Street Fight Daily: Twitter Brings Local Trends to Mobile, Square Poaches PayPal Exec

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

twitter-bird-blue-on-whiteTwitter Updates Its Apps with New Trends Locations (TheNextWeb)
Less than a month ago, Twitter expanded the number of locations serviced by its Trends product by more than 160 countries and cities. Today, the company brought the feature over to its Android and iOS apps, letting Google and Apple users access the localized data that will tell them what people are talking about right now.

Yelp Finds Antidote to Mobile Burn in Bundled Inventory (Street Fight)
Shares of Yelp rose 10% in after hours trading Wednesday evening after the company reported strong top-line growth in Q1 2013. The reviews site grew its revenue by 67% year-over-year to $46.1 million in Q1, cutting its net loss in half to $4.8 million from $9.8 million a year earlier. The bump came on the back of a 81% jump revenue from local businesses as well as successful monetization efforts in nascent international markets.

Square Hires An Exec From PayPal To Form Payments Partnerships With Retailers (TechCrunch)
After bringing on a new global business lead from Google, Square is making another key executive hire today. The payments company is announcing that Alex Petrov, a former PayPal exec, will be Square’s Vice President of Partnerships.

In Counting Actual People, Hyperlocals’ Smaller Traffic Numbers Can Be Big (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: With local merchants looking at more and more digital marketing options in their search for customers, community news sites have to be aggressive in selling themselves to potential advertisers (and raising revenue that will pay for editorial and other improvements). How can they make the most of their traffic numbers, which are much lower than those at most commerce-based sites?

Brownstoner Founder Jonathan Butler’s Venture-ing into Queens (New York Daily News)
Marking his first foray into the borough, the owner of Brooklyn blog powerhouse Brownstoner Media and hipster mecca the Brooklyn Flea is acquiring Queens website QueensNYC.com, Butler told the Daily News. Local tech company BlankSlate is selling the real estate and lifestyle website, which will be renamed Brownstoner Queens and will become a tab on the Brownstoner site.

Case Study: Roofer Uses Local Marketing Tools to Boost Call Volume (Street Fight)
Muth Roofing owner Chad Muth wasn’t convinced he should be relying solely on Angie’s List as a way to advertise and promote his roofing business. “At one point in time, Angie’s List was driving our business. Almost 40% of our call volume was coming from Angie’s List, which is great, but it’s also kind of scary because it’s like putting all your eggs in one basket,” said Muth.

A Community News Co-Op, Aiming to Build a Replicable Model, Moves a Step Closer to Reality (Nieman Journalism Lab)
Dan Kennedy: Unlike one-off projects such as the New Haven Independent or The Batavian, the intention behind the The Banyan Project is that it be replicable. Its founder, Tom Stites, hopes the Banyan Project will be able to offer a “co-op in a box” to communities looking to start their own cooperatively owned news sites.

Placed Launches Analytics Product to Make Local Ad Targeting Smarter (Street Fight)
Placed, a two year-old startup based in Seattle, has spent the last two years passively tracking the physical movements of over 70,000 smartphone owners who chose to share their location with the company. Today, the venture-back firm is opening that data to marketers, launching a Nielsen-like ratings service called Placed Insights to help advertisers intelligently buy location-targeted advertising.

Hyperlocal Media is Coming in From the Cold (Journalism.uk)
Damian Radcliffe: Over the past year, the UK’s nascent hyperlocal scene has witnessed a step change in activity and recognition from policy makers and funders alike. And while it may be too early to tell, the increasing penetration of smartphones may also mean that 2012 to 2013 was also the year in which UK hyperlocal media consumption began to become more mainstream.

How Google is Melding our Real and Virtual Worlds with Games, Apps … and Glass (Venture Beat)
Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality. But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you’ve got something interesting.

7 Takeaways From The Local Search Association Annual Conference (Search Engine Land)
Neg Norton: Local search companies should work closely with businesses to create compelling digital content that will help them stand out among their peers and generate new leads. A steady stream of content — whether images, videos, or tweets about the business’ products and services — will help local businesses build engagement with consumers, a critical component to ensuring that businesses have a strong presence in search.

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