Street Fight Daily: 07.01.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
It is still not too late for Groupon to get back on track and succeed in China if they can implement the right strategies with focus and speed, writes Helen Wang. Someone has to change the game. (Forbes)…
Ever wonder what Groupon’s all-time, best-selling promotion was? Research conducted by data scientist Paul Butler reveals just that. (Huffington Post)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
A few months after being named COO of the Huffington Post Media Group, Jon Brod’s responsibilities are being narrowed to focus on running AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites. Brod co-founded Patch with Tim Armstrong and was CEO when it was acquired in 2009. (Paid Content)…
Location-based service advertising will grow to over one-third of all mobile advertising in four years. By 2015, location-based advertising will be $6.2 billion, according to Pyramid Research. (MediaPost)…
ReachDeals’s Razgaitis: Mobile Is a ‘Key Catalyst’ in Deals Space
DealOn, a group buying company that launched in late 2009, was always meant to be more than just a Groupon clone. The site offered deals, but it also had plans for a white label deals solution for publishers as well as an “offer exchange” which sought to “empower the deals ecosystem,” according to Rich Razgaitis, who was the company’s CEO until it was acquired by ReachLocal last year…
Street Fight Daily: 06.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“How can LivingSocial beat a better-funded competitor with more name recognition who has a 22-country head start on them?” asks Sarah Lacy. “Ironically by moving more slowly, throwing around less cash and being smarter with local hires, not pricey consultants and MBAs.” (TechCrunch)…
“You can’t just jump into a crowded local news market with a product that’s about as good as the existing ones,” writes Erik Wemple. “Even marginally better won’t get the job done. It’s got to be so much better that you can eat the lunch of legacy outlets.” (Washington Post)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.27.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
LivingSocial seems to be following Groupon’s lead in acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale. (TechCrunch)…
Could Offers become a massive new revenue stream for Google — the “second huge growth engine” that Google has long searched for in vain? SAI spoke to reps of merchants who have signed on to offer Google Offers in New York, as well as Google’s Eric Rosenblum, the lead engineer on Offers, and Google spokesperson Nate Tyler. (Silicon Alley Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.24.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
In the automotive space, the responsibility for advertising is shifting from car makers to car dealers, and that means significant boost for local media, especially online, according to a report looking at the auto category from Borrell Associates. Online is pulling ad spending from car companies and dealers at a more accelerated rate, and display is likely to remain a key beneficiary. (Paid Content)…
In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Yesterday it announced a partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers. (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Foursquare is introducing its largest partnership to date: a national deal with American Express to offer discounts to cardholders when they check in on their cellphone at certain shops and restaurants. Substantial deals like those being offered to American Express cardholders may bring Foursquare and other location-based services further into the mainstream. (New York Times)…
Foursquare simply doesn’t have the salesforce to craft the same kind of deals that Groupon can. Groupon’s deals tend to be more alluring with deeper discounts. AmEx is helping Foursquare here by sourcing many of these deals itself through its own salesforce and existing relationships with local and national merchants, but it also gets to keep all the revenue. At least for now. (TechCrunch)…
St. Louis Beacon: Revenue Beyond the Banner Ad
The St. Louis Beacon, a local Web site that covers the region, was founded in 2007 by a group of veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters who perceived a serious lack of in-depth reporting about the communities they lived in. After building up the site, they snagged a couple of grants and partnerships that made the project viable. But, like many local news sites started by high-minded journalists, the Beacon was initially all about the journalism. “They didn’t have anybody on staff who was thinking about business models or technology strategy, or any of that sort of stuff,” says Nicole Hollway, the site’s general manager, who came on board in 2008…
Street Fight Daily: 06.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Daily deal aggregator Yipit just raised $6 million in a series B led by Highland Capital Partners. The company tracks 335 active deal services in 32 cities in North America. (TechCrunch)…
Foursquare has released version 3.2 of its iPhone app. Users will be pleased to find that Foursquare has streamlined the check-in process and improved its “Explore tab,” enabling users to navigate between nearby locations that are recommended as well as trending. (Mashable)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Just-over-two-year-old Foursquare has just announced an important milestone: 10 million user accounts. The company will pass 750 million check-ins later this week, with users are now averaging about 3 million check-ins a day. (TechCrunch)…
EveryBlock, the website that collects community news and connects neighbors with each other, has hired a new president, Brian Addison, to oversee its growth and marketing efforts. Founder Adrian Holovaty remains with EveryBlock, focusing more on product than business. (Chicago Tribune)…
Localeze’s Dague: Solving the Problem of Search for Local Merchants
As online search has become such a pervasive utility in our lives, maintenance of accurate local search results has become increasingly important for brick-and-mortar businesses everywhere — as well as for the ever-growing number of location-based platforms that serve up those search results as part of their geo-located service. Localeze does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work in making sure that listings across hundreds of platforms remain accurate and current. The company monitors and manages local business identities, and authenticates local search results, making sure that business information is accurate and consistent…
Street Fight Daily: 06.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… eBay is beefing up its mobile arsenal with its first local shopping app, powered by the local shopping search engine that eBay acquired in June, Milo. (Mashable)…
AOL chief Tim Armstrong said yesterday that “certain” Patch outlets — there are 800 and counting — should be profitable by Q3 or Q4, though he didn’t offer specifics. (Paid Content)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
In explaining the relevance of its new product, Geotagger, Fwix says that “LatLong” — latitude and longitude — is going to replace keywords as the standard for online ad buys, as daily deals and mobile usage become a greater part of publishers’ traffic and revenue streams. (PaidContent)…
While Groupon may want to move its IPO forward quickly, to capitalize on the enthusiasm generated by a new wave of Internet-related stock debuts, it will likely have to wait until late summer, or possibly the fall, for its stock to be priced and trading publicly. (Marketwatch)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
According to a Rice University study, most businesses don’t feel any loyalty toward a particular daily deal site, and over the next few years daily deal sites will likely “have to settle for lower shares of revenues from businesses compared to their current levels, and it will be harder and more expensive for them to find viable candidates to fill their pipelines of daily deals.” (PaidContent)…
Groupon Inc. Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis’ venture firm is an investor in rival LivingSocial and has ties to its board, a relationship that could pose a conflict, according to corporate-governance experts. (Bloomberg)…
Fwix’s Shirazi: Layering Location on Top of the Web
San Francisco-based hyperlocal search database Fwix made news last week when it announced a new product called Geotagger that will allow publishers to tag Web pages with locations — in effect allowing them to create a layer of precise location information on top of their content, and giving them another method to index the information in that page by. The company is partnering with NBC to roll the service out onto the network’s local news Web sites. Street Fight visited Fwix’s offices in San Francisco last week and caught up with the company’s CEO, Darian Shirazi…
Street Fight Daily: 06.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Groupon’s Andrew Mason has been visiting Beijing, and is now responding to a few very obvious problems at Groupon China that seasoned observers have been noting since the group buy Web site first opened up shop in Beijing and Shanghai. (TechCrunch)… One current Patch editor, who says she was “hired as part of the 2010 end of year push to launch 750 sites,” sent a note she titled “5 Things to hate about working for Patch” — one of which is “The Patch model isn’t sustainable. (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 06.10.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… The FCC has produced a 478-page report on the state of the media in the digital age, and — no surprise — the report has found a big gap in watchdog and investigative journalism, and the local news hole hasn’t been filled by the proliferation of online news and non-profits. At the same time, the report doesn’t support any major government intiative to correct the situation. (Paid Content, Block-By Block, Nieman Lab, Romenesko/Patch)… Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi. (TechCrunch)…