Street Fight Daily: Square CEO’s Gift, Groupon Expands Point-of-Sale
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Square’s Dorsey Returns 10% of his Shares (Fortune)… For Groupon, The iPad is its New Passport to Global Markets (Washington Business Journal)… UrbanSpoon Hires New Top Exec, Hopes to Emerge from Restaurant Discovery Pack (PandoDaily)…
DemandForce CMO: There’s No Limit to Where We Will Want to Go
If Google’s acquisition of Waze was the biggest exit in local tech over the past few years, Intuit’s buy of Demandforce was arguably the most important. Since shelling out nearly half of a billion dollars for the retention marketing software provider, the company has quietly executed on a strategy to position itself an integrated solutions provider for small businesses…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Raises Another $35M, eBay’s Strategy for Offline Commerce
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.…. Foursquare Raises a $35 Million Round and Adds DFJ’s Schuler to the Board (AllThingsD)… EBay’s Strategy for Taking On Amazon (New York Times)… Nextdoor Talks Growth, Now Being Used In One In Six Neighborhoods In The US (TechCrunch)…
Why Small Local Sites *Must* Have Multiple Revenue Streams
“If there is a ‘model’ for community news, it’s finding the right mix of diverse revenue streams that are best suited to the particular conditions of a news organization’s local market and journalistic mission,” says Jake Batsell of NewsBiz. “But that diversity of revenue is critical, because news outlets depending on a single stream of income are leaving themselves vulnerable…”
Case Study: Caribou Coffee Amps Up Holiday Sales With Mobile Gift Cards
In an effort to enhance Caribou Coffee’s mobile marketing capabilities, and spur a boost in gift card sales during the important holiday shopping season, vice president of marketing Michele Vig launched an eGift card initiative in early November. Now, customers who purchase eGift cards online can send their gifts to friends via email. Recipients can then redeem their gifts by showing their smartphones to a cashier or printing the gift card at home and handing over a paper printout…
Street Fight Daily: Moovit Raises $28M, Local’s Next IPO
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Moovit Raises A $28M Sequoia-led Funding Round For Its Public Transit Service (PandoDaily)… Local Heroes: The Public Companies of Tomorrow (AllThingsD)… Hey Uber, Lyft Is Growing Faster Than You (TechCrunch)…
Geo-Unicorns: Will Local Spawn More Billion-Dollar Startups?
At the Street Fight Summit in New York a couple of months ago, I moderated a panel that looked at the “Billion-Dollar Opportunities in Hyperlocal.” Our thesis in putting the panel together was that the personalization made possible by location-based technologies was still in its early stages of evolution, and that the “geo-web” will be spawning many of the billion-dollar exits that later-stage VCs crave…
JiWire Partners With Datalogix to Ramp Up Mobile Targeting and ROI
“Where people spend their time and where they spend their money are two very powerful signals for understanding audiences in the context of their daily lives,” JiWire President David Staas told Street Fight. “Our partnership enables marketers to leverage the power of mobile targeting, measurement and insights across hundreds of rich audience segments.”
In-Store Tracking — Privacy Intrusion or Communications Problem?
As the web continues to expand beyond the desktop, it is infusing itself into the parts of our lives which we’ve traditionally viewed as offline and out of reach, creating an uneasiness among consumers. The question for the technology community is whether users’ fears represent a material resistance by a weary market or natural lag between their concern and the recognition of the value of location tracking which these services will eventually produce…
5 Mobile Ad Tools for Very Small Businesses
Why should the big guys get to have all the fun? When it comes to mobile advertising, most vendors are still targeting their offerings at major brands and brick-and-mortar chains. However, a growing number of hyperlocal vendors are beginning to develop mobile ad products aimed squarely at the small business community…
Street Fight Daily: Patch Not Dead Yet, Amazon Buys Square Competitor
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Amid Postmortems, AOL Says Patch Is Still Alive (Businessweek)… Amazon Reportedly Buys Mobile Payments Startup Gopago, Working On An ‘Ambitious’ New Project (TechCrunch)… Customers Out in the Cold Balk at Uber Surge Pricing (New York Times)…
Mobile Local Media: The State of the Union
The end of the year is upon us and that means top ten lists, year-in-reviews, and predictions galore. Sort of in that spirit but a slightly different format, I’ve been organizing the way I look at the mobile local world into a few buckets. So as this month’s column, here’s my state of the union in mobile local media…
New Ebook Looks at Instagram as a Local Channel for Marketers
Instagram has evolved since its debut in 2010 to become a true local channel, one in which brands can build deeper, more authentic connections with their most devoted fans. A new ebook from MomentFeed, “The Year of the Instagram Strategy,” delves into this topic and provides strategies and real-life examples of how brands like JCPenney, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and Disney have successfully tapped into the power of Instagram…
How Hyperlocal Publishers Can Leverage Native Ads
Depending on your perspective, so-called “native advertising” is either a bold new frontier or the re-naming of a tried and true form of advertising — the advertorial. But either way, it is a tool that should be in the kit of every hyperlocal publisher because native ads can deliver content from the native (local) perspective that hyperlocals share with their readers…
Street Fight Daily: AOL Winds Down Patch, Twitter Tests ‘Nearby’ Feature
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… AOL Chief’s White Whale Finally Slips His Grasp (New York Times)… Twitter Test Shows ‘Nearby’ Tweets (Wall Street Journal)… Amazon Said To Launch Pantry To Take On Costco, Sam’s (USA Today)…
How Can Low-Revenue Indie News Sites Boost Their Game?
“The ability sell digital ad space efficiently is, in general, becoming an absolute necessity to compete for advertiser dollars,” says Kenny Katzgrau, a co-founder of Broadstreet Ads. “Local ad inventory cannot be an exception. More importantly, the ad inventory of beloved community news sites has a special value that isn’t being optimally exposed to buyers, big or small.”
Could Patch Find New Life as a SaaS Platform for Local Publishers?
At this point, the best path forward for Armstrong to realize his noble goal of delivering high-quality community news might just be to simply throw open the gates and recast Patch as a publishing platform for small and medium-sized publishers…