Street Fight Daily: Mobile Ad Spend Jumps, Web Only Gets Physical

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

U.S. Mobile Ad Spending Jumps to $4 Billion (eMarketer)
U.S. mobile ad spending is growing faster than previously expected, due in large part to the success of so-called “native” ad formats like Facebook’s mobile newsfeed ads and Twitter’s Promoted Products. eMarketer expects overall spending on mobile advertising in the US, including display, search and messaging-based ads served to mobile phones and tablets, to rise 180% this year to top $4 billion.

Information Wants to Be Free, but Local Data Is Currency (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: The sizable overlap between consumer-generated information and enterprise control is experienced every day in the world of local search. Though few local search companies could exist without licensed data, once that data gets inside their walls, it becomes a foundation upon which consumer-generated data adds value to a service.

Once Proudly Web Only, Shopping Sites Hang Out Real Shingles (The New York Times)
After years of criticizing physical stores as relics, even e-commerce zealots are acknowledging there is something to a bricks-and-mortar location. EBay and Etsy are testing temporary stores, while Piperlime, the Gap Inc. unit that was online-only for six years, opened a SoHo store this fall.

Spindle Tries to Pre-empt Local Discovery With Social Alerts (Street Fight)
Last week, social discovery app Spindle rolled out a place-based alerts system designed to inform users of interesting and relevant social media updates from local businesses around them. Street Fight recently spoke with Spindle CEO and cofounder Pat Kinsel about about what makes Spindle’s value proposition so vital.

Garmin Integrates Foursquare and Glympse with Mobile Apps for Non-Creepy Location-Sharing on the Go (The Next Web)
Garmin, that household name in the in-car navigation field, is integrating Foursquare and Glympse into its StreetPilot for iPhone app and Navigon iPhone and Android apps. The Foursquare integration lets users search for locations, find trending venues and look for any nearby deals being offered on the platform.

Geolocation App Life360 has 25 million users, A Way to Make Money (Venture Beat)
Life360, an app that helps families keep track of one another’s locations, will have 25 million registered users by the end of the year. That puts it within striking range of another location-centric app company with a much higher profile, Foursquare, which hit 25 million users in September, 2012.

2013: The Revenge of the Merchant (Street Fight)
Alex Salkever: Next year, merchants will start to gain the upper hand in online marketing. That gain will actually come from lessons in the consumer market, where simple UI and UX has become paramount for success and sophisticated filtering has given way to three-click processes.

Size of Community Doesn’t Determine Quality of Journalism (The Buttry Diary)
Steve Buttry: Of all the journalism topics I have addressed in this blog, I may be most qualified to address the question of how the size of a community relates to the quality of the journalism. And I can say emphatically that the size of the community and frequency of print publication do not dictate the quality of the journalism.

Why an Apple-Foursquare Partnership Would Make Sense (GigaOm)
Matthew Ingram: The bottom line is that Apple needs to add as much value to its Maps app as it possibly can, in order to keep people using it so that it can improve its data and become more competitive with Google. Adding Foursquare’s local discovery information might not make up for the lack of good geographical data within Apple’s Maps, but it could get more iPhone users to spend time in the app, and that in turn would help generate better data.

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