Street Fight Daily: 09.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
With Foursquare having won the battle for the check in, Gowalla has undergone a serious transformation. Technically version 4.0, the new version bears little resemblance to the previous versions of the app. Gowalla is no longer predominantly a check-in service. That’s still one aspect of it, but the idea is now to focus on two key areas: travel and storytelling. (TechCrunch)…
The daily deals market is still a bit chaotic, but it’s opening up opportunities for companies that can make sense of it all. That’s true of CityPockets, which offers a digital wallet for storing past deal offers as well as a secondary market for buying and selling discounts. (GigaOm)…
Loopt CEO: Turning the Deal Around
When Loopt introduced its new U-Deals program earlier this year, our guest columnist, Doug Stephens hailed the concept as a “profound” shift in the consumer dynamic. Street Fight recently caught up with Loopt’s founder and CEO Sam Altman to talk about U-Deals, location privacy, and where he sees location-based services headed.
Street Fight Daily: 09.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A Groupon deal might boost sales but, it can also lower a merchant’s reputation as measured by Yelp ratings, say computer scientists who have analyzed the link between daily deals and online reviews. (Technology Review)…
Patch is looking for adolescent contributors from high schools — and even middle schools — as it seeks to recruit thousands of community bloggers. (Forbes)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Zagat gives Google the best local content in one fell swoop, as well as relationships with thousands of local advertisers, writes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. “Now Google can plug the best local content into its many products and have the best local search product. … This is important because local is the next big online advertising opportunity. Daily deals are just the tip of the iceberg.” (Business Insider)…
“Local is going to be big; I think everyone realizes that,” says Sameet Sinha, a senior analyst at B. Riley. “But in this sort of capital markets environment, long-term projects aren’t given much leeway, especially a project like Patch that is much more people intensive than tech intensive.” It’s just “not something that should have been undertaken by a company the size of AOL.” (PEHub)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Echoecho is a simple service that lets people request location updates from friends in their phone address book, who then can decide whether to respond with their coordinates. The company announced yesterday that it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Google Ventures and United Kingdom-based PROFounders Capital. (GigaOm)…
“It seems to me that Digital First is much more likely to solve the problem of building strong — and profitable — web-based local media than is AOL’s Patch,” writes Felix Salmon. “The first and most important reason is that local newspapers are, and always have been, the first best source of local ad-sales talent. … On the other side of the editorial divide, local newspapers are also the first best source of local news, and are generally much more respected and trusted in local communities than any cookie-cutter Patch site is likely to become.” (Reuters)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Add Groupon Inc. to the list of hot new Web companies having second thoughts about whether now is a good time to go public. The daily deals website, which is expected to fetch a $20 billion valuation upon its stock-market debut, canceled its investor roadshow and is reevaluating plans for an initial public offering in the face of stock-market volatility. (Wall Street Journal)…
Location-based services are becoming more commonplace tools for mobile users, but check-in services appear to be facing a tough road to adoption, according to new figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The organization found that 28 percent of American adults use some form of mobile and social location-based services to get directions or recommendations, or to check into a location. But Pew found that only 4 percent of adults use their phones specifically for check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla, the same as in November. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.05.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
GPS navigation services provider TeleNav has completed the acquisition of goby, a local search engine and mobile application developer. goby provides services that allows users to explore events and activities based on location. (M&A Deals)…
Nonprofit news site The Bay Citizen got a jump start to success early in its life with a unique content relationship with The New York Times that provides two pages of local news for the newspaper’s Northern California edition. (NetNewsCheck)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.02.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
While Yelp’s daily deal segment got off to a strong start, things have been getting worse ever since. So, what happened? Over the last 6 months, Yelp has been generating less and less revenue per deal as competition in the space heated up. (Yipit Blog)…
The Washington Post has decided to let the leases lapse on all but two of its local bureaus. Beginning next year, the Post has decided to end the leases on four offices in Virginia and three offices in Maryland. (Politico)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.01.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
If a private equity firm buys AOL and chops it up to sell off the parts — as is being rumored — Henry Blodget thinks Patch will be “toast.” (Business Insider)…
