique content relationship with The New York Times that provides two pages of local news for the newspaper’s Northern California edition. (NetNewsCheck)…
Rethinking Hyperlocal: Not Just a Paper, Not an Address
The Washington Post’s decision to close most of its regional bureaus makes a tremendous amount of sense and moves us further along the continuum towards a new reality when the news doesn’t have an office and hyperlocal is also hypermobile. In fact, I’d venture to say that real estate is something that the traditional dailies should ditch, pronto, as part of their transition into a new kind of news organization…
Facebook’s Life After Deals
The best or biggest deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week. Who: Facebook What: Taking another approach to location-based services Just a week after it said it would abandon its location-based service Places in favor of a new strategy, Facebook announced that it was getting out of the deals business. Facebook Deals was only around […]
Street Fight Daily: 09.02.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
While Yelp’s daily deal segment got off to a strong start, things have been getting worse ever since. So, what happened? Over the last 6 months, Yelp has been generating less and less revenue per deal as competition in the space heated up. (Yipit Blog)…
The Washington Post has decided to let the leases lapse on all but two of its local bureaus. Beginning next year, the Post has decided to end the leases on four offices in Virginia and three offices in Maryland. (Politico)…
FundsOn: Deals Site’s Charitable Twist – Getting by Giving Back
Charu Chundury was once an entrepreneur focused on software to help manage local youth sports. But these days, he sees an opportunity to tweak the model for charitable giving with an “effort-free” hyperlocal product aimed at the $290 billion a year consumers spend — all the while benefitting small businesses and consumers. How so? With a new company called FundsOn.