Pinterest’s Plan to Win Over Small Businesses
Four year-old scrapbooking site Pinterest has managed to succeed where many other social media — from Path to Google — have failed. In an interview with Street Fight, Joel Meek, who heads up the company’s small business efforts, discusses the role be believes the company can play an local discovery engine, and why its uniquely positioned to help small businesses reach users in the earliest stages of the purchase process…
Street Fight Daily: Millennials Drive Mobile Growth, Catalina Buys Coupon Company
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Millennials Are The Largest Group Of Smartphone Owners, And Adoption Is Still Growing (TechCrunch)… Catalina Acquires Cellfire To Tie Mobile Offers To In-Store Sales (AdExchanger)… Apple iPhone’s Mobile Payments Expected to Include CVS and Walgreens (Recode)…
Booker Eyes New Markets, More Capital
Sixteen months ago, Bain Capital’s venture wing made a $27 million bet on Booker. Now, the company says its gearing up to raise another big round in order help propel it into a number of new appointment and class-based verticals and hold off a bevy of increasingly well-capitalized competitors…
YP Hooks Up With Goodzer to Add Services Data to Search
YP has announced a new partnership with Goodzer that will populate the company’s local search product with information about service provider offerings from the startup. It’s the latest in a series of moves by the yellow pages carve-out to rejuvenate its local search product and draw users away from Yelp and Google, as pressure continues to mount on the listings model…
As IPOs Near, Tech Takes Another Crack at Small Business
A handful of upcoming IPOs will add fuel to an already-competitive small business marketing and technology industry. But the fundamental question is how these companies slow an already rapid rate of commoditization, and “build a moat” around their businesses to hold back the next wave of startups looking to grab market share in their wake…
Why the Mobile Industry Needs to Address Its Data Problem
Earlier this week, the Washington Post published a report detailing the widespread use of surveillance software by governments to track the movements of cellphone users both within and outside their borders. The news highlights yet another example of a dangerous schism developing in a data-driven advertising-technology industry between the reason consumers share data and the way it is eventually used…
Dstillery CEO: ‘Dirty Data’ in Mobile Ads as Serious as Click Fraud
Reports suggest that more than half of the the available mobile inventory that includes location data is incorrect. Tom Phillips, chief executive at Dstillery and an early whistleblower of online advertising fraud, says false location data in the mobile advertising industry poses as great of a threat to marketers as fraudulent traffic on the web…
As Franchises Bounce Back, A Golden Market for Local Tech Surfaces
A booming franchise sector presents a unique opportunity for hyperlocal firms to blend the scale and reach implicit in the digital marketplace with the granularity and flexibility afforded by mobile, social and other locally-driven platforms. What’s more, the franchise industry — with its unique combination of scale and fragmentation — could help provide a critical stepping stone for vendors to reach the small business market…
ReachLocal CEO: Company Got ‘Distracted By Shiny Things’
After a turbulent twelve months, which saw two founders depart and its stock price plummet, ReachLocal appears to be working on a comeback. Sharon Rowlands, the turn-around expert who took the helm as chief executive four months ago, remains as critical as anyone, but she believes that the company is on track to get things moving in the right direction in 2015…
How Innovation in Payments Can Drive Local Marketing
The changes in payments that Seth Priebatsch foresaw three years ago are certainly underway, but it remains more of a revolution than an evolution. Street Fight caught up with the LevelUp CEO recently to talk about why he thinks transaction data is the foundation of the next big wave of innovation in the marketing industry…
As Losses Widen, Groupon Struggles to Redefine Itself
Groupon said Tuesday that losses widened in the second quarter as marketing and sales costs jumped but gross profit remained flat. The culprit, a far less profitable ecommerce business than anticipated, accounted for every dollar of the company’s top-line growth as it struggles to find new footing for its sluggish local deals business…
How the Former CEO of Digg Plans to Win in Local
Earlier this year, Matt Williams, the former CEO of Digg and an Amazon vet, hooked up with a few other former Amazonians to found Pro.com, a local services marketplace that raised $3.5 million from investors that include their former boss Jeff Bezos. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about what local can learn from the early days of ecommerce…
Apple Will Beef Up Privacy in iOS 8 — Here’s What It Means for Local
When Apple unveiled iOS 8 last month, only brief mentions were made of iBeacon, the company’s much-hyped proximity messaging protocol. But early versions of the software released to developers in July suggest that the forthcoming operating system could include changes with implications for stakeholders across the commerce, advertising, and retail technology industries…
The Sharing Economy Goes Behind the Counter
We tend to think of the sharing economy as a consumer movement that helps us hail a ride or find a place to stay. But the basic logic driving the shift will soon start to impact the more mundane aspects of small business, allowing merchants to enjoy some of the advantages of scale that their larger competitors do…