News and Analysis
Street Culture: Techstars Co-CEO on Coaching Startups to Define Culture
“I think that culture is one of the few problems that you have to address before they’re problems,” says TechStars co-founder and co-CEO David Brown. “If you’re struggling to figure out how to grow sales, you can wait until sales are in trouble and still turn it around. But if you wait until you’re in trouble with culture, it’s really hard to turn that boat.”
Commentary
It’s Local Media That’s Broken, Not Hyperlocal
In mid-sized cities across America for nearly 100 years, the daily newspaper was the purveyor of enterprise journalism, the opinion maker and a focal point for advertising. In many cities they were monopolies: they set the pricing for advertising, they promoted and punished political officials, and they decided the news cycle every day. But as digital has overtaken American life, mid-sized American newspapers have not kept pace…
Report: Pureplays Using Legacy Media as a Farm System for Sales Staff
Local media companies need to do something to protect their digital sales assets or run the risk of losing them to pureplay web companies, according to a new report from Borrell Associates. Pureplays offer starting salaries in the range of $12,500 per year more than their nearest competitors, the local TV stations. The gap between starting pureplay sales people and those who work for newspapers is an incredible $21,000 more…
Local Video Copyrights in the Age of Online Virality
We need to find a way to attach revenue-producing messages to videos, so that the Web can do its thing without hurting the incentive for local media companies to create such videos in the first place. And I’m not talking about attaching 30-second prerolls. It can be done, and we need to talk about it. The Web is not TV…
Latest Posts
Why Yelp Is Steadily Becoming a Force in Local Data Aggregation
Unlike traditional aggregators like Infogroup, Acxiom, Neustar Localeze, and Factual, which provide basic listings for a very broad range of something like 20 million businesses in the U.S., Yelp is primarily focused on popular businesses — especially reviews of, and deals at, those businesses…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Building New iBeacon Device, Square Eyes Another Acquisition
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Apple is Building a New iBeacon-powered Device, FCC filing reveals (VentureBeat)… Curated Food Delivery Startup Caviar In Talks To Be Acquired By Square For $100 Million (TechCrunch)… Pew: Only 2 Alt-Weeklies Saw Circulation Gains in 2013 (Poynter)…
Designing a New Value Proposition for Consumer Location Data
In a paper published earlier this month, a group of researchers tried to put a price tag on the personally identifiable information that flows from our mobile devices. The results shine a light on the unique challenges facing companies interested in mining location data, and the divergent paths of two tech companies that have built businesses around that information…
Street Fight Daily: TaskRabbit Pivots, Bill Gurley On Uber
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… TaskRabbit Pivots, Launches On-demand Service for Cleaning, Handiwork, Moving, & Errands (VentureBeat)… How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size (Above the Crowd)… Birchbox Is Opening Its First Retail Store, And Here’s What It Looks Like (BusinessInsider)…
Why Retail Will Face the Same Fate as the Media Industry
Jeremy Rifkin, the prolific author who has served as an advisor to a number of world leaders, believes that the astronomical investments in Uber and Airbnb signal the breaking of a long-held “firewall” that kept the transformative effects of the Internet contained to the virtual world. Here Rifkin discusses why a small reduction in margins could kill traditional retail…
With Acquisitions, Brooklyn’s Corner Media Grows Into a Regional Cluster
Publisher Liena Zagare’s independent Corner Media network in Brooklyn has added three established community news sites in the borough to grow into a cluster of seven sites in a market of 1 million people. Street Fight recently caught up with Zagare to learn more about what her two acquisitions will mean for their neighborhoods and her company…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp’s Case Against Google, Urban Airship CEO Resigns
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Leaked Documents Show How Yelp Thinks It’s Getting Screwed By Google (TechCrunch)… CEO Of Startup Urban Airship Leaves Company After Being Accused Of Sexually Assaulting His Ex-Girlfriend (BusinessInsider)… Finding Ways to Use Big Data to Help Small Shops (New York Times)…
Unmanaged Local Listings Hurt Consumers and Businesses Alike
Google Maps and its competitors have become the most important pathways to brick and mortar businesses outside foot traffic and word of mouth. As one recent case indicates, an accurate Google Maps listing can be a matter of life or death for a local business. The company needs a stronger and more concerted effort to enlist the help of business owners to address this problem…
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The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation