News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Square Opens Its Platform to Developers, Google Pursues the Gamification Route

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TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Square Announces SDK, Opening Its Platform Directly to Developers for First Time… Google Hooks Up With Unity to Entice Advertisers with Game Supply… After Downgrading Publishers, Facebook Explores New Ways to Boost Them…

Brand Battle: The Body Shop vs Bath & Body Works

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Sponsored: To see how two personal care brands—The Body Shop and Bath & Body Works—stacked up in a competitive marketplace, digital marketing company Brandify used its proprietary software to see which marketing and branding areas stood out as strengths and which areas fell short.

Square Announces SDK, Opening Its Platform Directly to Developers for First Time

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Recognizing and looking to capitalize on the fact that some businesses may have needs its own software does not exhaust, Square announced on Thursday the release of the Square Reader SDK, which will allow developers serving brands and SMBs around the world to redesign the check-out experience in exactly the right way for their specific businesses.

Commentary

Traditional Businesses Still Failing to Reach Online Consumers

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An infographic from Marketecture offers a useful compendium of statistics pointing both to the great opportunity in local and the persistent gap between that opportunity and the actual practice of marketing by many small business owners…

Amazon Getting Pieces in Place for Next-gen Payment System?

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At first glance, many are seeing Amazon’s new card reader as a competitive move against the likes of Square and PayPal. But this is actually a tiny start to a bigger vision. Amazon’s vast reach can make its card reader matter in a variety of interesting ways…

It’s Official: The Newspaper Industry Has Given Up on Newspapers

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In the past couple of weeks, three of the major legacy media companies announced they were splitting their companies into separate-but-unequal broadcast and print ventures. The decisions by Gannett, E.W. Scripps and Tribune to divide their once “synergistic business models” into separate and very distinct businesses indicate that we are now at the beginning of the end-of-the-end for this industry…

Latest Posts

How to Get to 5 Years of Success in Hyperlocal Publishing

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This month Scott Brodbeck is celebrating the fifth anniversary of ARLnow, which has expanded into a mini-network of four sites in metro Washington D.C. We caught up with Brodbeck recently to see how he’s made a journalistic and business success out of community news and where ARLnow is headed in 2015…

LBMA Podcast: TapSense for Apple Watch, Canopy Labs Founder

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On the show: WiFi Aware; The RealTalk app; GM’s At Your Service; Robots invade Lowe’s; Jawbone wants corporations to move more; VoucherPages launches an app; Yummly + Instacart = 1 hour ingredient delivery; Skyhook partners with FiLIP Technologies; 3D maps of ski hills…

Street Fight Daily: Bud Light On-Demand, Google Adds Events

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyAB InBev Launches App For One-hour Home Delivery Of Beer (MarketWatch)… Google Makes It Easier To Buy Tickets For Live Events, Straight From Search Results And Maps (The Next Web)… With The Booking Now App, Booking.com (aka Goliath) Just Arrived To The Last-Minute Hotel Game (Pando)…

Thinknear Founder Eli Portnoy Launches New Startup Sense360

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Two months after exiting Telenav, Eli Portnoy has raised $2.75 million from a handful of investors for a new project, Sense360. The startup is developing software to analyze the data from sensors such as light readers or accelerometers…

9 Keys to Launching a Successful Beacon Program

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One of the biggest questions from retailers in the coming year will likely be how they can better implement beacon programs at their stores. We asked top executives from the hyperlocal industry for their take on what’s really necessary to launch a successful beacon program…

Optimizing Your Pay-Per-Call Campaign

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Basic pay-per-call campaign optimization strategies run the gamut from scheduling ad play according to hours of operation to selecting the most accurate categories for ads to play in. These optimization strategies help increase both the volume of calls that a business receives and the duration of those calls…

Street Fight Daily: Microsoft’s Square Competitor, Moovit Raises $50M

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyMicrosoft, PayPal Team Up for Mobile POS for SMBs(eWeek)… Moovit Raises $50M To Scale Its Public Transit App, Goes Up Against CityMapper (TechCrunch)… Facebook Ad Clicks Are Shifting to Mobile, so Why Aren’t Conversions? (AdWeek)…

How ZocDoc Grew Its Healthcare Booking Site Into a National Business

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Street Fight recently caught up with Anna Elwood, vice president of operations at ZocDoc to talk about how the company built up its customer service, how it balances people and technology, and how it decides where to go next…

4 Reasons Location-Based Services Will Become a Thing Again in 2015

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With improved location accuracy, improved POI data, and efficient background location processing, developers will be equipped to build apps that can truly extract relevant real-world user experience. Location will mean more than a wandering blue dot; it will mean the places we’ve traveled, the relationships we’ve developed, and the resolutions we’ve kept…

Street Fight Daily: Marketers Spend On Social, Clinkle Pivots (Again)

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology70% Of Marketers Plan To Boost Social Spending In 2015 (Marketing Land)… Clinkle Pivots From Its Soured Brand To “Treats” For Sharing Discounts (TechCrunch)… How Zomato Plans To Eat Yelp’s Lunch In America (Quartz)…