In OpenTable Deal, Signs of Deeper Convergence in Travel and Local
Two recent acquisitions by Priceline and TripAdvisor offer an early look into a logic that could drive a more comprehensive consolidation of the travel and local technology sectors. Many of the structures built to help visitors navigate new cities — and implicitly for marketers to reach tourists — might quickly become obsolete…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Gets Into Mobile Payments, Pandora’s Local Revenue
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Get Paid: GoDaddy Links With PayPal, Dwolla, Stripe For A Mobile & Web Payment Service (TechCrunch)… Pandora: More Than Half Our Revs Will Be Local In A Few Years (Marketing Land)… Taking Another Plunge into Digital News (USA Today)…
Street Fight Daily: Tech Helps Small Business, Inside Uber’s War Machine
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Startups’ Modern Tools Help Small Merchants Compete (New York Times)… Inside Uber’s Political War Machine (DailyBeast)… Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages (Atlantic)…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Charges Fees, Intuit’s M&A Machine
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Foursquare Will Start Charging the Heaviest Users of its Places Database (TheNextWeb)… With Its M&A Train Rolling, Intuit Looks to Prove the Big Company Can be a Good Home for Small Firms (Pando)… Apps Now Account for Half of All Digital Media Time (MarketingLand)…
Despite Many New Local News Sites, ‘Media Deserts’ Are a Stubborn Reality
More than 120 newspapers have shut down in the U.S. since 2008. Surviving papers have been forced to cut their local news budgets in the implosion of old media ad revenue. Hundreds of digital community news sites have been launched in the meantime, but journalist and educator Dr. Michelle Ferrier from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University says that millions of Americans have ended up in a “media desert.”
Is the U.K. Moving Ahead of the U.S. in Location Targeting?
If the American Revolution were fought based on technological powerhouses alone, we’d win in a heartbeat. Yet some advertisers in the U.K. are pulling off the sorts of campaigns that we only dream of here. It’s easy to chalk that up to the comparatively small size of the market, but that’s selling ourselves short. There’s no good reason that we can’t roll out the same location-based ad tech that has proven so successful in the U.K…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Plans Grubhub Competitor, Google Moves to the Car
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Is Quietly Launching A Local Takeout Service To Rival Seamless And DeliveryHero (TechCrunch)… Google Moves to the Car with Android Auto (Recode)… Uber: The Great Disruptor of Pizza Delivery? (Fortune)…
How Retailers Can Bridge the Gap With Beacons
Using beacons, content can be delivered to a consumers’ mobile device that augments the shopping experience and bolsters the relevancy of the merchant’s real-time communications based on the consumer’s location and real-time behavior. As a result, the messaging can be perceived by the consumer less as “marketing” and more as “helpful.”
8 Strategies for Reaching Out to Online Influencers
Rather than sitting idly by while influencers dictate what’s being said about their businesses on social media and review websites, merchants are beginning to reach out to these social media users on a personal basis. Here are eight strategies that marketers should consider when reaching out to influencers online…
Street Fight Daily: ZocDoc Raising $152M, FAA Bans Delivery Drones
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… ZocDoc Raising $152 million at $1.6 Billion Valuation (Fortune)… FAA Bans The Use Of Drones To Deliver Packages (TechCrunch)… RelayRides’ Altered Future Points To A Ride Sharing World Dominated By Lyft And Uber, Not Zipcar (Forbes)…
Shopkeep Founder: Micros/Oracle Deal Won’t Help SMBs
With its acquisition of Micros, Oracle is affirming its commitment to making, selling, and continually repairing outdated technology that has far outlived its usefulness. This approach, while wasteful, works for big companies with million-dollar IT budgets — but small businesses neither want nor need technology that sits in a room and takes up space…
At Indochino, A Retail Model Built to Order
When the founders of Indochino, a startup that sells custom suits online, began to drum up strategies to enter brick-and-mortar retail, they found some surprising fat in the model: the store itself. What they came up with in response is an ephemeral alternative to offline selling that draws on some of the flexibility of ecommerce while retaining the experience of a physical presence…
5 Self-Serve Solutions for Creating Location-Targeted Mobile Offers
Locally-targeted mobile ads are expected to reach $4.5 billion in the U.S. this year — an increase of $1.6 billion in the last year alone. As merchants search for creative ways to take advantage of location-targeted advertising, many are turning toward self-serve solutions for creating location-based mobile promotions…
Street Fight Daily: McDonald’s Orders Ahead, Oracle Puts Micros On Menu
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… McDonald’s Is Secretly Testing Its Own Order-Ahead And Payments App(BusinessInsider)… Oracle Puts Micros on Menu as Restaurants Eat Up Software (Bloomberg)… Google Is Getting Into Domains. Should GoDaddy Worry? (Mashable)…
Local’s Sleeping Giants; A Tale of Two Keynotes
We’re at the height of keynote season, and in the past month Apple, Amazon and Google, have all carted out their wares. Local was understated at each, but below the surface were huge implications…