Mobile Coupons Gain Traction, But QR Codes Are Fading
The future of mobile coupons is nearly here and it looks bright, according to a recent study conducted by RadiumOne, which found that nearly half of women ages 35 to 54 would like to receive mobile coupons via SMS. Meanwhile, other methods of coupon delivery are rising in popularity as well…
Street Fight Daily: NextDoor Funding, Yahoo Looks to Local Discovery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Neighborhood Network Nextdoor Raises $21.6 Million (Reuters)… With New Alike Mobile App Acquisition, Yahoo Pushes Into Local Discovery (AllThingsD)… Verve Mobile Raises $14M, Invests In Location-Based Tech (Media Post)…
5 Business Intelligence Platforms for Hyperlocals
One of the fastest ways for hyperlocal marketers and sales teams to improve their success rates when pitching to SMBs is by identifying businesses most likely to be receptive to their offerings. A number of recently introduced business intelligence platforms can make that process a little bit easier and help marketers leverage online data to pinpoint businesses that are new and thriving…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Acquires MashLogic, EveryBlock Could Be Sold
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Groupon Acqui-Hires MashLogic, Will Shutter Britely Plugin This weekend (PandoDaily)… EveryBlock Could Still Be Sold, Says Schiller, After Abrupt Closing of Hyperlocal Pioneer (Poynter)… After Acquiring 15 Groupon Clones, CrowdSavings Finds a Buyer for Itself (AllThingsD)…
Tagwhat Expands to Aggregate Offers by Location
Tagwhat, the maker of an app that focuses on location-based content (from articles to video and audio about a given place), recently announced its entry into the business end of location services with new features that help users find offers from nearby merchants. The service now will pull time- and place-sensitive deals directly from Facebook (and other social networks), displaying them next to to the place-related content already provided users…
How to Scale Local and Stay Entrepreneurial
The Alternative Press, which quickly grew to 15 sites in suburban New Jersey (three wholly owned and the rest licensees), is now hoping to replicate that success by growing into a network of 100-plus sites. That’s almost twice as big as the footprint of corporate pure play Daily Voice and in the same league as networks operated by the Chicago Tribune (TribLocal) and Denver Post (YourHub)…
Street Fight Daily: Stoppelman Makes a Buck, Local’s Top Ten
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp CEO Takes $1 Salary (CNET)… The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local (TechCrunch)… Why Daily Deals Aren’t All Bad (No, Really) (PandoDaily)…
Patch Misses 2012 Revenue Target
AOL’s network of hyperlocal sites missed the $40 million to $50 million revenue target that the company had set for last year, a miss that CEO Tim Armstrong attributed to disruption from superstorm Sandy in the fourth quarter during a Friday earnings call. The company remains committed to achieving run-rate profitability for Patch by the end of this year…
Street Fight Daily: eBay’s Resurgence, Redbeacon Founder’s New Venture
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… eBay is Back! (Fortune)… Redbeacon Founder Launches MyTime, A Booking And Ecommerce Platform For Local Services And Open Appointments (TechCrunch)… Why Credit Card Companies Need Some Madison Avenue Style (ReadWrite)…
NBCU Shutters Pioneering Hyperlocal Network EveryBlock
EveryBlock’s original goal was to collect as much local data as possible, sort and filter it, and then present it to its audience. EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison, who was hired by NBC in mid-2011, changed all that. In announcing the closure, Vivian Schiller, a senior vice president at NBC News, said, “The decision to shut down the site was difficult. But in the end, we didn’t see a strategic fit for EveryBlock within the portfolio.” Read more…
Study: 14.7 Million People Engaged ‘Locally’ with Retail Brands in Q4
A new report by the Location-Based Marketing Association and local analytics company Venuelabs looks at the amount and quality of “local” consumer interactions. As local activities like reviewing, checking in, or posting a photo become ubiquitous across platforms, the volume of location-specific (versus brand-specific) digital engagement with brick-and-mortar businesses has exploded…
Street Fight Daily: Aol Under Armstrong, Big Moves in Online Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… At AOL Under Tim Armstrong, the Only Constant Is Change (AdAge)… Made To Order: Big Moves In Online Food Delivery (ReadWrite)… Report: Geo-Aware, Geofenced Ads Outperform Other LoMo Targeting (Screenwerk)…
Yelp Hits 100 Million Uniques as Users Shift to Mobile
Yelp reported mixed earnings on Wednesday as wider than expected losses tempered strong revenue growth in the fourth quarter. The reviews site brought in $41.2 million during the quarter, taking its annual revenue to $137.6 million for 2012. The overwhelming majority of its revenue growth came on the backs of local advertisers as brand spending remained flat…
Channeling Starbucks, FiveStars Seeks Loyalty in the Form of a Gift Card
The Mountain View, Calif., company is launching a new gift card product aimed at helping businesses transform new customers into returning customers through its POS-integrated loyalty platform. The company has piloted a co-branded gift card with a handful of small retail chains since December, and plans to open the feature to its smaller merchants with the release…
Street Fight Daily: Gannett Paywall Pays Off, AOL Sunsets Hipster.com
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… The Case for Paywalls: Gannett Gains While Digital First Experiments (Poynter)… More Change At AOL: Photosharing App Hipster.com Is Shutting Down (TechCrunch)… PayPal Destroys Google Wallet, MasterCard, Square, and Visa in Digital Wallet Study (VentureBeat)…
5 Misconceptions SMBs Have About Mobile Advertising
Even as small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly warming to digital marketing, questions and misinformation persist about how mobile campaigns reach local consumers and influence their behavior. We asked a few folks who work in the mobile sphere to provide us a taste of the kind of concerns about mobile ads they’re hearing from SMBs…
Street Fight Daily: ‘Find My Friends’ on Facebook, DFM Considers Paywall
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Facebook Is Said to Create Mobile Location-Tracking App (Bloomberg)… Digital First Media is Working on Paywalls, Even Though It Really Doesn’t Want To (PaidContent)… Will “Stalking Apps” Be Stopped? (Time)…
EveryBlock Was Experiment in Data Journalism That Fell Short
When it was launched in 2007 by digital wunderkind Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock was hailed as one sure part of hyperlocal’s future. As a result of Holovaty’s coding, the site was able to tease out for publication petabytes of government-collected data that otherwise might not ever see the light of day. EveryBlock was a pioneer in collecting, sorting, and filtering data. But it hadn’t progressed to turning its digital buckets of information into knowledge. Its vaunted coding, which located every overturned garbage can, couldn’t do that…