Famous Footwear Integrates Mobile App With Digital Wallet, Rewards
As shoppers grow more accustomed to using their smartphones to research products and search for coupons while shopping in-store, retailers are being forced to introduce their own branded mobile apps just to keep up. Famous Footwear is one of the latest retailers to jump onboard, with a mobile app that integrates with the company’s rewards program and provides shoppers with features meant to improve the in-store shopping experience…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Real-Time Recs, First Data (Re)Launches POS
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… With Real-Time Recommendations, Foursquare Checks Into Google And Apple’s Turf (ReadWrite)… First Data Quietly Buys Payments Startup Clover; Launches Point Of Sale Platform For Merchants (TechCrunch)… Google Now Cards Invade The New Google Maps (SearchEngineLand)…
Study: Digital Ad Revenues Grow As Mobile Accelerates
Internet advertising revenues surged in the first half of 2013, reaching $20.1 billion on continued growth in the mobile sector, according to new study commissioned by the IAB, and conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mobile revenues, which include both smartphones and tablet media, more than doubled in Q1 and Q2, growing from $1.2 billion in 2012 to over $3 billion this year…
Nokia Finding New Life In Location Services, Connected Car
With its device business offloaded to Microsoft, Nokia has turned its focus to its services business, headlines by its location and commerce platform, HERE. Street Fight caught up recently with Nokia’s VP of connected car, Floris van de Klashorst, to discuss the opportunity the auto market presents the local marketing industry, the challenges facing developers, and the business case for auto and local tech…
Street Fight Daily: PayPal’s (New) Way To Pay, AmEx Links To TripAdvisor
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… PayPal, Aiming For Retail Ubiquity, Adds One More Way To Pay (ReadWrite)… Encouraging the Reviewers, Honestly (New York Times)… Google Moving Staff From Search To Its Payments Business In A New Push For Google Wallet (Business Insider)…
Constant Contact Rolls Out New Features For Contact Management Platform
Constant Contact has upgraded its contact management platform, integrating the platform with its suite of online marketing tools. Additions to this platform include the ability to monitor growth tactics as well as enabling small businesses to expand their engagement with a “did not open” email report…
6 Tools Merchants Can Use to Clean Up Location Data
For 42% of adults, search engines have become the primary tool for finding local merchants and service providers. But what those consumers don’t always realize is that much of the information they’re finding can be incorrect or out of date. Here are six platforms helping merchants fight back by cleaning up their location data…
Hyperlocal Site Xtraxtra.com Re-launches With Focus on Non-profits
Four years after launching, Massachussetts-based xtraxtra.com has re-launched with a focus on benefiting local non-profits and charities. The partnership between the hyperlocal website and non-profit organizations allows it to reward them for bringing in more traffic to the site, while simultaneously generating sponsorship and advertising revenue…
In Push to Measure Mobile ROI, Marchex Beefs Up Call Analytics
Marchex, the publically-traded call analytics firm, has released two new products this morning aimed at improving its ability to attribute calls to mobile actions and to determine the actual quality of a call. The move comes as a number of advertising technology firms have launched new attribution services in recent months, scrambling to measure return on investment for an increasingly interested, but skeptical, brand advertiser…
CardFlight Raises $1.6 Million In Seed Round
After launching a private beta of services in May, New York-based CardFlight has raised a $1.6 million seed round to expand the company’s mobile payments platform led by venture capital firm, ff Venture Capital. CardFlight, which provides apps and tools for large and medium-sized merchants, allows developers to incorporate in-person card payments into their own app…
Aisle411 CEO: Retail Will Be the Biggest Opportunity for Indoor Location Tech
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…
As Digital Media Gets ‘Horizontal,’ It Acts More Like Local Businesses
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…
LBMA Podcast: DoubleDutch, WordLogic Reach, and Gap’s New ‘Three Screen’ Strategy
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..
In Search of the Checkout Pixel for Local
Until recently, the “last mile” offline had been considered the most challenging step to solve for. But today, it’s increasingly where most of the action is happening. Consideration starts online, but picking up the sushi or the TV, or getting the bridal party fitted, occurs offline — and that involves not just more steps, but also more room for attribution. What was opaque previously is now fertile ground. The race is underway to plant flags at every step and, to make things interesting, with each flag planted consumer behavior is changing…