News and Analysis
Retail as a Service: Amazon will Create (and Destroy) with Cashierless Checkout Solution
Mike Boland: The innovation including and surrounding cashierless checkout goes beyond payments to affect a broader set of functions like supply chain, inventory management, and store layouts. It’s like a retail toolkit in a box, with cash-flow friendly pricing, à la SaaS. You may have heard of it: It’s called retail as a service (RaaS), and it could transform the next decade of retail. Amazon will lead the way.
Digital Ad Trends to Watch in 2019, Mobile to Account for 71% of Digital Ad Spend
Programmatic SSP Pubmatic released on Tuesday morning an elaborate report detailing digital ad trends to watch in 2019. The highlights include a look into how mobile, video, and of course programmatic itself will continue to evolve in the coming year, reshaping the way brands reach customers.
Location Data Industry Gets Huge Wake-Up Call on Monday
Platforms, brands, and vendors benefiting from the reams of location data used to hit consumers with highly targeted ads should be paying attention to a change suggested by Google and Facebook’s appearances before government authorities, a New York Times exposé out Monday, and most importantly the impending arrival of GDPR-like legislation in the United States: 2019 will be the year privacy actually matters, posing a potentially devastating threat to the status quo of the location-based data and marketing industries.
Commentary
The Not-So-Low-Hanging Fruit: Why the Local Market Remains Elusive
“The great challenge of winning the local market boils down to balancing sufficient reach and scale with specificity,” writes Noah Elkin, who is joining Street Fight today as managing editor. “It turns out thinking globally and acting locally isn’t always easy — as a consumer or a marketer.”
Why ‘On-Demand’ Alone Isn’t Enough to Make a Viable Business
Success in this market doesn’t come from betting that millions of consumers will change their purchase behaviors. Success in the on-demand economy employs a simple, time-tested formula: taking an existing service — one that a lot of people use — and making it better.
Will Mobile Search Dethrone Google?
Why would Google’s market leadership be vulnerable to mobile search incursion? Innovation in search can occur at the user experience level, the core indexing and ranking algorithms, and the business model and ecosystem that supports search. Each of these faces potential mobile disruption.
Latest Posts
Case Study: Salvage Yard Appeals to Do-It-Yourself-ers with Mobile App
In addition to social media channels like Facebook and YouTube — where Padilla shares how-to videos and articles that might be helpful to his customers — Victory also upgraded its website to offer instant online quotes and inventory lookup information…
Openings and New Hires at Verve, Uber, Twitter, and Gannett
Every two weeks, Street Fight covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. (Plus, scroll down for jobs on offer now.) Latest: Where2GetIt, Street Fight, Gannett, and more..
Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s New Mobile Ad Formats, Instacart Reclassifies Workers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… The Conscientious Consumer: A Disruption Opportunity in Local On-Demand (Street Fight)… Meet Spot, the Latest Startup Born from an Uber Co-founder’s Incubator (Fortune)… Twitter Just Made a Stronger Case for Retailers to Buy Ads (AdWeek)
A Window Into the Office Culture at Square, From SFO to Tokyo
A growing company often means thousands of employees in offices around the world. Keeping those employees connected was a priority for Square, the small business software company headed up by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
5 Cloud POS Alternatives to Windows XP for SMBs
Cloud-based POS systems are growing in popularity among all businesses, and particularly those in the SMB category. We’ve put together a list of five cloud POS solutions for SMBs that can no longer rely on Windows XP, complete with information about what makes each option unique…
LBMA Podcast: Google’s Location Aware Search, xAd’s ‘Meaning of Local’
On the show: Thync’s digital drug; Indoor Atlas partners with Aisle411; Marriott and Netflix Travel Brilliantly together; Nomadic Gifts brings back the carrier pigeon; Verve Mobile acquires Fosbury; Facebook gives away beacons…
Street Fight Daily: Google’s Mobile Web Ambitions, Routific Gives Tech to SMBs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Made A Secret Acquisition To Get You To Stop Using Apps Because It Makes Most Of Its Money From Search (Business Insider)… Routific’s Route Optimization Tools Help Local Businesses Offer On-Demand Delivery (TechCrunch)… Meet the Startup Drawing Maps for Foursquare, Pinterest and Mapquest (Fortune)
Is Yelp’s Slowing Growth a Function of Mobile’s Adolescence?
The apparent slowdown in Yelp’s growth does not necessarily reflect the value of the company to consumers or advertisers. Instead, it exposes the growing pains of the mobile ecosystem.
Report: Local Merchants Embrace Digital, but Need Plenty of Help
In the connected local economy, digital techniques will be the primary means of navigation for the customer journey everyone talks about. At the same time, physical-world commerce infrastructure is about to be seriously outdated. The 2015 Local Merchant Report, a survey of 500+ SMBs and VSBs, helps suppliers better understand merchants’ usage of and attitudes toward digital marketing and e-commerce…
Washington Post’s Gazette Community Sites Were Stuck in a Print Past
I was shocked to hear last week that Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post was closing its Gazette community news sites in suburban Maryland. But if I had been paying closer attention to the fast demographic and lifestyle changes in those suburbs, it might have seemed a little more obvious.
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