Street Fight Daily: Patch To Close 400 Sites, eBay Launches Retail CRM

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

PatchArmstrong Confirms “Hundreds” Of Layoffs At Patch, 400 Sites Shuttered Or Partnered Off, And A New CEO (TechCrunch)
In a call Armstrong held with the Patch team today, he explained that “AOL is going to be running the show” at the restructured Patch, and that Armstrong will be running the show along with new CEO Bud Rosenthal. 400 Patch sites will be closed or partnered with outside sites over the coming week as part of the changes being made at Patch to try and turn things around, Armstrong explained on the call, but also reassured the Patch staff that the company is behind the initiative.

Bundling Local News in With Amazon’s Shopping List (Street Fight)
Patrick Kitano: Combining local news with shopping is the perfect entree to courting SMBs into Amazon’s affiliate program, which surprisingly accounts for 40% of Amazon’s total revenues. That replaces expensive local sales teams with affiliate support call centers. The promise to SMBs is simply inclusion in the shopping lists. Amazon with news is no longer just a purchase destination, it becomes part of daily living.

eBay Launches Salesforce-like Platform For Merchants (TheNextWeb)
eBay is doubling down on serving local businesses. Recognizing that brick-and-mortar stores aren’t going away, eBay also announced the launch of its Retail Associate Platform to empower the company’s “foot soldiers” to build better relationships with customers. Akin to what you might find on Salesforce.com, the platform gives associates a complete insight into customer history, product information, and social media.

Hyperlocal Social Ads Need to Be ‘Current, Relevant, and Contextual’ (Street Fight)
Topsy is one of a handful data analytics startups that are helping brands make sense of the deluge of data flowing through social networks. Street Fight recently caught up with Jamie de Guerre, the company’s VP of product, to talk about the intersection social media and location, and how marketers can leverage location data to make social media marketing work.

Google Directs ‘Relevant Ads’ to Maps (CNet)
Google is following up on the recent roll-out of its updated Google Maps app for Android and iOS devices with a new local ad view and click type. Google wrote in its blog post announcing the ads that the new display makes them “more attractive for users and more effective for advertisers,” although it’s not hard to imagine user problems emerging from placing ads in the same location in the app as non-advertised location and navigation information.

Groupon’s Stock Surge: Mobile Is A Treasure Chest, If You Can Just Unlock It (PandoDaily)
A year ago, the mobile Web was seen as something of a conundrum, a magical box of treasures with a lock clasped on it that nobody seemed to know the combination of. In the past few months, however, things have changed quickly. Companies are showing significant progress in monetizing their growing base of mobile users.

E-Commerce Still a Sideshow at 5.5% of Retail, M-Commerce $4.7 Billion (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: Earlier today comScore released e-commerce estimates for the second quarter of 2013. The firm said that online retail spending in the US (excluding travel) came to just under $50 billion in Q2. E-commerce, though big and growing, remains essentially a sideshow. Internet-influenced offline spending is the main event.

Location Analytics Company Placed Tops 100M Places Measured Daily, From 100K Opt-In Location Sharers (TechCrunch)
Location-based analytics pioneering startup Placed is seeing good progress with its opt-in location surveying program, which it helped to boost with the introduction of an affiliate program back in March this year. Since January, Placed has seen those participating in its mobile panelist program increase 190 percent, with daily measurements growing 228 percent.

LBMA Podcast: Foursquare Sells Data, iInside’s Jon Rosen (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode: Foursquare sells your data – finally! Apple uses location to conserve your battery power. Inglot creates the ultimate video shadow box display. Coupons are making their post-recession comeback. Chuck Martin talks the mobile web retail push in our mobile minute. Jon Rosen of iInside is our special guest.

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