Street Fight Daily: Yelp Surrounded, Mobile Advertising’s Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Is Yelp in Trouble? (The Wall Street Journal)
Shares of Yelp have fallen about 7% since Facebook announced its new search tool Tuesday. True, fears of Facebook may be overdone since it will take a while for the social network to build up sufficient depth of content to compete as an effective local search tool. The threat of Google, though, is tough to overstate.
Fragmentation in the Device Landscape and What It Might Mean for Local (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: We know that the great mobile shift has arrived. This does not mean the end of the laptop era entirely, as any user of processor-intensive software like Photoshop knows. But it does mean that we are using our devices in ways that have become heavily context dependent.
Is Location-Based Advertising The Future Of Mobile Marketing And Mobile Advertising? (Forbes)
Steve Olenski: It’s as if every marketer and advertiser collectively sees the future is in mobile marketing and advertising but more often than not does not know how to best go about maximizing this increasingly burgeoning space. Location-based advertising offers a solution.
Openings & New Hires at Advance Digital, Neustar, Factual, Yellowbook, Apple and More (Street Fight)
A new big-name CMO arrives at LivingSocial to shake things up, while a senior technology exec departs there. Brad Moore leaves Tribune Company. And now that the new year is fully upon us, employers are posting openings for a range of jobs, from digital account director to director of client services, as well as for SEO manager and manager of publisher solutions. Find your job now!
Foursquare’s New Interactive Map Plots Its Evolution From Local Check-In Site To Global Utility (TechCrunch)
The company has released a detailed, interactive and gorgeous, topographical map, plotting out 500 million check-ins from the past three months. There are quite a few things you can glean from this, perhaps the most interesting being that Foursquare isn’t a product that’s simply popular in San Francisco or New York City.
Why Free Is Bad: Businesses Should Be Happy To Pay For Key Services (ReadWriteWeb)
Mike McDerment: Everything free is good, right? Worng. There are big downsides to getting things for free that are poorly understood and rarely considered, and upsides to paying for the things that really matter — especially for small businesses.
Is There a “Big Win” for the Payment Startups? (AllThingsD)
More than a decade after PayPal’s introduction to the market, a new crop of startups, including Square and LevelUp, have entered the space with hip technological payment solutions. However, the problem is that none of these companies are filling a hole the same way PayPal did, and there’s no reason to believe that any of them can unseat the entrenched monsters dominating the market.
5 Mobile Retail Trends to Drive Conversions in 2013 (Urban Airship)
Brenna Hughes: Retailers are increasingly searching for innovative ways to target this group with the goal of driving conversions, but where they often go wrong is by creating forced, unnatural solutions that require users to change their behavior. Retailers should implement solutions that complement user behavior – in other words, create a mobile experience that is adapted to users rather than the other way around.
Zagat Restaurant Reviews Added to Place Summaries in the Google Places API (The Next Web)
The Google Places API has been updated today to include Place Summaries, which will include “curated expert reviews and ratings” based on user feedback. The new version of the API will also show establishments listed and recommended by Zagat, a restaurant-rating group also owned by Google.
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Waze, Spun (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan have nine different stories, including their bewilderment at Waze; why they think 4sqTrigger is onto something; and UrbanAirship’s progress with Tello. Also Scott Lindenbaum of Spun talks about using a goat for location-based marketing.
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