With $21 Million Banked, Group Commerce Eyes Developing Markets
“In some ways, [the developing world is] even more fertile ground than developed markets where things are set in stone, and traditional ways of doing things have existed for many years,” says the company’s CEO, Jonty Kelt. “However, there are cultural attitudes towards purchasing online and delivery which, might be quite different in China than they are in the U.S. or Europe.”
Study: Political Campaigns Using Mobile Ads for Hyperlocal Targeting
Using hyperlocal-targeted mobile signup ads — interactive in-app ads that allow users to submit basic contact information — marketers are paying on average $0.85 -$1.00 per user signup across all swing states, and $1.33-$1.45 across key battleground states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, Colorado, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio and Florida, according to a study released yesterday by mobile ad platform Pontiflex.
$16 Billion Later, Facebook Eyes Local
If we take Facebook Offers as indication of the company’s forthcoming plan of attack in the local space, self-serve, in one form or another, will be at the core of its strategy. The company will likely invest heavily in educating merchants about self-serve advertising, and, with Offers, help teach merchants about the fundamentals of commerce-based marketing…
INFOGRAPHIC: SF, LA Top List of Cities With Socially Savvy SMBs
The study found that Grand Rapids and Oklahoma City have the highest percentage of SMBs with Facebook pages at 29% and 28% respectively. The number is a little less than half of what Borrell Associates estimated for the overall percent of SMBs that used Facebook as a promotional tool in 2011 (60.4%) and well below Merchant Circle’s figure in late 2011 (70.0%)…
Factual Adds Context to Location With New API
Factual has added deeper analytics to its compendium of location data services with the release of its new Geopulse API this morning. The API enables developers to retrieve contextual information — commercial profiles and density scores as well as demographic indicators like age, gender, and median income — for a given location across Factual’s 50-country reach.
How Big Data and Augmented Reality Are Transforming Hyperlocal
Behind the most innovative hyperlocal technology companies is likely a Hadoop cluster — an open-source distributive data framework, which allows companies to collect and analyze data at scale. Street Fight recently caught up with Cloudera’s VP of technology solutions Omer Trajman and solutions architect Patrick Angeles to discuss how “big data” is continuing to change the game in hyperlocal…
JiWire: 49% of In-Store Comparison Shoppers Check Others’ Prices
The mobile audience company that uses WiFi loading pages to connect advertisers with consumers has released its Q1 “Mobile Audience Insights Report” this morning. The big takeaway here is that the mobile device is set to play a large, and potentially disruptive, role in the brick-and-mortar shopping experience moving forward…
Foursquare’s Biz Dev Chief Decamps for Andreessen Horowitz
Tristan Walker, who pioneered some of the company’s most innovative partnerships, announced today that he is leaving the location-based social networking company. He joins Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra, who left the ecommerce startup to become an EIR at Andreessen Horowitz early last month…
Fwix Rebrands as Radius, Builds Intelligence Product for Local Sales
Fwix, the hyperlocal information play that evolved from content aggregator to place database, is rebranding as a business intelligence product called Radius. The new incarnation of the company will provide contextual data and a lead generation tool for sales forces looking to sell to small and medium-sized businesses by leveraging the place identification technology and local dataset which Fwix developed over the past three years…
Yext Infographic: 64% of Foursquare Listings Have Missing or Incorrect Info
The graphic draws from data collected through Yext’s diagnostic tool, and shows that upwards of 40% of business listings on major hyperlocal services and directories include incorrect information. Foursquare is most consistently incorrect or incomplete, with 64% of the listings in the service including an error or missing key information (like a phone number), followed closely by AOL-owned MapQuest and Citysearch at 57%…
Yipit’s Vacanti: Flash Offers Will Drive Growth of Deals Industry
During a keynote address at yesterday’s Daily Deal Summit in New York, Yipit CEO Vin Vacanti laid out a trajectory for the deals space, in which Gilt-like flash offers would drive much of the industry’s growth. “It’s not about daily deals anymore; what these companies have realized is that they’re building a user base that’s willing to consume from them,” said Vacanti.
Why TechStars’ Tisch Won’t Buy Your ‘Daily Deal’ Company
Investment interest in daily deal companies has been flat for some time, but the stigma attached to the “daily deal” has turned the classification into a scarlet letter for companies. Some of the negativity around the term is likely a consequence of the irregularities found in Groupon’s accounting. But the underlying shift stems from a simpler strategic shift in industry organization…
Loku Brings Local Aggregation Engine to Mobile With HTML5 App
As local information on the web becomes increasingly ubiquitous, look for a wave of aggregators like Loku to sprout up with personalization-focused products. In many ways, the local information ecosystem is following the trajectory that the deals space has taken over the past year: as the signal creation game consolidates with a few dominant players coming out on top, a new wave of aggregators arise to build products on top of the information layer offered by the original players…
Selling a City to Tourists Via Hyperlocal
There is an emerging opportunity for cities to subsidize hyperlocal marketing efforts through hyperlocal platforms. For example, a city agency could create a neighborhood-based promotion on top of mobile payment play LevelUp in which a visitor who shared that they say, ate lunch at a traditional tourist destination, could win a promotion to receive a free round trip train fare to a peripheral neighborhood if they ate dinner at a restaurant in the neighborhood…
Does the ‘Debt’ in Daily Deal Transactions Inhibit Loyalty?
Even forward-thinkers who speak about “commerce,” or “local commerce,” or even “e-commerce” as the next stage in digital marketing are abstracting too quickly: the industry-sparking innovation here is the use of commerce to drive customer acquisition by bringing the point of sale to the moment of impression…