Street Fight Daily: Waze’s Advantage, Location Data Drives Mobile Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
As Mapping Costs Rise, Waze’s Volunteer Army Will Give It an Edge (AllThingsD)
Waze CEO Noam Bardin says that the crowdsourced mapping company is going to have some key advantages versus much bigger Google as consumers become increasingly more demanding about the quality and accuracy of their mobile mapping applications. Waze’s key advantage, he said, will be its 44 million users and 70,000 volunteer map editors who form the backbone of its ability to constantly update and validate its maps.
CityGrid CEO: Passive Location Data Will Be ‘Transformative’ for Hyperlocal (Street Fight)
In May 2011, Street Fight spoke with Jay Herrati, the former CEO of CityGrid, about the fragmented nature of the local online advertising marketplace and the future of the then-exploding Groupon. Recently, we caught up with Jason Finger, Herrati’s replacement, to discuss some surprises over the past two years and the coming “verticalization” of the hyperlocal industry.
Location Information to Make Mobile Ads More Valuable (CNET)
Hyper-targeted advertising based on your location is coming to mobile phones and could finally bring money into the mobile advertising market, say experts at the All Things D mobile conference here Monday. In separate interviews, executives talked up the importance of users’ GPS location information to help tailor advertising.
Why Broadcasters Need to Embrace Digital Hyperlocal (Street Fight)
Walter Sabo: There are lots of hyperlocal marketing opportunities are being missed daily by traditional broadcast media. This isn’t because stations don’t want the revenue — it’s because they are so understaffed and under-funded, it’s simply difficult to devote resources to learning new technologies. But this may be exactly the right time to start investing their (very small) resources to upgrade mobile apps and improve online capabilities to tap hyperlocal dollars.
Foursquare Needs Check-ins to Build Strong Local Search Engine (Mobile Marketer)
“The one downside to [the recent update] that no one seems to be talking about is that moving away from check-ins as the central feature will lessen the data on which it’s building these recommendation and local discovery features,” said Michael Boland. “They have over three billion check-ins to work with now, but we’re talking about data that needs to be constantly refreshed to stay relevant.”
Hyperlocal Startup Street Fight Owns the Block, Hits Profitability on 2nd Anniversary (Upstart)
Two years ago, Laura Rich and David Hirschman founded an online news and interview site called Street Fight to cover companies in the burgeoning “hyperlocal” space, including media, retail, and location-based technology startups. Now, they’ve reached profitability, but are in a whole new landscape.
14 Ways Facebook Homes In On Local Search (SearchEngineLand)
Andrew Shotland: With the announcement of Facebook Home, Facebook has pushed the accelerator on its local mobile strategy, which was already in high gear, thanks to Facebook Local Search and its big brother, Facebook Graph Search. By the end of 2013, I expect the social media giant to further strengthen its hold as the #2 local search app; so, it might behoove local marketers to get a handle on exactly how their businesses are showing up in Facebook these days.
The Guardian’s New GuardianWitness App Opens Up Reporting to the Masses (TheNextWeb)
Guardian News & Media, the Guardian Media Group division responsible for publishing Guardian.co.uk and Guardiannews.com in the US, has announced a new platform enabling the public to submit content directly to Guardian journalists. GuardianWitness lets users share videos, pictures and text directly with the Guardian’s editorial team, as well as peruse contributions from other GuardianWitness users.
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