News and Analysis
Google Updates Search to Recommend Local Events Based on User Interests
Google is bringing the personalization zeitgeist to local event recommendations. The company reported on its blog Thursday that it is releasing a series of new features that will make it easier for users to find essential information about events of interest to them right on search engine result pages.
Commentary
It’s Official: The Newspaper Industry Has Given Up on Newspapers
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…
Mobile Local Apps: To Bundle or Not to Bundle
Facebook last week made the contentious move to force its iPhone and Android app users to “fast switch” to the Messenger app for all future messaging. The outcome will be worth watching for anyone developing mobile apps. Local media players are increasingly faced with decisions about app functionality. That includes whether to unbundle features to specialized apps (think gas prices), or to federate within one…
The Impact of Google’s Local Update Is Still a Developing Story
Google seems to be experimenting with driving more traffic to its local competition, meaning that it’s more important than ever for a business to secure its presence across a broad base of directories. The value proposition of local SEO does not change in a fundamental way, given that Google has long used citation consistency as a prominent local ranking signal…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Apple Watch Meets Beacon, Foursquare’s Uncertain Growth
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…The New Foursquare: People Are Checking In, But They May Not Be Staying (New York Business Journal)… Google Results For “Car Insurance” Could Look Different Very Soon (Search Engine Land)… Shopify Preparing for Dual U.S.-Canada Initial Public Offering in 2015 (Wall Street Journal)…
6 Platforms Merchants Can Use for Real-Time Customer Interaction
New customer interaction solutions are using mobile and location technology for enhanced customer experiences. In many cases, these hyperlocal tools give business owners a way to interact with customers in real-time and resolve problems before complaints start showing up online. Here are six of them…
Street Fight Daily: TripAdvisor Targets OpenTable, Cracks In The Geoweb
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Line Launches A Taxi Booking Service In Japan Because Chat Apps Have Become Platforms (TechCrunch)… TripAdvisor Goes on a Dining Reservations Binge With Acquisition of Iens (Skift)… Cracks In The Digital Map: What The ‘Geoweb’ Gets Wrong About Real Streets (Guardian)…
Infographic: Here’s How National-to-Local Gets Done
You start with objectives at the national level, learn and tweak based on data feedback on the ground, and just make sure there’s constant and immediate communication between the two sides. The cloud offers the easiest and most flexible way to do that. This cloud layer might be called the “Local Service Layer. Here’s how it works…
Why Two Competing News ‘Indies’ in Suburban Charlotte Are Teaming Up
The independent digital community news site Davidson News and sister site Cornelius News are teaming up with six-year-old print-based Citizen Media Group in Charlotte. To see why these competing “indies” decided to partner, and what they hope to achieve, we spoke recently with their founders…
Street Fight Daily: Shakeout in Ad Tech, Trulia Partners With Uber
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Burst of M&A in Online Advertising as Shakeout Begins (Wall Street Journal)… Trulia + Uber = Solution to Problem You Didn’t Know You Had (Boston)… How Shazam Is Going From Music To Retailers With Augmented Reality And Wearable Integration (The Next Web)…
Could the Mobile Ad Industry Spin off a Data Business?
The data collected by mobile companies is often far more comprehensive than their online counterparts, offering insights into the complexities of consumer behavior between places — not just websites. The question facing mobile advertising executives is whether that data might actually become a business in its own right.
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