Street Fight Daily: Target Focuses On In-Store, Nokia’s Hyperlocal Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Target Tightens Focus On Mobile As In-Store Shopping Tool (Mobile Commerce Daily)… Sizing Up The Nokia That Remains, HERE Business A Bright Spot That Gains More Platform Freedom (TechCrunch)… Who Needs Foursquare More: Google, Yahoo Or Microsoft? (MarketingLand)…
Street Fight Daily: Microsoft Eyes Foursquare Investment, Nokia Unveils Connected Car
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Microsoft Vying With American Express for Stake in Foursquare (Bloomberg)… Nokia Unveils Its Connected Car Platform: Here Auto (GigaOm)… Apple Sued Over ‘Find my iPhone’ In New Patent Campaign Against Location Apps (PaidContent)…
Infographic: Breaking Down The Local Stack
A stack of technologies has emerged to quietly reinvent the way business and consumers interact locally. One by one, technology firms have recreated the way we find, buy and retrieve goods and services locally as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers. Siloed early on, these industries are starting to coalesce, working together to form layers in a coordinated Local Stack.
BlockAvenue Pivots From Utility to Media, Becomes CO Everywhere
Tony Longo and Dan Adams, the founders of Block Avenue, are doubling down on media. Two years after launching the service as a tool to rate locations, the company has rebranded as Co Everywhere, and released a mobile app to help people explore the world around them. Users can pick a featured place, or outline a geography on a map, and peruse content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and a other sources that come from within the area…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp-Google Rivalry Heats Up, A Hard Sell Gone South
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Google’s Local Business Is “Really Struggling,” in “Constant Chaos,” Yelp CEO Tells Charlie Rose (AllThingsD)… When the Hard Sell Goes South (Blumenthals)… Navigating The App-Data Explosion: Localytics’ Raj Aggarwal (ReadWrite)…
With New Ad Product, Placed Connects Dots for In-Store Visits
Slowly but surely, technology firms are finding direct links between the ads we see on mobile devices and the places we visit in the real world. Placed has partnered with xAD to launch a new product called Placed Retention, which uses the company’s panel of participating consumers to determine whether a mobile user who was exposed to an ad appeared within a store days later…
Brands Hope to Use Mobile to ‘Conquer’ Competitors’ Locations
Mobile-local ad network xAd has released a new report that shows a substantive increase in interest from brands in so-called “geo-conquesting,” the technique of targeting messaging to users at or near a competitor’s location. During the second quarter, nearly one third of every lat-long targeted campaign run on the network included some form of geo-conquesting strategy…
Keeping Customers Coming Back Through the Power of Data
Gone are the days where the only record of a visit to a local business was a credit card transaction, loyalty punch, or cash receipt. Now our activities become user profiles that help real-world businesses to track us — as much to retain their customers as to make that customer experience better suited to the individual and less frustrating…
Street Fight Daily: Patch To Close 400 Sites, eBay Launches Retail CRM
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… AOL Won’t Deny The Rumor That Patch’s CEO Is Out After Just Two Months On The Job (Business Insider)… eBay Launches Salesforce-like Platform For Merchants (TheNextWeb)… Google Directs ‘Relevant Ads’ to Maps (CNet)…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon May Expand Deliveries, In-Store Tech Heats Up
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Amazon Is Going To Start Delivering Groceries To New York City In 2014, Says Analyst (Business Insider)… In-Store Tech Is So Hot Right Now: Sephora Acquires Fragrance Software Startup Scentsa (AllThingsD)… Smartphone Owners Turn to Local TV News Apps (eMarketer)…
Groupon Names Lefkofsky CEO as Business Rebounds
Groupon’s search for a new chief executive ended Wednesday evening with a familiar name: Eric Lefkofsky. During an earnings call Wednesday, the company announced that the firm’s long-time executive chairman, who has shared the leadership duties with Ted Leonisis since the company fired founder Andrew Mason in February, will take on the full responsibilities as CEO. “Everything we do is with local in mind,” Lefkofsky stressed during the earnings call…
AOL’s Armstrong: 1/3 of Patch Sites Currently Have ‘Viable Business Model’
On an earnings call Wednesday, AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong said that the remaining 600 or so sites are split between properties that are on their way to viability, and sites that will likely not reach profitability by the end of the year. The news comes as AOL works to bring the closely-watched hyperlocal media network to run-rate profitability by the end of 2013, a commitment that Armstrong says the company still plans to meet…
With New Yelp Partnership, ReachLocal Puts (Some) Eggs in SaaS Basket
Less than a month after Yelp rolled out a partnership with Delivery.com and Eat24 to bring online ordering to the reviews site, the company announced on Tuesday the addition of ReachCommerce, ReachLocal’s newly launched booking software, to the Yelp Platform. The partnership will allow users to process book appointments with service providers, which use the ReachCommerce software, without leaving the Yelp app or site…
Why Brands Need a Local Voice on Facebook
Street Fight recently caught up with Brand Networks’ chief executive, Jamie Tedford, to discuss the evolving local opportunity for brands on Facebook, the value in maintaining both a “brand” and “local” voice on Facebook, and the need to create a more responsive (and decentralized) approach to social media…
Dongle Domination: 40% of SMBs Use Mobile Card Readers
A new report from BIA/Kelsey finds that 40% of small and medium-sized businesses already accept payments with a mobile credit card reader, and another 16% of the businesses plan to add capability within the next year. The numbers come amid an across-the-board increase in small business engagement with the digital tools, with social media and mobile advertising also taking a larger chunk of business owners time and money…
With Strong Earnings, Yelp Nears Profitability
The reviews site brought in $55 million in revenue during the quarter on a $878,000 loss, the closest the company has come to run-rate profitability since going public. The results come on the heels of a busy past few weeks for the company as it began to stake its position in a local market that’s increasingly shifting toward commerce technologies…
Behind Big Retail Brands’ Complicated Relationship With Loyalty
More and more, loyalty startups are looking beyond the SMB market, and to larger brands as a potentially lucrative market with substantially lower sales costs. But, the outcome could be more complicated than it first appears. In a recent conversation with Street Fight, Dawn Maire, creative director at Rockfish Interactive, suggested that retailers might be better acquirers than partners for many loyalty companies…
Street Fight Daily: Google Revamps Zagat, Groupon Loses Mobile Chief
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… 
Google Unveils Revamped Zagat Website, Apps (TheNextWeb)… Groupon Loses Mobile Head David Katz (TechCrunch)… New Facebook for Business Hub Launches With Tips, Tools, Case Studies (SearchEngineWatch)…
In Local Sales Effort, Foursquare Looks to Strike a Balance
Foursquare is trying to find a new path for local sales. The embattled check-in-turned-local-discovery startup has started to build out its local sales organization, focusing on a combination of technology and customer service rather than door knocking and hand-holding. This summer, the company began the challenging processes of developing a local sales effort that can reach mom-and-pop shops from New York to New Delhi…