News and Analysis

Retailers Use AI for In-Store Experimentation, Customer Service

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Brick-and-mortar retailers are looking for an edge in their fight against the e-commerce behemoths, and as the battle rages on, it’s looking like artificial intelligence might be the answer.

Street Fight Daily: Google Revamps Maps, Echo’s Market Share Slides as Speaker War Heats Up

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Maps Platform Arrives, Changing the Game for Developers… Amazon Echo Losing Market Share as Smart Speaker Rivalry Intensifies… Square’s Loss Widens As Spending Picks Up…

Who’s Using Local AR? And How Often?

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According to a recent survey, AR users like what they see, with a whopping 73% reporting high or very high satisfaction. But non-users report explicit disinterest, with the biggest reason being the rather daunting “just not interested.” This presents a big hill for AR app developers to climb. 

Commentary

How Mobile’s Demographic Shift Impacts Local

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It seems that young people in the 18-24 demographic spend, on average, more time on mobile devices today than they do watching television. It also appears that mobile usage is far ahead of “playing games and computer use for leisure.” What does this mean for the future of local search and local media? I would say it’s not unlike the lessons the Republican Party was forced to confront in the aftermath of its recent election defeat…

Mobile-Local Shopping Comes Into Focus

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Customers are getting poached right under retailers’ noses by Amazon and the rest of the showrooming brigade. So what are retailers doing to combat these challenges as we enter the biggest shopping season in the biggest year of local retail transformation since the invention of the department store? The results so far are mixed…

Black Friday’s Local Opportunity: Taking Preprints Digital

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Publishers across the country give thanks for the fantastic single copy sales they get on Thanksgiving due to the bundle of preprint circulars that come with the paper ahead of Black Friday. But for quite some time people inside and outside of the newspaper industry have been discussing the fact that the preprint business is declining — and might go away altogether…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Google Books Hotels, What’s Next for Square?

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyGoogle Checks In to the Hotel Business (Wall Street Journal)… A Sale or IPO or More Funding? Here’s What Might Be Next for Square (Recode)… Uber’s Threat Finally Hits as Postmates Surges to 10k Deliveries a Week (Pando)

Reconsidering Location for On-the-Go Consumers

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Out-of-home works because it is exactly what its name implies. That’s a powerful advantage. But with great power comes great responsibility. And in order to capitalize on this advantage, we need to re-think our approach. Once we start regarding out-of-home as a behavior (specifically, of consumers on-the-go) instead of just a set of location-specific screens, our success is almost guaranteed…

6 Strategies for Measuring the Impact of In-Store Messaging

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By 2016, mobile is expected to have a $327 billion influence on in-store sales, but many of the merchants who utilize these hyperlocal technologies are having difficulty determining the true ROI of their campaigns. Here are six strategies for businesses to measure the impact of their in-store messaging campaigns…

Closely Raises $3M to Turn Its Social Analytics App Into a Business

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Closely, the maker of Perch, a social analytics app for small businesses, has raised $3 million in a series A round of funding led by Grotech ventures. Amid a chaotic local marketing industry, the company has quietly built out a novel business model which draws on learnings from the consumer world to solve one of the most dire problems in the business technology industry: selling to small businesses…

Street Fight Daily: Yodle Plans IPO, Uber Tests Courier Service

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyOnline Advertising Company Yodle Planning IPO This Year (Wall Street Journal)… Uber Expands Into Courier Service With Manhattan-Only Pilot (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Facebook Wants to Turn 25 Million Small Businesses Into Advertisers (AdAge)…

GrubHub(s) vs. Uber(s) vs. Yelp(s): Making Sense of the Mayhem in Local Commerce

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Last week, ride-sharing service Lyft announced that it had closed a $250 million round of funding to compete with Uber in what will likely become a capital-intensive — and noisy — race around the world. But the battle over transportation is just one example of a wider push by tech companies to reinvent traditionally offline industries by developing lightweight marketplaces…

Payment Technology: If it Ain’t Broke… Start an Entire Industry to Fix it.

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Mobile payments is an exciting area of cultural and technological disruption, and at the same time a solution in search of a problem. Somewhere in all the excitement, we seem to have forgotten that paying for things with cash or credit card ain’t broke. We’ve been covering mobile payments closely on this blog and many […]

Street Fight Daily: Square Secures Credit, GrubHub Shares Soar

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologySquare Secures Credit in ‘Low Hundreds of Millions’ (CNBC)… GrubHub Shares Surge in Debut (Wall Street Journal)… TPG Said Close to Airbnb Investment After Snags Resolved (Bloomberg)…

Assess Your Clients’ Local Search Competition in Three Quick Steps

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Local SearchCongratulations! You’ve just signed that hard-to-land client that’s been in your sales pipeline for months. Now the hard (or, I think, the fun) work begins. Where can you deliver the most value for this hard-earned client, right from Day One?

LBMA Podcast: Facebook and Oculus, PayPal and Placed

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Top stories of the week include Iconeme’s talking mannequins; Shyp shipped; Adtile’s kinetic ads for smart watches; AT&T shutting down its Alerts program; Pepsi’s unbelievable bus shelter; and Spacified’s matching service for pop-up store space.