Street Fight Daily: LivingSocial a ‘Stronger’ Company, Factual Founder’s Past
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
LivingSocial a ‘Better, Stronger’ Company, Says Grotech’s Don Rainey (Washington Business Journal)
“The hype pendulum has touched on both extremes at this point,” says Don Rainey, one of LivingSocial’s longest sitting board members. “We have hit the most positive, we’ve hit the most negative, and we’re swinging positive right now. This is a better, stronger LivingSocial with a great deal of potential.”
Locu Adds Yelp to Its Growing List of Publisher Partners (Street Fight)
The company has announced a new partnership with local reviews and discovery service Yelp. The partnership, which follows previous deals with OpenTable and CitySearch, means that Locu’s 15,000 local merchant customers will be able to distribute their location, coordinates, hours, and menus to Yelp with real-time updates.
Why The Man Who Already Changed The Internet Forever Is Trying To Do It Again (Business Insider)
In 2003 Gil Elbaz, sold his company Applied Semantics to Google in a deal that would lay the foundation for the search giants AdWords product. A decade later, the entrepreneur is back in the startup game as founder of Factual, a data company aimed at collecting, and making accessible, as much of the world’s data as he possibly can.
7 Mapping Tools for Hyperlocal Publishers (Street Fight)
Including an interactive map alongside a local news story is an excellent way for online journalists to enhance context, relevance, and reader engagement. Here are seven platforms that reporters can use to quickly create interactive maps to go alongside their hyperlocal stories.
5 Reasons Foursquare Is Losing The Social Local Mobile Revolution (ReadWrite)
With a influx of new cash, Foursquare is shifting its business focus away from check-ins toward selling its trove of user location and behavior data to businesses, ad exchanges and others. This may be the company’s last, best chance to succeed. Here are five primary reasons why Foursquare failed to capitalize on the disruptive market potential of social-local-mobile — despite its early mover advantage.
Publisher Dave Harte Weighs in on the Quest for Hyperlocal Success in the U.K. (Street Fight)
“I think we’re in a place where the larger media organizations are in the second cycle of trying to rethink hyperlocal, and in the meantime there have been some smaller innovators, often ex-journalists themselves, who are starting to develop out of it,” says the Bourneville Village publisher. “The key still remains having people in place to sell ads.”
Mobile Payments Growing but Still More Hype than Reality (Internet2Go)
Greg Sterling: Mobile payments — as in buying things in a retail store with a mobile device — still appear to be years away. A recent survey conducted by the IAB showed that there were pockets of mobile-financial activity: people capturing coupons, buying digital content and paying selected bills via smartphones. But the road to in-store mobile payments adoption is much longer.
The ‘Smart’ Trend in Hotels (New York Times)
Hotels around the world are using technology in new ways, with the goal of speeding up or personalizing more services for guests. Instead of the staff at the front desk offering advice on where to go for dinner, guests may be lent an iPad loaded with maps and suggestions for local restaurants and sightseeing.
Why the Star Tribune Fell for Programmatic (Digiday)
Local and regional papers like the Star Tribune have suffered a vicious cycle of declining ad revenue leading to layoffs of sales people, which means even more declines. Enter programmatic buying as a way to generate some much needed revenue. Publishers like the Star Tribune, embrace it.
Putting Yelp in Their Rear-Review Mirror (Los Angeles Times)
Many business owners say the reviews on the crowd-sourced website are too self-centered and not trustworthy. They’re angry, worried or confused about the filter the site uses to screen entries.
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