News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Google Rolls Out Media Subscription Tool, Amazon Expands Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Rolls Out New Subscription Tool with McClatchy News Sites… Amazon Shows Its Drive for Efficient Ordering is Relentless, Delivering Straight to Cars… DoorDash Makes a Big Push into Grocery Delivery, Partnering with Walmart…
Commentary
True Innovation in Local News Organizations Still Lacking
News sites need to innovate around their core competencies by spending time understanding their customers (advertisers and consumers) and what problems they can solve for them. The solutions should be a good fit for the organization and should be something that they are uniquely positioned in the marketplace to provide…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…
Waze Highlights Inconsistencies in Local Data
There are too many different ways to categorize businesses, and none of them represents a unified standard for online search. Such a standard if widely implemented would make all businesses categorized as grocery stores line up neatly with each other and would provide a significant boost in overall relevancy…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb’s Grand Plans, Foursquare’s Recommended Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans (Fast Comapny)… Foursquare CEO: How We’ll Tell You Where To Eat And What To Order (ReadWrite)… Matt Cutts: Google Mobile Queries May Surpass PC Search This Year (SearchEngineLand)…
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…
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