Why a Former Gawker Editor Is Pushing Local News to National Audiences

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We recently caught up with Ratter founder A.J. Daulerio to talk about making local stories into national news, “building a tabloid about city while acknowledging the internet as the neighborhood,” and how he plans to avoid Patch’s missteps…

Thinknear Chief: ‘No Doubt’ That Consolidation Coming in Mobile Ads

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Loren Hillberg recently took over as General Manager of Thinknear at Telenav, replacing the company’s founder Eli Portnoy. We caught up with him recently to talk about the transition from the entrepreneurial stage of a business to the scaling stage, the future of mobile-local advertising, and the coming wave of consolidation…

Is Location More Than a Feature in Mobile Advertising?

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The rise of smartphones has created a wealth of location data that marketers on both the buy- and sell-side are desperate to capitalize on. But is location really more than just another targeting mechanism for mobile advertising? That was the question posed to a Street Fight Summit panel Tuesday…

Is Your MVP a Minimum Viable Channel?

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“Just because you have product/market fit, don’t raise money until you have validated your channel,” said Closely CEO Perry Evans. “We might have been able to be a successful business — but we shouldn’t have been a business that took venture capital. We couldn’t produce the return the VCs needed.”

Five Hyperlocal Startups to Watch

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At the Street Fight Summit on Tuesday afternoon, startup investor and mentor Laurel Touby quizzed five founders about their plans for world domination and developing a viable business model to support it. Here’s what we learned…

The Rise of Marketing Automation in Local’s Next Act

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Marketing automation isn’t just for the biggest companies in the world anymore. Thanks to companies like Booker, Signpost, Shopkeep, and others, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) have access to the data and the tools to reach their customers in smart, efficient ways while minimizing the hassle on the backend…

Angie’s List Reports Wider-Than-Expected Loss, Stock Tanks

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The company reported the addition of 350,376 gross paid memberships during the period, down six percent from the third quarter of 2013. Its stock price fell more than 17% percent on Wednesday, continuing an 18-month drop…

Webinar: Brands Beginning to Find Value in Local Data

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“If we can understand a person’s location and what’s going on around them, we have a much better view as to who they are and how we might be able to communicate with them,” Brett Leary, VP/Group Director of Digitas said during a Street Fight webinar Thursday…

#SFSNYC VIDEO: Scale Still Elusive for Hyperlocals, But Hope Springs Eternal

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According to BuzzMachine blogger and author Jeff Jarvis, AOL’s Patch did hyperlocal scale all wrong: “What they should have been was a sales network for local sites,” he said during a conversation with CBS Local Digital Media President Ezra Kucharz at Street Fight Summit last month. “If that existed, other local sites would have been able to start. It would have led to mass opportunity…”

Why Partnerships Are Key to the Future of Local

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The future of local lies in partnerships. That was the topic of a wide-ranging discussion between Ohad Tzur, North America Lead for Google’s Wildfire partnership program, Delivery.com CEO Jed Kleckner, and Leaf CEO Aron Schwarzkopf, during a panel at Street Fight Summit on Friday morning…

LivingSocial CEO: Our Business Isn’t ‘Daily Deals,’ It’s Ad Dollars

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“We realized with the asset base that we had that we should be able to do other things and leverage it into new areas,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy at Street Fight Summit on Thursday in New York. “How do we take the hundreds of thousands of merchants that we work with, the tens of millions of customers that we have, this big salesforce, and a technology team and figure out new ways to get customers through the doors of merchants.”

Well-Funded SocialRadar Works on App for Local Social Discovery

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In April, Blackboard co-founder Michael Chasen founded a new venture called SocialRadar, planning to build a new app that will provide real-time location-specific information about people nearby. Eight weeks later, Chasen and his team raised nearly $13 million. We asked Chasen about his quick and successful fundraise, how Blackboard informed the founding of SocialRadar, and why the world needs another social discovery app…

With $2.5M in the Bank, Trover Eyes ‘Phase Two’ of Its Photo-Sharing Community

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With 130,000 monthly users, Trover’s numbers aren’t enormous, but the community is engaged and growing. And for now that’s just fine for CEO Jason Karas. He spoke with Street Fight recently about the company’s recent fundraise, how to eventually monetize the power of passion, and the strengths of a tiny team…

Survey: 52% of SMBs Still Don’t Have a Website

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Yodle has released the findings from its first Small Business Sentiment Survey, which recently asked 306 small business owners nationwide for their perspectives on a variety of topics, and found some interesting results when it comes to SMBs and technology. According to the survey, “many small business owners are still not adopting modern technology and marketing approaches.”

5 Things SMBs Need to Know About Their Customers in the Multiplatform Era

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In a Street Fight webinar Tuesday sponsored by YP, Greg Sterling, a senior analyst with Opus Research and contributing editor at Search Engine Land spoke with Sanjay Sood, YP’s SVP of consumer platforms, about new strategies small businesses can use to get discovered by consumers in the smartphone age…

PriceGrabber Acquires Snapette

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Mobile shopping app Snapette is getting a new home. The company, which has 1.5 million users, is being acquired by e-commerce platform and shopping site PriceGrabber for an undisclosed sum. For Snapette, it’s a play for scale. The company boasts partnerships with over 200 brands and retailers worldwide, but PriceGrabber puts millions of shoppers in touch with more than 12,000 merchants and sellers, driving more than $1 billion in annual sales…

Do Hipsters Do Hyperlocal?: Bedford + Bowery Editor on Communities and Culture

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NYU’s hyperlocal East Village blog is growing up and adding a few new ‘hoods. The Local, which had covered New York’s East Village and the Lower East Side, has become Bedford + Bowery, a site that now also covers the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick. So what makes these neighborhoods — hipster havens of the highest order — a fertile proving ground for hyperlocal? We spoke with Daniel Maurer, the NYU professor who oversees the venture to talk a bit about how the project has evolved…

FiveStars Partners With Rogers in Canada, Launches ‘Vicinity’

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FiveStars and Canadian media giant Rogers Communications have launched a new local customer loyalty service called Vicinity, which represents the California-based company’s first foray into international markets….

Square’s Kimble: There’s ‘More Opportunity Than Obstacle’ in Payments Space

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San Francisco-based mobile payments company Square continues to grow at a rapid clip. Chuck Kimble, who heads up the company’s strategic partnerships, will be appearing on a panel next week in San Francisco at Street Fight Summit West, so we took the opportunity to catch up with him recently over email and find out more about how the company is planning to expand beyond its initial mandate mobile payments…

Waze Builds Out Traffic Maps to Add Context in Location

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Andy Ellwood, the company’s senior director of business development, will be appearing on a panel at Street Fight Summit West in a couple of weeks in San Francisco to talk about how the future of mapping tech plays into hyperlocal marketing. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about how Waze makes money, the vitality of context, and fighting off Google…