Street Fight Daily: The True Value Of Mobile, Twitter Opens Up
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
How $10 Million Can Lose You $250 Million (AllThingsD)
Raj De Datta: In addition to BloomReach’s internal data that show mobile can affect a desktop e-commerce transaction, research from a Deloitte study suggests that mobile can influence traditional in-store purchases by an astounding 17x. So, hypothetically, a company that loses $10 million in yearly mobile revenue that provides poor mobile experiences stands to lose $70 million from desktop revenue and an additional $170 million from in-store purchases — totaling a whopping $250 million.
Aisle411 CEO: Retail Will Be the Biggest Opportunity for Indoor Location Tech (Street Fight)
The St. Louis-based company works with large retailers and small mom-and-pop shops to use indoor navigation apps to enhance the shopping experience for consumers while allowing retailers to track a shopper’s behavior in-store. In addition to a consumer-facing app, the startup, which raised $6.3 million in September, develops white-label applications for retailers, enabling clients like Home Depot and Walgreen’s to integrate indoor navigation into their existing products.
Twitter Opens Up With I.P.O. Filing (New York Times)
Twitter revealed on Thursday just how central smartphones and tablets are to its business — underscoring the technology industry’s rapid transition to a mobile world. But despite the evidence that it is increasing its revenue from mobile advertising, the company also disclosed that it has not yet turned a profit, and has been steadily losing money, and that its user growth has been slowing significantly since the end of last year.
As Digital Media Gets ‘Horizontal,’ It Acts More Like Local Businesses (Street Fight)
Terry Heaton: Local businesses are the most suited to life in the networked world, because they already deal with people directly, and often on a first-name basis. To the extent that local businesses have learned to do this, they can teach the rest of the business world how to behave in our increasingly collaborative environment.
LivingSocial CFO On Ticket Monster: “There Has Been No Transaction” (Washington Business Journal)
Ticket Monster — a South Korean deal site that LivingSocial Inc. bought two years ago — has not been sold, nor is a sale pending, according to CFO John Bax. Bax looked to tamp down persistent rumors that LivingSocial’s biggest subsidiary is about to be cut loose.
Groupon Taps Four New Executives For Key Roles (Chicago Tribune)
Groupon on Thursday named four new executives aimed at homing in on key growth areas and spots where competitors are nipping at its heels. Robbie Schwietzer, who has been at Amazon for a decade, has been named Groupon’s senior vice president of operations. Schwietzer was most recently vice president of Amazon Prime.
MyTime Aims To Be The Amazon Of Local Services, By Replacing Receptionists (Forbes)
An upstart app called MyTime wants to disrupt that by fusing the calendars of salons, restaurants and yoga teachers with its own booking system, so that you can make appointments with all of them through its mobile app – just as you can buy a product directly on Amazon. MyTime has been on the web since February, through the site MyTime.com, but is launching an iOS app today that lets people book a service with more than 2 million.
Daily Deal Sites Help Small Businesses Score Savings (Entrepreneur)
Similar to consumer-deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, a number of business-to-business outfits leverage their large subscriber networks to broker deals with vendors and take a cut of the sales. While some of these sites specialize in segments like office supplies or tech solutions, all offer free membership, frequent deal alerts and significant savings of anywhere between 10 to 80 percent off the retail price — making the little-known sites hard to keep ignoring.
Tulip Raises $2.4M from SoftTech VC And Others To Provide Connected Online, Mobile And In-Store Software And Hardware To Retailers (TechCrunch)
Tulip Retail, which develops an end to end technology platform for in-store and online sales for retailers, has raised $2.4 million in funding led by SoftTech VC. By pulling product, customer, and transactional information into a single, cloud-based hub, the Tulip Commerce engine allows large retailers to provide a similar purchasing experience in stores, and on the retailer’s website and mobile storefronts.
LBMA Podcast: DoubleDutch, WordLogic Reach, and Gap’s New ‘Three Screen’ Strategy (Street Fight)
Welcome to episode #149. On the show: Millennial Media partners with Placed and Neustar and, boom, value is created. Meanwhile, Joingo Places launches (and we wish it would stay just above the stratosphere). Our mobile minute with Chuck Martin focuses on the future of retail search, and our special guest is Cree Lawson, founder and CEO of Arrivalist.