News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Instagram Creeps Into Payments, Reviews Shape Local Offline Purchases

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Instagram Quietly Launches Payments for Commerce… Augmented Reality Heading to 3 Billion Devices, $85 Billion in Revenue… Yelp’s Chad Richard on the ‘Decentralization’ of Reservations…

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…

Commentary

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…

Google’s Local Offerings Have Gotten Too Complicated

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The extended Google+ Local rollout has been more troublesome than most. Usually when Google has experimented with social services in the past, such as Google Buzz and Google Wave, it has done so in a tangential way that does not threaten core functionality. With Google+, the gamble is to make social the center of all search activity, and yet the full realization of a social context for Google’s local search tools has yet to appear…

Latest Posts

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.

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Tests Local Commerce, GrubHub Raises Pricing

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyReport: Amazon to Expand Into Real-World Payments With New Amazon Local Commerce Business(Fierce Wireless)… GrubHub IPO Pricing Tops Estimate(Bloomberg)… Online Services Go Offline in China(Wall Street Journal)…

Case Study: Heineken Uses Foursquare Partnership to Reach Target Demo

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Size matters for Heineken, which is why the global beverage brand took a close look at Foursquare’s 40 million users and 3.6 million check-ins at bars, restaurants, and nightlife venues when deciding whether to partner with the vendor on its 2014 mobile campaign. “As a brand, we are always investigating new and innovative ways to bring our programs to life,” Heineken brand manager Bram Reukers told Street Fight…

Alternative Press Expands Hyperlocal Network Into Suburban Philly

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Mike Shapiro began his hyperlocal news network The Alternative Press in three suburban New Jersey communities — including his hometown of New Providence — in 2008. TAP has now expanded to 30 communities in the state and Shapiro has decided to cross over into Pennsylvania with a site in Lower Providence, in suburban Philadelphia’s Montgomery County….

Street Fight Daily: Just Eat Orders IPO, Lyft Raises $250M

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyJust Eat Joins Parade of London Tech IPOs, with $2.44-Billion Market Cap (Wall Street Journal)… Lyft Raises $250 Million From Alibaba, Third Point and OthersNew York Times)… Jim Brady will leave Digital First Media(Poynter)…