Local Quotables: BJ Emerson, Joe Meyer, Tim O’Shaugnessy and more…
In this week’s column, of all people, the VP of technology at Tasti-D-Lite, BJ Emerson, turned a sharp tongue on location-based services at the LocNav conference in San Jose (“they used to call it ‘stalking'”). Jim Brady talked scale; Joe Meyer described the realization that there was a business in local companies; and one small business owner cleverly noted that Twitter and Facebook don’t do a local merchant much good “if people don’t know where you are located.” Read all of this week’s the wise words and wise-cracks around and about the hyperlocal industry.
Street Fight Daily: 10.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon is seeking to sell shares in an offering that would value the company at close to $12 billion. The valuation is a steep comedown from earlier expectations that an I.P.O. of the Internet darling could value the company as much as $25 billion to $30 billion. (New York Times/Dealbook)…
Ownlocal has announcing a new round of investment from a string of investors including the Knight Enterprise Fund, Automattic, the makers of WordPress, and a number of prominent angels. The company creates web services for small businesses through partnerships with local media outlets and other organizations. (GigaOm)…
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…
Jim Brady Reflects on WaPo, ‘Blown Up’ TBD and the Do or Die Future of Local
Combine digital community journalism and the New York Jets? Jim Brady might call that heaven. The longtime leader in online journalism and hyperlocal endeavors (though he avoids the term hyperlocal) seems to expend as much Twitter juice on the finer points of the team’s play as he does on crowdsourcing the news. But just barely. Fact is Brady is one of the most recognized editorial leaders in online news going back to washingtonpost.com (the first time … ya know, in the ’90s) then AOL, then Washington Post 2.0, next TBD and now the Journal Register Company. Before he gets picked up by the Jets as a mid-season PR QB, I thought it a good time to catch up…
Street Fight Daily: 10.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Daily deals are coming to the radio. Clear Channel, the media giant that owns 850 stations, has made an exclusive deal with LivingSocial to offer its discount offerings on 500 of its stations, the companies announced on Tuesday. (New York Times/Media Decoder)…
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley expects the company to remain independent for another year, but admits he’s open to an acquisition: “The only thing we want to do is build a product,” Crowley said. “If we do it independently that’s great, if we do it as part of a company that’s another story.” (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 10.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
New York state tax administrators have concluded merchants should collect sales tax on the full face value of items purchased with vouchers from Groupon, LivingSocial and other Internet discount deal sites —if the vouchers are for a specific dollar amount. (Forbes)…
New York City’s Gothamist is thriving with an average 2 million unique visitors each month reading its eclectic brand of voice-forward reporting and aggregation geared to the young and well-heeled. Its success has allowed it to spin off sister sites across the country and around the globe. (NetNewsCheck)…
Don’t Miss Next Week’s Street Fight Summit – Ticket Giveaway
Hundreds of top executives from hyperlocal, location-based and daily deals companies will come together next week in New York City for Street Fight Summit 2011, where they’ll discuss the latest ideas and insights about how digital companies can target the $150 billion local advertising market. Street Fight is giving away a free ticket today to the first person who writes us.
Selected Directory of Hyperlocal Publications in NYC
PUBLICATION CATEGORY M.O. Bay Ridge Journal Neighborhood. Heavy on press releases and second-hand crime stories. Bensonhurst Bean Neighborhood. Recently created by Ned Berke, founder/editor/publisher of SheepsheadBites, site relies heavily on Huffington Post-style re-purposing of content originated by other publications. Bikeblog Specialty site. Founder Michael Green, a film maker who sees the bike as “humankind’s greatest […]
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: JiWire
Calling itself a “mobile audience media” company, JiWire connects advertisers with laptop, tablet and smartphone users taking advantage of public wifi connections. The company sells off of a comprehensive list of free and fee-based wifi connections across the country. Users who connect to those wifi hotspots see relevant location-based ads from JiWire partners…
Street Fight Daily: 10.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Huffington Post’s purchase of Localocracy is further evidence of the “neighbor connect” online space heating up. At least two dozen significant startupshave popped up in the past year focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like Localocracy, aim at niches (local ballot issues and related), while others intend to promote a general sense of community. (MediaShift)…
HopStop, the online service that provides door-to-door subway and bus directions for major cities in the U.S. and abroad, has kicked off “HopStop AdLocal,” a new program that offers businesses up to 12,500 free advertising impressions over a 30-day period, a value of $250, the company says. (Entrepreneur)…
Yelp Helps Local Restaurants Beat the Big Chains
Positive Yelp scores translate into real revenue boosts for local restaurants but not for chains. That’s the basic finding of a recent study by Michael Luca, a researcher at Harvard Business School. He found that a one-star differential in ratings on the popular crowd-sourced review site can bump revenues by 5% to 9% at a local restaurant. This is not entirely surprising. What is more interesting is that chain restaurants did not benefit from any significant increase in profitability or revenue corresponding to Yelp ratings…
Street Fight Daily: 10.14.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
MapQuest’s new Vibe uses data collected from the past 10 years about cities’ most popular destinations. Vijay Bangaru, MapQuest vice president of product, writes that the concept originated out of a shift in users’ needs from “maps and directions” to “local search.” (Mashable)…
Groupon and LivingSocial succeed because consumers perceive them as great deals. But is that true? Perhaps not. Thumbtack.com called 10 vendors offering daily deals (five from Groupon and five from LivingSocial) and found eight instances where they were quoted a price over the phone that was cheaper than the advertised regular price being offered. (Business Insider)…
In Jefferson’s Hometown, a Hyperlocal Focuses on Digital Democracy
Brian Wheeler is executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow, a thriving nonprofit hyperlocal in Virginia that focuses on land use and other civic issues that are key to protecting the character of the community that was the home of Thomas Jefferson. We talked to Wheeler about his unusual definition of user engagement, and how he’s working to take it to a new level…
Street Fight Daily: 10.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
The next update to Foursquare’s iPhone app includes a new feature called Radar, which pulls suggestions from the app’s Explore feature. Depending on your location, it might suggest a nearby restaurant, or remind you that the coffee shop on your to-do list is nearby. It will also tell you when your friends are meeting nearby. (TechCrunch)…
LocalResponse, a local marketing system that pushes targeted ads to users based on their check-ins, has raised $5 million. The money will go toward expanding the sales team and building out an enterprise version of the service for brands and agencies. (GigaOm)…
What Independent Hyperlocals Need for the Long Haul
The surging growth of hyperlocal news—today there are more than 3,000 sites in operation and hundreds more in various stages of formation—is being driven by independents. The media disrupters are the people who have the passion and gumption to develop and run their sites with financing from their own personal credit cards.
I’m thinking of entrepreneurs like Debbie Galant, who with $3,000 co-founded Baristanet in the crowded media market of northern New Jersey in 2004, expanding it to seven communities. And Scott Brodbeck who, while he was completing a master’s program, started ARLNow in Arlington, Va., in suburban Washington D.C.