Street Fight Daily: Yelp Settles ‘Best of’ Suit, Groupon Fights for Survival

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Village Voice, Yelp Settle ‘Best Of’ Trademark Suit (PC Mag)
Village Voice Media and Yelp have come to an agreement over alleged trademark infringement. Less than a month after VVM filed a complaint against the reviews site regarding its use of the “Best of” phrase in various cities, Yelp has agreed to stop using the trademarks.

Groupon Fights for Its Life as Daily Deals Fade (Reuters)
Groupon last week reported another quarter of disappointing earnings as its core business stagnated, sending its stock down 30 percent to an all-time low of $2.76. Critics say the torrid growth that enabled Groupon to go public at $20 a share just a year ago was fueled by merchants buying into a new type of marketing that they didn’t fully understand.

Learning From a Failed IPO (Venture Beat)
Rocky Agrawal: Shortly after the company’s IPO, the stock tanked. Marketing costs were threatening the very existence of the company. Wall Street had pretty much written it off. That sounds a lot like the story of Groupon, but the story I’m talking about today is that of Varsity Books, a high flier in the first dot-com boom.

Sites Offer Small Firms Short-Term Deals (The Wall Street Journal)
A new crop of websites promise to help small businesses cut costs—by offering them coupons. Small companies sign up for the sites, such as OrderWithMe , Rewardli and GroupPrice , and get email offers of limited-time deals, usually lasting a week or so. The sites negotiate those discounts with vendors that want a simple way to connect with lots of potential customers.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand… Pennies? SMB Social ROI Platform SumAll Adds Instagram support (PandoDaily)
Plenty of companies offer enterprise grade analytics solutions, such as GoodData, Omniture, and Google Analytics Premium, but few in the SMB space compare to SumAll’s comprehensive yet accessible platform. Instagram in particular is becoming an increasingly important marketing channel for brands, as it becomes the social network of choice for more and more consumers – particularly the younger, more socially engaged crowd.

Jumptap: Targeting Both Place And Time Critical To Mobile Ad Effectiveness (Media Post)
As Boston-based ad network Jumptap highlights in its latest MobileSTAT metrics report, hyperlocal targeting has to account for time of day — even time of year — to get the most bang for the buck. Using traffic across its large network of publishers and mobile ads served each month, Jumptap finds that all mobile platform use spikes in the evening, but mobile phones are used at about 9% above the hourly average during the noon to 4:00 p.m. period and 16% above average use between 4:00 and 8:00 P.M.

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