Gilt City’s Richardson: Aiming Offers at the Local Elite
Most online ventures aimed at local markets tend to cast a wide net — targeting content or offers to a wide swath of consumers based solely on their location, and pulling sponsors and advertisers from local merchants. Gilt City, the localized offers arm of Gilt Groupe, has taken another route, targeting only the very wealthiest consumers in a handful of around the country with pricey-and-luxurious member offers and and events (featuring brands that aren’t necessarily local in nature)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Conquering “local” remains one of the largest opportunities on the Internet today, and it seems as though Twitter’s unique position has gone largely unnoticed, writes Victor Wong of PaperG. “If Twitter chose to focus more on location, higher user engagement and even monetization would likely follow.” (TechCrunch)…
OpenTable, the restaurant reservation Web site, will offer 30 percent off some dinner reservations through a new partnership with Savored, a start-up that offers daily deals for high-end restaurants. (New York Times/Bits)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
We&Co is a new iPhone app that is designed to connect patrons with the people that work at the businesses they visit. The app is designed to let users give thanks to their favorite service professionals. (Mashable)…
With the rise of location-based check-ins, there’s suddenly lots more data that marketers want to parse through to make sense of how consumers are interacting with their brands. MomentFeed is looking to sort through that data to help marketers better tap into location-based, social networking. (socaltech.com)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon Inc’s rapid growth has attracted rivals and regulators, a twin threat to the largest online daily deal company as it gets ready for an initial public offering. (Reuters)…
A former LivingSocial sales guy says the industry is setting itself up for an “implosion and a major shakeout.” (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
When reporters are in the field with their smartphones and they have a story to tell where both photo and location are vital, a stream of Flickr photos imported into a Google Map will do the trick. (10,000 Words)…
When it comes to national distribution, the majority of daily deals sites are in less than 10 big markets. Just under 20 percent of daily deals players are in a single market, while 69 percent of sites are in between 2 and 9 markets, (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
American Express is showing it’s got designs on being a big player in the deals space. The company is unveiling a partnership with Facebook and the introduction of a new social platform called “Link, Like, Love,” that will bring American Express deals to Facebook users through their social graph. (GigaOm)…
Geolocation platform Geoloqi, which uses persistent location tracking to trigger notifications tied to real-world places, has received a $350,000 investment from multiple backers. The company is building a means of integration with location based social networks like Foursquare that goes beyond what they offer today. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Placecast President: Increasing Relevance With Location-Aware Ads
Placecast is a location-based mobile ad company that uses “geo-fencing” to help brands extend offers to consumers in the vicinity of their store. The company says it “has pioneered the first fully integrated platform solution for device manufacturers, local directory companies, and mobile operators to easily integrate and monetize location-based information from virtually any source.”
Hyperlocal Ad Marketplace Local Yokel Media Launches
Digital media vet Dick O’Hare has announced the launch of Local Yokel Media, an ad network that claims to be the “first hyperlocal online ad marketplace specializing in monetizing hyperlocal ad impressions.” The company’s technology allows local and national advertisers to target online audiences via aggregated inventory on hyperlocal news and information sites…
Street Fight Daily: 07.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Yelp now has over 20 million reviews, up from 10 million in March, 2010 (and 17 million in April). The reviews bring in the visitors, and visitor growth tracks pretty closely with the growth in reviews. Yelp hit 53 million visitors in June, according to its own stats. (TechCrunch)…
Connecticut law-enforcement officials are looking into whether Groupon is breaking consumer-protection laws that prohibit gift cards from expiring. (Wall Street Journal)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Over the past six months, daily deal sites such as Groupon, Living Social and Gilt Groupe have attracted more than $1.69 billion in venture capital and other investments. Globally, there are more than 3,000 total daily deal companies, including more than 1,000 in China, more than 900 in Europe, and more than 600 in South America. (Daily Deal Media)…
Groupon has filed new S-1 from for its IPO where it is looking to raise at least $750 million. The daily deals site has added new underwriters Williams, RBC, Loop, Citadel, JPMorgan, Allen & Co, BofA, Citi, Barclays and Deutsche in addition to previous underwriters Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.14.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
