News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Adobe Buys Magento, Inside Google’s Rise to Digital Ad Dominance

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Adobe Buys Magento to Become Digital Ad Design Powerhouse… How Did Google Get So Big?… Some Companies Shrug Off GDPR…

Macaroni Kid Leverages Local Influencers to Connect Brands to Consumers

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“Our secret sauce is our ability to connect brands with consumers on a local level, via authentic local influencers,” says Macaroni Kid co-founder Eric Cohen. “Other media outlets can plug into an algorithm to target an audience. We have local moms telling other local moms the scoop as they hand out samples.”

Street Fight Daily: Square Embraces Sales and Moves Beyond SMBs, The Staying Power of Email

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… As It Grows, Square Deploys Sales Force to Acquire SMB Customers & Bigger Brands… Selling to Multi-Location Brands: Building on Omnipresent Email… Microsoft Acquires AI Company to Make Cortana and Bots Sound More Human…

Commentary

How Does Yelp Make Money and Where Is It Going Next?

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Yelp combines the nimble and engineering-driven product focus of a Foursquare or Facebook, with the direct SMB sales of a YP. It’s a powerful combo that few companies have, and few people talk about in blogospheric proclamations of category killers…

Local Search Is Becoming a Mobile Experience With a Social Layer

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One of the more surprising revelations from a recent comScore study is that Facebook is now the #2 mobile app for local search, behind Google Maps. This puts it ahead of Mapquest, Bing, and Apple Maps. Yelp isn’t even in the top five. Are people really using Facebook for local search? This may seem counter-intuitive to some, but consider that Facebook is by far the most popular mobile app in the world…

In Tomorrow’s Retail Universe, the Destination Is ‘You’

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Based on clues we can see all around us, it is my belief that retail, as we’ve known it for at least the last two millennia, is coming to an end. It won’t end tomorrow or next week. In fact, it will likely take at least a decade or two. But it’s very clear to me that we are coming to a tipping point and data, processing power and connectedness lie at the center of it all…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Plans Grubhub Competitor, Google Moves to the Car

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyAmazon Is Quietly Launching A Local Takeout Service To Rival Seamless And DeliveryHero (TechCrunch)… Google Moves to the Car with Android Auto (Recode)… Uber: The Great Disruptor of Pizza Delivery? (Fortune)…

How Retailers Can Bridge the Gap With Beacons

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Using beacons, content can be delivered to a consumers’ mobile device that augments the shopping experience and bolsters the relevancy of the merchant’s real-time communications based on the consumer’s location and real-time behavior. As a result, the messaging can be perceived by the consumer less as “marketing” and more as “helpful.”

8 Strategies for Reaching Out to Online Influencers

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Rather than sitting idly by while influencers dictate what’s being said about their businesses on social media and review websites, merchants are beginning to reach out to these social media users on a personal basis. Here are eight strategies that marketers should consider when reaching out to influencers online…

Street Fight Daily: ZocDoc Raising $152M, FAA Bans Delivery Drones

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyZocDoc Raising $152 million at $1.6 Billion Valuation (Fortune)… FAA Bans The Use Of Drones To Deliver Packages (TechCrunch)… RelayRides’ Altered Future Points To A Ride Sharing World Dominated By Lyft And Uber, Not Zipcar (Forbes)…

Shopkeep Founder: Micros/Oracle Deal Won’t Help SMBs

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With its acquisition of Micros, Oracle is affirming its commitment to making, selling, and continually repairing outdated technology that has far outlived its usefulness. This approach, while wasteful, works for big companies with million-dollar IT budgets — but small businesses neither want nor need technology that sits in a room and takes up space…

At Indochino, A Retail Model Built to Order

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When the founders of Indochino, a startup that sells custom suits online, began to drum up strategies to enter brick-and-mortar retail, they found some surprising fat in the model: the store itself. What they came up with in response is an ephemeral alternative to offline selling that draws on some of the flexibility of ecommerce while retaining the experience of a physical presence…

5 Self-Serve Solutions for Creating Location-Targeted Mobile Offers

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Locally-targeted mobile ads are expected to reach $4.5 billion in the U.S. this year — an increase of $1.6 billion in the last year alone. As merchants search for creative ways to take advantage of location-targeted advertising, many are turning toward self-serve solutions for creating location-based mobile promotions…

Street Fight Daily: McDonald’s Orders Ahead, Oracle Puts Micros On Menu

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyMcDonald’s Is Secretly Testing Its Own Order-Ahead And Payments App(BusinessInsider)… Oracle Puts Micros on Menu as Restaurants Eat Up Software (Bloomberg)… Google Is Getting Into Domains. Should GoDaddy Worry? (Mashable)…

No, the Amazon Smartphone Isn’t Going to Kill Retail

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The in-store experience provides tremendous benefits to shoppers, and the Amazon Fire phone further illustrates the opportunity to use innovative mobile solutions to improve and influence the shopping experience…

LION-Borrell Revenue Survey Unravels

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A revenue benchmarking partnership between the Local Independent Online News publishers association and Borrell Associates is coming apart because too few of LION’s publishers want to share their information with the the local media research company…