The Guardian’s n0tice Launches to the Public
The Guardian Media Group has publicly launched its newest endeavor in the world of open platform media, n0tice. Access to the community publishing platform, which has been in an invite-only beta since mid-October, is live, but community participation — i.e. posting to the network — will remain limited to select users for the time being, project lead and director of digital strategy at GMG Matt McAlister told Street Fight on Monday…
ReachLocal Kills Bizzy, Takes $3.3 Million Loss
Location-based recommendation service Bizzy has announced that it will be shutting down in mid-November, marking a major turn of momentum in the local recommendation space. According to a statement released on the company’s blog, the application folded because it “ultimately did not attract the number of users it needed to sustain itself in the long run.”
Main Street Connect Announces New CEO, $7 Million in Funding
Main Street Connect, the network of hyperlocal news sites, announced yesterday that Thompson Reuters’ Global Head of Product Management Zohar Yardeni would come on as CEO, replacing founder Carll Tucker who will become chairman of the company’s board of directors. The company also announced $7 million in new funding, matching an inaugural round raised a year ago…
Street Fight Announces Research, More Events
Taking the podium on the second morning of the Street Fight Summit 2011 in New York City, Street Fight co-founder David Hirschman said that Hyperlocal Industries, which publishes the Street Fight website, would soon launch a research division and host more events like the Summit in 2012.
Will Data Define Deals 2.0?
Industry data has become a commodity in the young, explosive deals space, with aggregators like Yipit selling reports on industry trends. For the most part, the data is publicly available. Aggregators use bots to scrape hundreds of deals sites, indexing the thousands of deals distributed each day across vertical, geography, and, until recently, number of deals sold…
HopStop Launches Self-Serve Local Ad Play
Hopstop, the navigation service that pioneered point-to-point transit directions six years ago, has launched an advertising product aimed at local marketers. The self-serve platform allows local merchants to target HopStop users who search for directions to or from their neighborhood with a short call-to-action ad…
BiteHunter CEO: Learning From Kayak
BiteHunter launched amid the height of deal mania this Spring, as an aggregator for dining deals. With the June launch of its iPhone application and subsequent addition of instant deals to the mobile product last week, the company has grown into a real-time search engine for dining deals. Street Fight recently spoke with the company’s CEO, Gil Harel, a veteran in the dining vertical, about the aggregation industry and the variable future of the deals space…
#SFS11 Company Profile: SCVNGR/LevelUp
SCVNGR is a mobile marketing platform that uses location-based game mechanics to improve engagement with brands. Since 2010, the company has partnered up with Dunkin’ Donuts, Swarovski, and numerous universities to build custom marketing campaigns on top of its mobile application. At the same time, the company has seen solid engagement with its rewards product aimed at small and medium size merchants…
Philly.com Launches Hyperlocal Site for Main Line
Philly.com, the digital face for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, launched a small hyperlocal site yesterday. The site, Neighbors, will begin by providing news coverage exclusively for Philadelphia’s Main Line — the city’s oldest, and arguably most advertising-friendly, suburb…
CEO Josh Williams Explains Gowalla’s Overhaul
Last Thursday, Gowalla released a much-anticipated revamp of its location-based application, capping off a blockbuster summer for the geo-social space. The company’s CEO Josh Williams announced the redesign in early September, citing a return to Gowalla’s fundamental mission of encouraging people “to go out and explore.” The driving force behind the Austin-based company’s renaissance appears to be elsewhere — less an ideological about-face and more, an extensive retrofitting aimed at making Gowalla a potentially profitable company….
#SFS11 Company Profile: Urbantag
The local review and recommendation space is in need of some tidying up. User-generated reviews on sites like Yelp fail to incorporate taste, and often are littered with disingenuous reviews created by the merchants themselves. Meanwhile, recommendation engines like Bizzy and Foursquare Explore require users to share their location on a geo-social network — an activity that remains uncommon in the general public. Urbantag wants to help solve the problem…
Tippr Launches Affiliate Network: ‘AdSense for Deals’
Group-buying service Tippr has announced the launch of an affiliate network program this morning to supplement the company’s featured white-label product. Publishers who use Powered by Tippr software to host daily deals will be able to syndicate these offers across a network of affiliate sites — including major aggregators like Yipit and Yahoo Deals as well as over 1,000 hyperlocal and vertical niche publications…
Why the Merchant API Is Key to Foursquare’s Future
Last week, Foursquare updated its business page, adding case studies for merchants and use studies for brands, and generally improving the user experience. Since updating its merchant platform in the spring, the location-based social networking company has quietly launched an offensive to create a viable B2B component in their business, laying the groundwork for future monetization…
Sonar CEO: ‘Location Is Reaching an Inflection Point’
“We spent the last five years uploading our lives to the Internet – our likes, preferences, activities and so on,” says Brett Martin. “Now, we are downloading that information and spreading it over the suitable world. So there is a gold rush of applications which are working to help navigate that data in a physical context.”
Foursquare’s Merchant API Lays Groundwork for Monetization
Amid the fanfare over Foursquare’s new features, the July release and August update of the company’s Merchant API went largely unnoticed. Eric Friedman, Foursquare’s director of business development, talks about why the offering marks a big step toward improving merchant services and laying the groundwork for future monetization.
Gilt City’s City Unlisted: Merging Commerce and Content
Gilt City, the group-buying offshoot of luxury commerce brand Gilt Groupe, has — among other things — built its business on developing a strong editorial voice mostly through the selection and presentation of its offers. In May, however, the company launched an under-the-radar beta project called City Unlisted to experiment with an alternative approach to pairing content and commerce…