When EveryBlock was launched in Chicago in 2007, the site’s mission was to fill people in on everything going on in their individual neighborhoods. Now, with new community features in place and a presence in 16 cities, the MSNBC-owned site is planning to expand out nationally. (American Journalism Review)…
Location-based Q&A platform Localmind has raised $600,000 in angel funding. The service differs slightly from fellow Q&A apps like Opinionaided or Locql, because Localmind’s real-time, location-based platform sits on top of existing check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. (TechCrunch)…
Local News + Google Maps + Social Media = TapIn
Location-based photojournalism platform Tackable has partnered with The California Newspapers Partnership to create an iPad app called TapIn, which allows users to view layered information (including news stories, coupons, business listings, services, and events — as well as user-generated images and video) on top of a location-aware map…
Street Fight Daily: 07.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Zaarly, which just launched an app for Android, connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place, reverse Craigslist-style, by allowing users to post what they’re looking for (beer, a massage, or an iPad), how much they’re willing to pay for said good or service, and how soon they need it. (TechCrunch)…
AT&T Interactive has announced the formal launch of in-app local ads on its mobile ad network. The rollout will allow developers to target ads based on a user’s location and potentially earn more revenue from higher ad rates. (MediaPost)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare hopes to ease its revenue problem with a series of pacts to remarket daily coupon deals from LivingSocial, Gilt Groupe and AT&T Inc. to its 10 million users. A similar deal with Groupon is also said to be in the works. (WSJ)…
Groupon made updates to its terms of service and privacy statement last weekend to reflect new ways the company collects and shares user data. Now if users opt to share their location data through Groupon Now, the company will track user location and be able to share it with several sources. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.11.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
LivingSocial, the number two player after Groupon in the booming daily deals market, has selected three Wall Street banks to underwrite its initial public offering. Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division, Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase will lead the IPO, which is expected to raise $1 billion. (PaidContent)…
More than 10,000 developers behind some of the hottest apps on the iPhone, iPod Touch and AndroidOS-based smartphones are using Foursquare’s application programming interface to tap into its location and places database, the company says. (Mashable)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Is Groupon’s idiosyncratic CEO, Andrew Mason — an accordion-playing, ever paranoid prankster — ready to move his company forward and fight off a horde of copycats? (Vanity Fair)…
Newspaper sites like Boston.com have begun to integrate SeeClickFix, a hyperlocal civic action plug-in that allows users to click on a map, report issues in their neighborhoods, and comment on reports made by others. (Poynter)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.07.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Groupon’s S-1 filing for an IPO last month certainly got a lot of negative ink. Rattled by the intense media and analyst reaction to the filing, sources said the Chicago-based company commissioned a poll of its consumers and merchants to gauge the impact. (AllThingsD)…
Two weeks ago, Foursquare announced that there were over 10,000,000 people using the service. Now the company has announced that it has over half a million merchants signed up as well. (Foursquare Blog)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.06.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Gilt City, the local daily deals counterpart of high-end flash sales site Gilt, has established a private loyalty rewards program using Facebook Groups. (Mashable)…
Foursquare released a new feature yesterday: Notifications. Unlike the push notifications for check-ins you’re used to seeing on the Foursquare mobile apps, these new Notifications focus on other activities on Foursquare “beyond the check-in.” (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: 07.05.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“Instead of telling small businesses to avoid daily deals, how about trying to understand why some small businesses are having success?” writes Vinicius Vacanti. “With that understanding, we could then educate other small businesses on how they might be able to replicate that success themselves.” (TechCrunch)…
“While location advertising may not be new, marketers can now digitally localize their ads,” writes David Staas. “The question is, how do brands win in this new world of location media?” (Mashable)…