News and Analysis

6 Recruiting Platforms for the Marijuana Industry

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Cannabis startups are struggling to recruit job candidates who understand the cannabis market, which is opening the door to an entirely new vertical for technology firms with recruitment platforms. With the market itself still in its infancy, a handful of key players are vying to become the go-to recruiting sources for the cannabis industry as they work to match employers with job seekers who understand the state-by-state rules and regulations that govern the marijuana market.

Google Being Investigated for Antitrust Violations by Slew of States

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More than half of US state attorneys general are investigating Google for antitrust violations, the Washington Post reported. Officials anonymously told the Post that the probes are expected to be announced on Monday.

This marks a serious escalation in mostly recent government efforts to increase regulation of the giant tech firms that have become the most powerful private enterprises in the world, squashing competition in their home industries and disrupting adjacent ones. The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are already looking into the potentially anticompetitive power of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

Klos Founders See Opportunity in Social Messaging Market

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Like so many other startups, Klos is being marketed as a solution to a problem. In this case, the company’s founders see the problem as social media being inherently anti-social. Original broadcast sharing on legacy social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is on the decline. Messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage are incredibly popular, but they don’t help people expand their social networks. While there are existing services, like Tinder and Bumble, that combine messaging and network expansion, they almost all fall into the dating app category.

Commentary

What Happens When Google Can Manipulate the Very News It Seeks to Protect?

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A recent controversy finds the search giant caught in a contradiction. The company has strong financial interest in acting as the gatekeeper to the news. But Google also has a strong interest in portraying itself positively in the news that it effectively controls.

Why Real-time Geofencing Is a Missed Marketing Opportunity for Brands

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Many marketers are focusing too exclusively on the simplest form of location data. Geo-fencing severely limits the potential of location data and also the reach of a digital campaign.

Two Mobile Marketing Studies Sketch Location Data’s Role in Cross-Channel Measurement

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The reports released last week by industry organizations provide useful advice on mobile marketing tactics and using location data. Both studies point to the need to apply integrated, cross-channel measurement techniques, and to use location data for targeting, customer segmentation, and attribution.

Latest Posts

Belly’s LaHive: Beacon Tech ‘A Little Bit Overhyped’

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The company’s CEO says that he considers beacons “an additional channel of communication so that businesses can identify when customers are inside a store and target them with special offers,” but he doesn’t see location-based tech and loyalty programs going hand-in-hand.

Street Fight Daily: Uber Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides, Shopify Teams Up with Postmates

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Offers Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides… More Than 21,000 Businesses Can Now Add Same-Day Delivery Through Postmates… Vacation Rental Startups Attract $100 Million in Funding So Far This Year…

Will Phone Calls Survive the Chatbot Apocalypse?

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The trillion dollar question is if this emerging chatbot technology will annihilate the phone call. Though I’m bullish on messaging and chatbots, the answer to that question is likely no.

6 Customer Analytics Solutions for Restaurants

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The restaurant industry may be better positioned to take advantage of big data than almost any other vertical. Here are six examples of data platforms that restaurants can use for both sales and service optimization.

Sponsored Post: 9 Mobile Apps That Are Transforming Local Commerce

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There is no shortage of business tools and apps available to entrepreneurs today. Technology, now more than ever before, is discovering new ways of solving old problems and enabling retailers and service providers as well as the mighty consumer to reach, share, save, buy, bid, deal, message, post and even make a phone call, anytime and from almost anywhere. …

Street Fight Daily: Co-op Marketing Battles Facebook/Google/Amazon, Lead Generation’s Future

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facing Facebook, Google, and Amazon, Brands Pool Their Data (Marketing Land)… The Future of Digital Lead Generation (TechCrunch)… Publishers ‘Feeding On Scraps from Facebook’, Says Bloomberg Media Boss (The Guardian)…

Understanding the Local Search Marketing Funnel

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According to the funnel metaphor, customers travel in stages from awareness to purchase, the funnel getting narrower at each stage as some customers drop off and do not move to the next stage.

LiveIntent President: Local Publishers Need to Leverage ‘Gold Mine’ of Email Newsletters

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Advertising network LiveIntent has 1,300 publisher clients, including Hearst, New York Times, Washington Post and ESPN. Through these relationships, it can target 130 million unique visitors. We caught up with the company’s president, Jason Kelly, to talk about how local publishers can compete with social-media platforms for ad revenue.

What Designing an ‘OS for Restaurants’ Really Requires

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When you look at the restaurant tech stack, there are clearly solutions, software, applications that should play nicely with each other, but the larger players have purposefully walled off their gardens. The next multi-billion-dollar company in this space will identify the mission-critical pieces of technology in the stack, and own them.

Amplified Robot CEO Lays Out a Case for the Role of AR/VR in Retail

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At the LOCALCON conference in London last week, Amplified Robot CEO Steve Dann gave a keynote address on VR’s practical uses for the retail industry. VR is steadily “climbing up the slope of enlightenment,” Dann said, and it’s in our best interest to familiarize ourselves with it.”