News and Analysis

TruRating, Verifone Deal Highlights Importance of Customer Feedback Data

In a move that highlights just how important customer feedback data has become to mid-size businesses, the global payments and commerce juggernaut Verifone recently announced that it’s partnering with TruRating, a comparatively small but influential customer insight company that specializes in point-of-sale customer feedback solutions.

Home Services Company Porch Acquires Rival Serviz

Seattle-based home services platform Porch has struck a deal to buy rival on-demand home services platform Serviz, growing the former’s network of home professionals to new markets, the company announced on Wednesday morning.

Sprinklr Partners with Nextdoor to Power Hyperlocal Social Campaigns

Touted as the first deal of its kind, the partnership opens up for brands a social platform that provides the unparalleled opportunity to target users with verified addresses who are guaranteed to inhabit the same geographical spaces and jabber about the same local brick-and-mortar businesses.

Commentary

3 Mobile Marketing Musts for Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

Over the past few years we’ve seen the mobile marketing industry mature, with new standards and best practices emerging to help marketers reach mobile consumers as they move throughout their day. Here are three mobile marketing strategies which have become table stakes for physical retailers…

Using In-Store Analytics To Counter the Threat from Disruptive Digital Retailers

Online retailers have successfully proven that leveraging analytics drives conversions and improves shopper experience. Indoor analytics provides these same invaluable insights to physical stores, closing the data gap between digital and brick-and-mortar environments…

What’s in a Swarm? Making Sense of Foursquare’s Split

It’s hard to envision now, but it could be that a decoupled discovery and recommendation service will be just what Foursquare needs to scale its dataset beyond entertainment and to encourage users to improve the quality and accuracy of venue information. These developments would turn Foursquare into a viable competitor to data aggregators like Infogroup and possibly to Google Maps itself…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Expands Search, Amazon Tests Same-Day Delivery

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Hands-On With Facebook Post Search: Strong Recommendations, Yelp Should Worry (TechCrunch)… Amazon Tests Bike Messengers For One-hour Delivery In New York City (MarketWatch)… Decline In Organic Reach Changes Facebook’s Value Proposition For SMBs (AdExchanger)…

How Digital Is Destroying the Mechanics of High-Margin Products

The Internet is positioned to transform companies that have been selling over-priced physical products whose absurdly high margins have been hidden from consumers by complicated purchase processes that look a lot like services…

Gilt Groupe Co-founder Tries Her Hand at On-Demand

Earlier this year, Glamsquad, a seed stage startup offering in-home hair and makeup services, brought on Gilt Groupe co-founder and early advisor Alexandra Wilkis Wilson as chief executive. Street Fight caught up with Wilkis Wilson last week to discuss the challenges in merging the data-driven ecommerce approach with the realities of running a real-world service…

Street Fight Daily: Mobile Search To Exceed Desktop, Instacart’s Big Round

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Mobile Search Will Surpass Desktop in 2015 (eMarketer)… Instacart Is Raising North Of $100 Million At A $2 Billion Valuation (TechCrunch)… We Can’t Trust Uber (New York Times)…

At Pinterest, a New Pitch to Small Businesses

Pinterest has managed to carve out a solid domain in a jam-packed social media landscape. Now, it’s time to build a business — and the local market is poised to play a big role, said Joel Meek, the head of the company’s small business efforts, during a BIA/Kelsey event in San Francisco on Thursday…

Openings and New Hires at Niche Media, Balihoo, and YP

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 Yext, SnapRetail, PlaceIQ, eBay, Hearst, and more…

LBMA Podcast: Amazon Home Services, Retail Prophet

On the show: Google takes over Times Square; Drones in TGI Fridays; Shazam goes in-store with Mood Media; Audi’s new car sharing platform; Fujitsu turns light into image recognition. Our resource of the week is 3D printed maps for the blind…

Street Fight Daily: Uber Raises $1.2 Biliion, Yahoo’s Mobile Comeback

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Uber Raises $1.2 Billion, Putting Its Value at $40 Billion (New York Times)… Yahoo to Surpass Twitter in U.S. Mobile Ads (AdAge)… Google Gooses Resellers of Its Biz Apps With 10% Incentive (Wall Street Journal)…

Will The On-Demand Economy Loosen Google’s Grip on Local?

Over the past decade, Google has controlled the way we find and interact with local businesses with an indomitable grip. But will a shift away from the information-based businesses — namely, search and advertising — to more transactional models lead to a change? According to speakers at a BIA/Kelsey event yesterday, that’s a distinct possibility…

YP Study Touts the Effectiveness of Its Search Products

Earlier this week, the 100+- year-old company released new research that found adults who use YP to search online are more engaged in several key ways compared to other searchers. Street Fight spoke with YP’s CMO Allison Checchi recently, who said that the company’s deep roots in local search help drive that behavior.