Street Fight Daily: 01.13.12
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
Urban Airship To Shutter SimpleGeo Services In March, With Factual Picking Up The Slack (TechCrunch)
It looks like it’s curtains for SimpleGeo’s services. Urban Airship said that after the requisite internal discussions, talks with customers, and hand-wringing, that it will “wind down the availability of the current versions of [SimpleGeo’s] Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months.” The target date for pulling the plug officially will be March 31st.
Rue La La Operator Lays Off 65 Workers, Plans to Shutter SmartBargains (Boston Globe)
Rue La La, a members-only shopping website based in Boston, said yesterday that it will cut about 60 positions from its workforce of 550 employees, after absorbing partner site SmartBargains.com. The company said it plans to devote more attention to its ‘‘core business’’ and restructure its network of Rue Local sites in San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago, all of which were launched in August.
Why Foursquare Won’t Share Location Data With Google (FastCompany)
Austin Carr: Before, search was always performed in one place. But now, as the data these engines mine becomes proprietary and more valuable to its owners, Google and modern engines such as Bing are losing access to indexing that data.
SoLoMo Revolution Picks Up Where Hyperlocal Search Left Off (Mashable)
Hyperlocal search was a hot-button term a few years ago, but there’s a new phrase in town that takes its predecessor to a whole new social level: SoLoMo.“Hyperlocal search may be dying, but the phenomenon is evolving and becoming more mobile,” says Greg Sterling, senior analyst with San Francisco-based consultancy Opus Research.
Foursquare: Still Mobile-Focused, But With More Love for the Web (GigaOm)
Increasingly, many web services are finding big business in moving to mobile. But for mobile apps like Foursquare, there’s also a lot of opportunity in beefing up their desktop web presence. Foursquare now gets 1 million visitors a day to its website.
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