News and Analysis

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.

Prime Day Powers Industry-Wide Boost in Mobile App Downloads for Retailers

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Amazon’s mid-July Prime Day powered not only sales at local businesses and direct purchases on Amazon’s rival retailer sites but also spikes in mobile app downloads for those retailers, according to data released today by mobile app marketing company Liftoff.

After Downgrading Publishers, Facebook Explores New Ways to Boost Them

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We all remember the seemingly apocalyptic early 2018 announcement that Facebook would downgrade publishers in favor of foregrounding posts from users’ family and friends. Less discussed are the various changes Facebook has made since that announcement to give publishers on its platform a fighting chance.

Commentary

30 Days Into Foursquare’s Great Schism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Vitals include whether or not Foursquare die-hards will migrate to Swarm. More importantly, will peeling off social and location tracking features to Swarm make Foursquare proper the more broadly applicable and mainstream-friendly local discovery engine it’s hoping to be?

New Listing Services Will Help Local Data Go Digital

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Somewhat unexpectedly, 2014 has seen a profusion of companies entering the listing management arena, many of them veterans of related disciplines. Those of us with long experience in the space are not surprised that others would see the value in helping businesses get found on local search sites and apps. But why the sudden surge of activity?

Local Mobile Search in U.S. Still Outpacing Other Major Global Markets

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We recently culled data from more than 13 million users of our mobile shopping platform in six countries. Not surprisingly, because of its high saturation of smartphone users, the U.S. market reports the highest percentage (60%) of all our search traffic from mobile devices. We expect that to increase as smartphone sales continue to grow…

Latest Posts

Here Are the Top 5 Exits in Local Tech of 2014

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The largest deals came on the public market, where some of the more established firms found late exits and others teamed up with rivals. But the startup scene saw its share of healthy M&A activity as well. Here are the five biggest deals in the local tech of 2014….

The Year in Local Search: A Timeline of the Top Stories of 2014

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The holiday season is a time to contemplate the year gone by, so we’ve rounded up some of the top news stories in local search over the past 12 months. It was a year marked by Foursquare’s rebranding, Google’s new SMB interface, and upgrades from the likes of Apple, Yelp, Yahoo, YP, MapQuest, and Bing…

Street Fight Daily: Starbucks Drops Square, Uber to Patent Surge Pricing

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…starbucks_square-2Starbucks Drops Square App as Mobile-Payments Battle Intensifies (WSJ)… Uber Moves to Patent the Surge Pricing Its Customers Hate (Skift)… Google Gains Ground on Amazon With Same-Day Deliveries During Holiday (AdAge)

10 Top Location-Based Mobile Campaigns of 2014

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In 2014, the use of geo-data, geo-fences, beacons, ultrasound, even LED lighting and magnetic positioning systems, have coalesced around geo-targeting consumers both outside and inside store locations. We asked the folks at GeoMarketing to look back at 10 campaigns that pioneered in the space in the past year…

Thinknear Chief: ‘No Doubt’ That Consolidation Coming in Mobile Ads

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Loren Hillberg recently took over as General Manager of Thinknear at Telenav, replacing the company’s founder Eli Portnoy. We caught up with him recently to talk about the transition from the entrepreneurial stage of a business to the scaling stage, the future of mobile-local advertising, and the coming wave of consolidation…

Street Fight Daily: Oracle Buys Datalogix, Secret Adds Location-based Sharing

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…datalogixOracle Buys Datalogix, Beefs Up Digital Marketing Cloud (ZDNet)
Oracle on Monday said it acquired Datalogix, which provides digital marketing data as a service. The deal complements Oracle’s acquisition of BlueKai and rounds out its digital marketing suite. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but for Oracle Datalogix is a stocking stuffer that gives it yet another pillar to offer data as a service and another cloud product to sell… Secret’s Relaunch Adds Location-based Sharing (VentureBeat)
The broadcasting of public posts is now split between those from friends and those that are location-based, similarly to Yik Yak, another anonymous mobile app focused on college campuses and local communities… In China, a Rapid Jump to Mobile Advertising (New York Times)…

Openings and New Hires at Dex Media, Yext, Angie’s List, and LocalVox

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Every two weeks, Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new jobs and hires at Microsoft, Colony Logic, Soleo, PlaceIQ, Fixya, and Placed…

Lessons Learned From the Call Analytics Trenches

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It may be a long time before the true value of call analytics data is fully realized, but I’ve been recording the digital marketing revolution one (often uncertain) hello at a time…

LBMA Podcast: Maps on Clothes, Smart Screens

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On the show: TGI Fridays’ drone attack; Health Insurance benefits with Misfit; search as signal by Mindshare and Google; Monochrome; pop-up Libraries; smart screens by Photon and Panasonic; eBay Australia’s 24-hour Christmas Windows…

Street Fight Daily: Google Measures “Store Visits,” Square Resurrects Wallet

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Google’s Making It Easier to Figure Out if Online Ads Actually Drive In-Store Traffic (AdWeek)… Square Is Resurrecting Wallet, Its Pay-By-Name Mobile App, And Giving It Away (ReadWrite)… Can Wal-Mart Clerks Ship as Fast as Amazon Robots? (Wall Street Journal)…