Street Fight Daily: Yelp Buys Qype, SMBs Warm to Facebook
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp Buys Website Qype for $50 Million to Grow in Europe (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Local Businesses Start Warming Up To Facebook Ads: 300K Tried Promoted Posts, 75K Were New Advertisers (TechCrunch)… Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Preparing for an Online Christmas (AllThingsD)…
Shining a Light: ByteLight Goes After ‘Holy Grail’ of Indoor LBS
Forget about the “last mile,” this Cambridge, Mass.-based company plans to close the last meter, with light-based technology to target shoppers within a a few feet. Street Fight sat down with CEO Aaron Ganick after the dust had settled on their recent funding announcement to find out whether his product could change hyperlocal commerce — or if it was just technology searching for a problem…
Case Study: Clothing Boutique Collects Customer Reviews
Online reviews allow e-commerce retailers to establish themselves as authentic and trustworthy in the eyes of consumers, but getting customers to leave feedback when they purchase products online isn’t always an easy task. Reve Boutique owner Meital Benaroya says she uses Zuberance to identify and reward her biggest “brand advocates.”
Topix Expands Emphasis on Local Races in Runup to Election
With just a couple of weeks remaining until the election, hyperlocal news aggregator Topix is going all in — covering the smaller elections that don’t get national press or, for that matter, any press at all. In July, the company recruited David Marks from Politico to be editor-in-chief of its local politics coverage. Last week, the company launched a new offering that gives a granular look at local races. Street Fight recently caught up with Topix CEO Chris Tolles to talk about his site’s deepening focus on local politics…
Place Off: A Week in the Life of the Mobile Local Revolution
A couple columns back, I covered the collision of big data, mobile and local (please refrain from acronyms… “BiDaLoMo”!). That covered some location analytics players like JiWire and Sense Networks. But since then, the action has picked up. In the last week alone, I’ve had in-depth conversations with others defining this space including Placed, PlaceIQ, and Telenav…
Getting ‘Real-Time’ Into Hyperlocal Advertising
We’ve seen a demand to not only bring local advertisers back into the mix on mobile and online advertising, but a need to provide more relevant and more timely information within those ads. This is because consumers crave “new” at a pace never possible before now – and this desire shows in the response rates measured in multiples of a standard static banner ad…
Sense CEO: SMBs Must Reach Consumers at Decision-Making Points
“The mobile experience is a very personal interaction with the consumer.” says Sense Networks CEO David Petersen. “It’s one that you can interact with consumers and lots of times, when they’re on the go. I think it’s less formal than online. I think it’s a great medium for connecting with consumers and I think today it’s also exceptionally cheap.”
SFD: DNAinfo.com Heads to Chicago, Slow Adoption of Mobile Payments
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology...
Hyperlocal News Site DNAinfo.com Readies November Launch in Chicago (Crain’s Chicago Business)…
Mobile Payments: A Solution in Search of a Problem? (CNET)…
Google’s Woes Show Mobile Isn’t Just a Facebook Problem (Wired)…
True Innovation in Local News Organizations Still Lacking
News sites need to innovate around their core competencies by spending time understanding their customers (advertisers and consumers) and what problems they can solve for them. The solutions should be a good fit for the organization and should be something that they are uniquely positioned in the marketplace to provide…
Broadcastr’s Lindenbaum on ‘Putting the Web Back Into the World’
“The expectation for discovery of content is one that continues to rise,” says the company’s co-founder. “At a certain point people are expecting content that is perfect for them to just already be there for them. So, the more factors we can take into consideration in order to deliver on those expectations, the better we’re going to be. Location is one of those things”
Openings & New Hires at Constant Contact, Facebook, Groupon & More
Ever more personnel changes at Groupon, a new hire at Constant Contact, plus shifts across the industry in business development, sales and product management. On the move this week: Dalip Tyagi, Shagun Vatsa, Joshua Scherman, Sean Smyth, and more. Openings at Yext, Yahoo, Ebay, LinkedIn, Manta and more…
Street Fight Daily: Patch To Profit in 2014, Google Expands Promotions
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… 
AOL’s Patch ‘in Line to Make a Profit’ (The Guardian)… Google Launches Promotions On Google Shopping, Enables Distribution To Google Offers & Maps On Android, Too (TechCrunch)… The Future Of Location-Based Marketing Isn’t Foursquare (Marketing Land)…
Sac Press’s Ilfeld: More Talk About Reader Revenue at Hyperlocals
Two major online news industry conferences were held recently — BxB Summit 2012 in Chicago and ONA12 in San Francisco. I asked Ben Ilfeld, COO of the Sacramento Press and an inveterate news industry conference goer who was a participant at both meetings, for his take on what took place at both…
Placecast Launches Card-Linked ShopAlerts for Smarter Geofencing
A new product from Placecast hopes to change the way you receive mobile discount offers. The company is launching a new “Card-Linked ShopAlerts” service that uses new technology to combine location, retailer, and credit card information to give consumers discounts at local stores and chains such as Starbucks, L’Oreal, and The North Face…
Transaction Overview: Telenav Acquires ThinkNear
ThinkNear provides Telenav with a product that can drive near-term advertising revenue and is well suited to be integrated with Telenav’s turn-by-turn direction capability. The ThinkNear team and their mobile advertising knowhow are also an important addition to Telenav’s engineering and product organizations…
Street Fight Daily: Shopkick Rebuilds App, LocalVox Raises $7.4M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Shopkick Totally Recreates Its Shopping App. Gamification Out, Design and Content In (Pando Daily)… LocalVox Raises $7.4M for One-Stop Shop for Local Marketing (GigaOm)… Buy Reviews on Yelp, Get Black Mark (New York Times)…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…
The Role of Directories in the New Local Ecosystem
Marissa Mayer’s announcement that Yahoo would be moving its focus away from local search, along with some other significant factors in the developing local ecosystem, calls into question the continued viability of a robust marketplace of local directory and search sites. Here are a few harbingers of a potentially more consolidated future…