News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: AR/VR Market Grows 72% YOY, How Mall of America Leverages Local Tech
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Content Market for Visual, Augmented Reality Hits $3 Billion… Even as Amazon Lurks, Drugstores Double Down on Bricks and Mortar… Is Google Using GDPR As an Excuse to Restrict Publisher and Advertiser Choices?…
Commentary
The Role of Directories in the New Local Ecosystem
Marissa Mayer’s announcement that Yahoo would be moving its focus away from local search, along with some other significant factors in the developing local ecosystem, calls into question the continued viability of a robust marketplace of local directory and search sites. Here are a few harbingers of a potentially more consolidated future…
Place Off: A Week in the Life of the Mobile Local Revolution
A couple columns back, I covered the collision of big data, mobile and local (please refrain from acronyms… “BiDaLoMo”!). That covered some location analytics players like JiWire and Sense Networks. But since then, the action has picked up. In the last week alone, I’ve had in-depth conversations with others defining this space including Placed, PlaceIQ, and Telenav…
Getting ‘Real-Time’ Into Hyperlocal Advertising
We’ve seen a demand to not only bring local advertisers back into the mix on mobile and online advertising, but a need to provide more relevant and more timely information within those ads. This is because consumers crave “new” at a pace never possible before now – and this desire shows in the response rates measured in multiples of a standard static banner ad…
Latest Posts
How Data is Transforming the Local Purchase Funnel
For years, the local marketplace largely missed out on a data revolution that has transformed commerce on the web. But the rapid adoption of the smartphone is quickly bringing the local shopping experience to parity with ecommerce, transforming the consumer journey and dramatically improving the targeting capabilities available to marketers today…
Why Booker Wants to Blur the Line Between Marketing and Operations
Last year, Bain Capital poured $27 million into Booker, a company that builds scheduling and business management software for small and medium-sized salons. Today, the New York-based startup is working to push deeper into the front office, building a new suite of tools that use a business’s operational data — booking data, payment information and the like — to engage with existing customers, and in some cases, find new ones…
Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click (Part II)
Beyond bringing in big leads — and SMBs paying handsomely for them — call monetization will be compelled by something else: Opportunity cost. We forecast call volume to SMBs to explode (65 billion by 2016) as a result of increasing mobile usage trends. That’s going to mean a whole lot of calls to answer…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Preps IPO, JustEat Eyes London Markets
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GoDaddy Prepares for IPO (Wall Street Journal)… Just Eat Preps IPO In London, Aiming To Raise £100M (TechCrunch)… CMO One-to-One: LivingSocial Evolves from Deals Site to Deals Marketplace (eMarketer)…
Street Fight Daily: Eventbrite Hits $1 Billion, Clinkle’s Clunking Continues
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Eventbrite Tops Billion-Dollar Valuation With New Funding (Wall Street Journal)… Clinkle’s Still a Hot Mess as Its Big Shot COO Departs (Recode)… Israel’s Wix.com Buys Mobile Commerce Firm Appixia (Reuters)…
In ‘Smart Cities,’ A Sea Change for the Web
Over the past decade, a new vision of the future has emerged, in which mobility, and ubiquitous connectivity is actually drawing us back into the physical world. To accommodate the world’s rapid urbanization, a growing sector of tech companies are working to create new ways to make our cities smarter. Anthony Townsend, a senior research scientist at New York University, spoke to Street Fight recently about about the Smart City movement and the changing relationship the physical and digital worlds…
Can New Local Media Consortium Succeed Where Others Have Not?
For two decades, legacy media have tried to pool their threatened resources and capture digital ad revenue to replace the billions of dollars that stopped flowing to their newspapers and TV stations. They have had some successes, but their more ambitious digital partnerships haven’t fared well. Now, a new group of old-media companies have banded together to form the Local Media Consortium in the hopes that it will it be able to succeed where other tie-ups have not…
Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Launches Yelp Help, Retail’s Red Herring
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yahoo Launches Yelp Help in Search to Better Battle Google: Here’s What It Looks Like (Recode)… New Data Suggests “Showrooming” on Amazon Might Not be Killing Physical Retail After All (Pando)… Google Tests Desktop-to-Mobile Retargeting With Brand Data (AdAge)…
Beyond Likes: Win Hearts with Emotional Marketing