Street Fight Daily: Groupon Scheduler, $2.5M Funding for CityMaps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
CityMaps Nabs $2.5M To Render Your City Social, One Block At A Time (TechCrunch)
Rip Empson: Striving to become a meta aggregator means that there’s plenty of opportunity to over-do it, to create a cluttered UI and a disappointing UX. But last week, CityMaps emerged from beta with a cleaner design and a new mapping engine that reduces most of that concern.
BIA/Kelsey: Local Advertising Revs to Hit $151.3B By 2016, Shift to Digital More Pronounced (Street Fight)
The firm states that this rise in digital will offset the lack of new revenue expected in the traditional media, and a greater percentage of local spend will be in digital in each successive year. By 2016, digital will constitute 25.5% of local advertising revenue, up from 16% in 2011.
Downballot Candidates Will Drive Hyperlocal Political Advertising in 2012 (Street Fight)
The way most local politicians advertise is massively inefficient because TV and radio advertising usually bleeds out beyond the borders of their district. A Congressional race in suburban district we worked on saw 93% of TV ad dollars wasted on voters who lived in other districts. Though presidential candidates tend to run the most sophisticated digital ad strategies, it’s really the candidates running for Congress or even the state legislature who need this targeting the most.
Groupon Scheduler Rolls Out in Beta as Part of Larger Tech Ambitions (AllThingsD)
Groupon doesn’t want to be known as just a deals company. As many others have proven (Google, Amazon, LivingSocial, etc.), that business is easy to replicate. Instead, the Chicago-based company wants to be known as a technology company for local merchants. To that end, it has rolled out Groupon Scheduler, an online calendar that enables small businesses, like spas and salons, to book appointments online.
How Community News is Faring (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism)
One of the challenges for new community online operations is how to develop a sufficient audience to help finance the site, whatever the revenue source. An increasingly effective method is to get the content out in front of people in ways other than the website. Partnerships with existing and more established outlets — including local television, public radio and newspapers — are becoming a more accepted path.
5 Online Marketing Strategies Every Restaurateur Should Know About (Street Fight)
Creating an effective online marketing campaign isn’t always a simple task — especially for restaurant owners that are used to focusing the majority of their time and energy on what’s happening in the kitchen. In recent years, a number of hyperlocal platforms have stepped in to make it easier for independent restaurateurs to develop websites, manage social media, and cultivate better relationships with their customers online…
Online Services: The Next E-Commerce Revolution (Revolution)
Tige Savage: At Revolution, we believe that consumers and merchants are on the precipice of a new breakthrough in e-commerce that could be just as significant, with a new generation of companies making services available for sale online just as simply as Amazon has made things available for sale online.
Groupon Shakes Up Management, Hires New Head Of Latin America (TechCrunch)
International management is becoming increasingly important to Groupon, as 7,000 of its 10,000 employees are now stationed outside of the U.S., and the chain of command leads directly up the ladder to Marc Samwer.
Mobile Devs Interested in Google Over Facebook for Social Mobile Apps (ReadWriteWeb)
In Appcelerator and IDC’s quarterly report on the trends of the mobile industry, 39% of developers answered that Google’s total assets were more important to them than Facebook’s social graph. Considering the huge lead that Facebook has in the social space, this is a bit of a coup for Google. What else are developers interested in at the start of 2012? HTML5 is on the rise, cloud services are hot and developer interest in Android is dwindling.
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