Street Fight Daily: Google Breaks Up Mapping Unit, Boston Phoenix Shuttered
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Google Breaks Up Mapping and Commerce Unit (Wall Street Journal)
CEO Larry Page is separating the company’s mapping-and-commerce unit, sending its former head, Jeff Gruber, to the Google X division. With the separation of Google’s mapping and commerce unit, mapping products, which many Web users access via the Google search engine, will become part of the company’s search team, also known as “knowledge.”
5 Ways to Pitch Hyperlocal to Madison Avenue (Street Fight)
In a Street Fight webinar Thursday, Mitch Bernstein, Director of Client Strategy at Neo@Ogilvy discussed the value of hyperlocal from a media buyer’s perspective, highlighting its ability drive conversions in a still-nascent mobile space and provide marketers with deeper insights into their consumer’s path to purchase.
Boston Phoenix to Close; Portland, Providence Papers Remain Open (Boston.com)
In a poignant signal of a fast-changing media landscape, The Boston Phoenix sent out a short and simple tweet Thursday afternoon: “Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck.” With that terse dispatch, the ground-breaking, Boston alternative weekly, which only six months ago reinvented itself from tabloid newspaper into glossy magazine, put a final punctuation mark on its announcement that its current issue, dated March 15, will be its last.
Openings & New Hires at Angie’s List, Topix, Google, Signpost and more… (Street Fight)
One hyperlocal publisher expands (Topix) while another contracts (The Daily Voice). Public company Angie’s List moves on from its CFO, JiWire hires a former Yahoo exec, and the head of The Local Search Association decamps (after 25 years) to head up The Association of Directory Publishers. Plus, find gigs at PayPal, comScore, AOL, LinkedIn, Newsle, Amazon and more.
Ok, So Maybe Greed Is Groupon, But The Much Bigger Issue Is The Product (TechCrunch)
Ingrid Lunden: As daily deals continue to trundle along, many of Groupon’s newer services are offered outside of the U.S. (and international makes up more than half of Groupon’s revenues today). And if Groupon does manage to crack markets like mobile commerce, beating out the many incumbents plus companies like Square and PayPal, it will be some time before these services begin to yield big rewards.
Why Companies Like Groupon, Yelp And ReachLocal Aren’t Dominating The Local Space (Forbes)
Payam Zamani: The local newspaper and the yellow pages have been slowly dying for more than a decade, leaving small businesses and merchants few options for local advertising. In its place, Internet companies like Groupon, Yelp, and ReachLocal arrived on the scene to reinvent local advertising online – but none has proved to be a digital nirvana for local businesses, because these solutions do not provide a simple and scalable way to connect with consumers who have a real-time need for their services.
Why Local Retailers Should Be Using Open Graph Markup (Search Engine Land)
Paul Bruemmer: When Facebook launched Open Graph Search in January, I initially didn’t make the connection between search engine marketing, other retail marketing (couponing, loyalty programs, etc.), search engine developments/innovations and a retailer’s bottom line. However, I’ve recently learned that Facebook has been testing a few hidden, unknown features behind-the scenes.
What Would the Perfect News Application Designed for Google Glass Look Like? (PaidContent)
Devices like Google Glass are going to change the way that we consume the news and other information — how will media companies have to change the way they think about the news and how it is constructed?
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — WillowTree (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan report back from DX3 Canada. Meanwhile, ShopSavvy transitions to a retail app and U-Haul brings augmented reality to Detroit. Plus special guest Blake Sirach, VP Design for WillowTree — the makers of the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center mobile app experience.
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