Bezos Might Get His Delivery Drones Sooner Than You’d Think

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If Amazon really wanted to get unmanned delivery aircraft into our skies by the end of the decade, maybe Jeff Bezos could set up a series of challenges, working with DARPA. They could perhaps use U. S. government facilities like simulated urban environments on bases as contest venues. The FAA could chip in with providing specific guidance on how to make drones urban airspace legal for commercial purposes. Bezos could underwrite the contest. All IP created would remain the property of the participants…

Getting Drones to Do Our Hyperlocal Bidding

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Drones are the perfect last-mile delivery vehicle for small loads. Ultimately, I envision a future where the drones do all the local delivery and put the brick-and-mortar shops on much more even footing with Amazon and other larger providers. Why would I use this service? Because if I can buy from people that I have a personal relationship with and enjoy the same frictionless commerce and zero hassle, I will do it much of the time…

Apple May Have the Hardware, But Google’s Winning Hyperlocal

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The hyperlocal interface will overwhelmingly revolve around a mobile experience with advertising and commerce tied to location and in-the-moment activities or sentiments. By ceding that real estate to Google with a sub-par user interface and experience, Apple is handicapping its future efforts to earn a significant chunk of that market…

Guns, Money, and a Data-Driven Hyperlocal Wire Service

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A data-driven wire service would — through a cooperative model or other collaborative form of consumption — help pool the costs of complicated technology development and integration across numerous parties while yielding scalable, customizable results. Put the wired in wire service and let the database masters rule the new media universe…

2013: The Revenge of the Merchant

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Next year, merchants will start to gain the upper hand in online marketing. That gain will come from lessons in the consumer market, where simple UI and UX have become paramount for success and sophisticated filtering has given way to three-click processes.

How E-hail Apps Like Uber Could Impact the Hyperlocal Ecosystem

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It’s entirely conceivable that fast-growing ranks of Uber users would not be averse to other commerce offerings that could be paid for through the phone app. In fact, these users are probably even more used to the idea of paying over the phone than people who use Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook, neither of which has achieved wide adoption or even viral growth…

Hyperlocal Video Finally Comes of Age

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Hyperlocal video has, until now, been basically an oxymoron. The local television stations push out a decent amount of video but it has a metro rather than a hyperlocal focus. Patch.com and other hyperlocal news networks have done a bit of video, but it remains expensive to produce and comparatively hard to monetize at lower traffic levels. This is why a platform like Glocal looks really, really interesting…

2012 Election Points to Hyperlocal Future in Politics

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Election coverage at the local level is going to grow in importance., Here’s why: The shift from air attack to the tech-enabled ground game means that, in all likelihood, the era of declining voter turnouts are over, in my opinion. With growing turnouts come a more broadly-engaged electorate not just on political matters but on local politics that constitute the true bread-and-butter issues for many towns and small cities…

Yahoo Shouldn’t Be So Quick to Turn Away From Local

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Local offers Yahoo one of the few great markets where no obvious winner has emerged. Yes, Google owns Maps, Android and local search. Meanwhile Apple is moving to lock up the mobile local search segment (including voice recognition with Siri). But neither has really owns local content yet…

Prognosis Positive for Small-Town Newspapers?

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We all know that small papers have suffered far less than major metros in the advertising bloodbath. And talk to anyone in a small town and these papers continue to have tremendous relevance. Small papers have mostly slashed extras costs, if they ever grew bloated in the first place. And today, more than ever before, the tools for easily putting a small-town paper on the Internet have become incredibly simple…

Why Wall Street Should Be Paying Attention to Hyperlocal Analytics

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The correlation between directional trends and sales trends appears to be quite strong. That’s great for marketers — but could be pure gold for Wall Street or for just about anyone trying to analyze how a company is doing on a month-by-month or week-by-week basis. In the future, hyperlocal could become not just a way to understand customers but a way to invest smarter and way to level the information playing field…

Hyperlocal Sites Making a Church-and-State Mistake?

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Hyperlocal news sites are struggling to earn money. In part, that’s because they have imposed the artificial burden of a full church-state separation (ads / news) like the New York Times and other top-flight pubs. In an ideal world, this separation works. But in small town papers or small papers covering hyperlocal areas, church and state will never be separate – and never have been.

While SMBs Focus on Social, Online Reviews May Have More Impact

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If they have a choice between social media marketing and better customer service or a better product, small businesses may in fact be better off focusing on the product rather than the marketing push. You can have the best Twitter patter and the finest Facebook page — but a half-star rating change on Yelp because you failed to flip that burger in time or didn’t make eye contact with a customer might ultimately have a bigger effect on the bottom line…

Why Are Local Search Results Polluted With Bad Content?

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Really good local is half Q&A, half search and includes enough activity and ratings and comments to provide more than temporal relevance. But many sites that come up high in searches have few ratings, and don’t provide me with particularly useful or relevant information. And there is rarely a social graph overlay…

As Social Media Hype Wanes, Appeal of Hyperlocal Remains

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While social media is here to stay, the market shares a lot more with the online advertising segment than, say, the SaaS subscription business. Social media is only as sticky as its user base and only as attractive as it is fresh. I am sure that there are real benefits to tapping a social graph for sales. But I am becoming more sure that those benefits are incremental and evolutionary, rather than a step change…

New Klout Further Breaks Down Social Influence, Still Needs to Get More Local

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Klout was gracious enough to put me on the beta list for their new version and I spent the better part of Tuesday trying it out. The revision is still in beta but should go out to the entire Klout userbase shortly. My impressions were largely positive, although I still reserve judgement on the utility of Klout. Putting my hyperlocal hat on, I’d like to see impact from even more social graph inputs such as FoodSpotting, for example, and Yelp — also tagged to geography…

Uber’s Ice Cream Stunt and the Future of Get-It-Now Local Commerce

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With instant delivery, the local advertising market comes alive all of a sudden. Because now huge chunks of commerce where Amazon has stomped out mom-and-pops now becomes viable again because, at least for now — Amazon can’t get it to you same day, if you ab-fab-gotta-have-it-now-now-now. This trickles down into new reasons for mom-and-pops to, you guessed it, advertise online…

Advice for Mayer: Make Yahoo the Local King of the ‘Internet of Things’

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Local and mobile are two areas where Yahoo could shore up its business and, over time, dramatically improve its results. And if it plays the game well, it might be able to shift from a portal to a more dynamic provider of useful things for a hungry, mobile, social Web populace…

Twitter Loses Significant Local Audience in Cutting Off LinkedIn

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In the purely hyperlocal sense of the word, LinkedIn is not like a Patch.com or a Foursquare. But, like Facebook, it is one of the primary filters though which people view social graph data. And social graph data, by definition, is local to some degree. Twitter’s decision to exclude the network from its API risks giving up on sizable growth opportunities…

As Content and Commerce Merge, Gilt Comes Out Ahead

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Gilt Groupe gets that shopping and magazines (or what used to be magazines) are rapidly merging. Rather than make an nod to editorial with stupid puns and obnoxious copy (not naming names, but), Gilt took a different approach, hiring journalists or writers with expertise or knowledge in the field. And they gave those writers a mandate to create useful content that not only plugs the wares but also, equally, is useful and interesting…