Street Fight Daily: Groupon Buys Breadcrumb, Judging Journatic, Warren Buffett
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Groupon Acquires Breadcrumb to Make Redeeming Deals on the iPad Easier (AllThingsD)
Groupon has acquired Breadcrumb, a small company that was building a point-of-sale solution for the iPad. Groupon said that Breadcrumb’s team, including founder and CEO Seth Harris, will be joining the company and that Breadcrumb will soon be offering its product to Groupon’s existing merchant partners.
On Journatic, and Making It in Hyperlocalville (Columbia Journalism Review)
Brian Farnham: At Patch, we came to the conclusion that the recipe for community news is equal parts people and platforms. You need some journalism pros, you definitely need social components and tons of engaged active users, and you need technology — not for its own sake, but to amplify, accelerate, and elevate what your people produce.
Why Clay Shirky Is Right and Warren Buffett Is Wrong About the Future of Local Newspapers (GigaOm)
Mathew Ingram: It could be that Buffett sees the future of local newspapers as one in which readers cannot access anything without paying for it, and hopes that the strength of connection those papers have with their communities will convince large numbers of people to sign up for a paywall — thereby turning each paper into a tiny version of The Economist or the Wall Street Journal. But without some kind of turnaround in both print and digital newspaper advertising, those businesses are likely to be much, much smaller than they are now.
SnipSnap: How a Newspaper Vet Aims to Remake Paper Coupons For the Mobile Era (ReadWriteWeb)
SnipSnap doesn’t just take a photo of each coupon, but rather picks out and properly digitizes pertinent details, such as the face value, expiration date, barcode and name of the store. The app notifies you when a coupon is about to expire and reminds you about it when you’re near the store.
Yelp SMB Advisory Council a Model for the Industry (ScreenWerk)
Greg Sterling: Yelp Small Business Advisory Council is probably the smartest single thing that Yelp did on the merchant side. It not only generates product suggestions it provides Yelp a perpetual focus group to test ideas. And it creates good will. Google and others have done roadshows and periodic SMB surveys and focus groups. But as far as I’m aware nobody has put together a sustained advisory group like this.
Five Stars Hits 1.3 Million Check-Ins, Emerging As A Quiet Giant In Customer Loyalty (TechCrunch)
Five Stars, which makes an all-purpose customer loyalty card and web platform that people can use at multiple different retail locations, has now processed more than 1.3 million check-ins, the company’s co-founder Victor Ho says. These check-ins have occurred across 250,000 users in the 700 or so retail locations in which Five Stars is active.
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