“While it’s easy to get into the daily deal marketplace it’s much harder to grow and sustain a daily deal business,” says Mary Song, CEO of Yuupon. (WebProNews)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“The golden age of daily deals, led by the unprecedented growth of Groupon, seems to be coming to its end,” writes Ben Parr. “That’s not to say daily deals won’t be sticking around for a long time — clearly there is a business in it — but when two major players withdraw from the space and its biggest player experiences a 50% traffic decline, it’s a clear sign that the daily deals market is no longer in its heyday.” (Mashable)…
A little over a year after Gannett and Yahoo teamed up on local ads sales primarily for the publisher’s 81 community newspapers, the two are extending their partnership to include all of Gannett’s 19 local TV stations. (PaidContent)…
Managing the Data Infrastructure Behind Hyperlocal
As more and more location-based apps and services pop up, one of the major issues that developers at these companies face is the need for accurate, updated, geo-coded information about all of the businesses out there. Data provider Factual is kind of a clearinghouse for the data sets that these developers need…
Street Fight Daily: 08.30.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local reviews network Yelp is preparing to cut staff and “scale back” its one-year-old Yelp Deals service. About 15 sales staff currently working on the Deals service are getting redeployed to other parts of the organization; another 15 will remain working on the service, and the number of offers sent to users is “unlikely to grow.” (PaidContent)…
By 2015, small and medium-sized businesses will spend only 30% of their marketing budgets on traditional media with the rest going to digital and online media, according to BIA/Kelsey. (NetNewsCheck)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is getting out of the daily deals business after four months of testing, a move that may ease some competitive pressure on industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. (Reuters)…
The global location-based advertising market will reach $12.8 billion by 2017, according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts. (Press Release)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local business reviews site Angie’s List filed for an IPO yesterday. The company will raises as much as $75 million. Angie’s List offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web. (TechCrunch)…
Yipit’s data report revealed substantial shifts in the daily deal space occurring over the past month: Daily Deal industry revenue declined 7% in July in North America’s largest markets. Groupon’s revenue declined 4% while LivingSocial’s revenue declined 18%. (Yipit Blog)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Amazon.com is rolling out its daily deals offerings in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. One thing AmazonLocal can do, which Groupon and other deals sites cannot, is promote still more deals on Amazon itself. (New York Times/Bits)…
Local news remains – oddly – one of the final frontiers not yet conquered under the Internet’s mighty dominion. But its time seems to be arriving, and experiments abound. (American Journalism Review)…
Harnessing Geo-Location Data to Profile Places
PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall talks about how his company’s technology collates geo-location data sets to give profiles of specific places. By tracking and deciphering patterns of foot traffic, mobile searches, and even weather data, he says his company can give advertisers and merchants a deeper understanding of the opportunities around them.
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is killing off Places. To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. (TechCrunch)…
Group Commerce, which sells a software platform to let publishers host their own daily deal applications, has acquired geo-location startup Socialight. The Socialight team and technology will be put toward fleshing out Group Commerce’s mobile strategy. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Placecast’s ShopAlerts service, which delivers retailer and merchant offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones, has announced its integration with mobile smartphone apps. (TechCrunch)…
With millions of Americans carrying GPS-enabled smartphones around all day, mobile marketers dream of using their locations to serve them targeted ads. But recent studies show that consumers and advertisers aren’t yet ready for location-based advertising to take over our touchscreens. (Poynter)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Imagine if Groupon starts instructing its sales force to start focusing on opportunities other than restaurants, spas, massages and pilates classes. Theoretically, the company could leverage its enormous international subscriber base to venture into offering deals for groceries, household items and other goods regularly purchased offline. (TechCrunch)…
“Patch is AOL’s last, best chance to build a growth engine,” writes Maxwell Wessel. “Investors shouldn’t be calling for AOL to back off the business. They should be calling for AOL to double down — not by increasing Patch’s $150M+ yearly cash burn, but by increasing commitment. ” (Harvard Business Review Blog)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare announced new features on Thursday that allow check-ins at events, like concerts or movies, instead of just the places where those events are happening. The company said the new features will simply formalize the existing behavior of its users. (New York Times)…
Groupon has not only faced questions about its controversial accounting practices, but is now also having to respond to questions from members of Congress about its privacy policies. (AllThingsD)…