News and Analysis
SMBs Scramble to Capitalize on an Early Amazon Prime Day
Small and mid-size businesses saw record-breaking sales during Amazon’s Prime Day in 2020, with an increase of nearly 60% year-over-year. But with so much of the retail space currently in transition and an early Prime Day on the horizon, SMBs are scrambling to ensure they can take advantage of the corporate holiday this year.
Swiftly Closes the Online-to-Offline Loop for Grocers and CPGs
Swiftly co-founder and CTO Sean Turner told me his company wants to be the “Google analytics for brick-and-mortar,” helping retailers, especially grocers, and consumer-packed goods brands not only sell and market their products online but also measure how both online and physical channels are performing.
Commentary
AR in Local Commerce: Google Shows the Way
Mike Boland: A recent and relatively understated development from Google could portend the future of augmented reality. Its previously teased “VPS” was released into the wild for a small set of users. For those unfamiliar, VPS (visual positioning service) guides users with 3D overlays on upheld smartphone screens. Sort of a cousin of AR, this type of experience could represent the sector’s eventual killer apps. Though we’ve seen the most AR success so far in gaming (Pokemon Go) and social (Snapchat AR lenses), it could be more mundane utilities like navigation that engender high-frequency use cases.
The Future of AI Is Here: Reflections on IBM Think
Damian Rollison: Among hundreds of sessions, exhibits, and demos, one theme came through clearly at IBM Think this month in San Francisco: for large enterprises especially, the AI-driven future for which we’ve been told to prepare is already here. In fact, enterprise companies are using IBM’s Watson technologies today to address a myriad of challenges inherent in the scale of those businesses.
Latest Posts
How a New Active Wear Brand Takes on the Big Guys
California-based Vuori Clothing started as a brand focused on yoga wear for men, and was (and still is) heavily reliant on using hyper-local marketing efforts to build brand awareness. Street Fight recently caught up with marketing VP Nikki Sakelliou to talk about the company’s local efforts.
Can the New Scroll Subscription Service Help Embattled Local Publishers?
Tony Haile, until recently the longtime CEO of the highly regarded online-analytics site Chartbeat, is planning to launch a new subscription site that doesn’t try to convert readers from free to paid. He calls it Scroll, and it has $3 million in seed money from formidable publishers including the New York Times, News Corp and Axel Springer.
Webinar Recap: Building the Local Marketing Tech Stack
In a webinar Wednesday, Street Fight’s research director David Card and John Hurley, Radius’s senior director of demand generation and content marketing, discussed how companies such as American Express, iHeartRadio, and DexYP use intelligent platforms and data to get ahead of their rivals.
Street Fight Daily: Alexa Everywhere Becomes Reality, Salesforce Launches Data Marketplace
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Wants You to Wake Up with Alexa, and That’s Just the Start… Salesforce Launches Data Studio, a Marketplace for Data… Over Half of Paid Programmatic Impressions Probably Aren’t Viewed by an Actual Person…
Brad Feld: Startup Founders Should Focus on Defining ‘Cultural Norms’
The Foundry Group and TechStars co-founder has seen his share of startups. He is co-author of the book “Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job,” which had its second edition released last month. Street Fight caught up with Feld recently to talk about some of the trickier issues in starting a company.
Tech and Brand Partnerships Point to a New Future of Mobile Shopping
In the future, partnerships between brands, tech companies, and marketers will enable a massive shift in payments and change how shoppers access the goods they want. So said Mike Jaconi, CEO and co-founder Button, maintaining that U.S. commerce is not yet primed for purchase — but it’s getting there.
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