Street Fight Daily: How Google Maps Lost, Groupon’s Risky Initiative
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology
Apple Maps: How Google Lost When Everyone Thought It Had Won (Guardian)
Apple’s maps have turned out to be a hit with iPhone and iPad users in the US – despite the roasting that they were given when they first appeared in September 2012. But Google – which was kicked off the iPhone after it refused to give Apple access to its voice-driven turn-by-turn map navigation – has lost nearly 23m mobile users in the US as a result. That is a huge fall against the 81m Google Maps mobile users it had there at its peak in September last year.
How To Use Location To Find Black Friday Shoppers on Mobile (Street Fight)
Retailers in the U.S. will debut their Black Friday deals on Thanksgiving this year, in an attempt to expand the annual buying binge, which accounted for $11.1 billion in sales last year, by a few more hours. For one-time events where consumers often break habitual patterns, a consumer’s proximity to a store may not be the best indicator of intent. But a deeper look into where shoppers go in the past may tell a more compelling story for marketers, according to new research from location analytics firm Placed.
The Risky Groupon Initiative That Beat Back LivingSocial Perhaps Once and for All (AllThingsD)
Jason Del Rey: Since Groupon’s earliest days, there was always one constant: It would almost never take less than 30 percent of the proceeds from the daily deals it sold on behalf of its small-business clients. But, last year, Groupon’s management caved, according to current and former Groupon employees. The thinking among its local sales teams in the U.S. was simple: Let us drop margins temporarily, and we’ll grab the best customers from LivingSocial and other competitors, as we’ll eliminate the price argument we sometimes lose business on.
Selling Search to Small Businesses (Street Fight)
Paul Wicker: It’s no secret that national brands are investing heavily in local marketing and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are feeling the increased competitive pinch. But while national brands will likely continue to dominate TV, print and radio advertising, digital marketing offers SMBs a rare opportunity to compete with national brands on equal footing.
American Express Teams Up With Mightybell To Connect Small Businesses With Each Other Locally (TechCrunch)
Mightybell, the platform that allows communities to learn and share together in groups, has scored a major partnership this morning that hopes to change this for small businesses across the country. American Express OPEN and Mightybell have teamed up to create a forum, which you can access here, for local businesses to rally and organize events with other local businesses and customers in their neighborhood for Small Business Saturday on November 30 and beyond.
Google Quietly Testing Offline Store Visits Tracking (MarketingLand)
Greg Sterling: Google is reportedly using location in the background (on Android and iOS) and its database of business locations (my guess) to determine when people visit stores. However, Google is not the only company trying to connect mobile ad exposures to store visits. In fact Google is late to the party.
Wi-Fi Networks Can Be Used For Spying, But That Doesn’t Mean They Should (GigaOm)
Kevin Fitchard: According to reports, the Seattle Police emergency services Wi-Fi network has the ability to identify any Wi-Fi device emitting a signal within range of one of its 160 wireless access points and record its location. A controversy is brewing because of this revelation, but the reality is that any Wi-Fi network can do this. In the world of wireless networking complete anonymity is simply a luxury we don’t have.
How Local Businesses Can Overcome Obstacles To Mobile Conversion (SearchEngineLand)
According to a new study, approximately 82% of those surveyed purchased products they researched in-store, while 45% said they bought products they researched on their desktop or tablet. These results beg the question, what is it about smartphones that is inhibiting consumers from following through with making purchases?
Kopo Kopo: Building The “Square of Africa” Amid Terrorism, Monopolists, And Huge Opportunity (PandoDaily)
Kopo Kopo has about 10,000 merchants on its Square-like platform that piggybacks off the monstrously successful African mobile payments service, M-Pesa, and is signing up about 1,500 new ones a month. A new round of funding will allow Kopo Kopo to continue to scale and expand beyond just Kenya to surrounding countries like Tanzania and Rwanda.
Yelp: We’re Second Only To Google In Local Data Quality (SearchEngineLand)
Yelp has long maintained that the company has one of the best (if not the best) local data sets out there. Recently, Yelp decided to take matters into its own hands and benchmark itself and the quality of its local data against the competition. The companies that performed the best in the test are Yelp and Google, with Google being the overall winner (by a nose).
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