News and Analysis

Raise Report: BigCommerce, Poq, SoundHound Secure New Funding

Every two or three weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for Uberflip, Cera, Pusher, and Rocketrip.

Survey: 72% of Shoppers Use Online Reviews to Judge Local Businesses

A survey by Netsertive found that 72% percent of consumers use online reviews to evaluate local businesses and eight-in-10 always research big items online before making their purchases in-store.

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

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…

Commentary

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…

Hyperlocal Online Ads Are About to Get a Lot Bigger — Billboard-Sized

The next time you are in your doctor’s office, at the mall or at the local sports arena, the ad that you see on a plasma TV display or a digital kiosk could have been purchased and placed there using the same type of system advertisers are using today to buy and place online display ads…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Square Makes Loans, Why Microsoft Invested in Foursquare

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyWith Square Capital, Square Begins Offering Controversial Merchant Cash Advances (Recode)… It’s Now Obvious Why Microsoft Invested Millions In Foursquare (Business Insider)… Uber Says it Doesn’t Discriminate by Neighborhood in Chicago (GigaOm)…

Political Spending May Stem the Tide, But Legacy Media Is Losing Its Grip

Borrell Associates predicts that political spending on marketing is set to balloon in the next four years, growing from 120 billion in 2012 to well over 950 billion in 2016. The overwhelming majority of that money will still be spent traditional media — namely, television —with only a fraction spent online…

Why In-Store Messaging Needs Offline Measurement

Offline, in-store environments historically have had limited tools for measuring impact of any marketing effectiveness, reach, or exposure. But mobile location technologies with geofence capability measure shopper behavior and produce actionable data sets, opening new opportunities to quantify messaging impact. Measurement is not only possible, but actionable…

How to Decide If Your Business Should Use Indoor Location Technology

Indoor location technology may not be the right solution for every merchant on the street. The costs and complexities of these systems can sometimes be too much for businesses in certain industries to handle, including smaller merchants who may not see enough foot traffic on a daily basis to benefit from using in-store location tools. Here are five questions that business owners should ask when weighing the decision of whether to start using indoor location technology…

Street Fight Daily: Square Reportedly Postpones IPO, Apple Brings iOS to the Car

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologySquare IPO Postponed Indefinitely (Fox Business)… Apple to Bring iPhone Software to Cars (Wall Street Journal)… Google ‘Map Jacking’ is Rampant, a Threat to Public Safety (Komo News)…

GrubHub Files For $100M IPO

Grubhub has officially thrown its hat into the I.P.O. ring, with the public filing of its prospectus Friday morning. The online ordering firm, which merged with competitor Seamless in August, filed the prospectus confidentially with the SEC last week under a new provision introduced by the JOBS act aimed at making the IPO process less expensive for smaller companies…

How Qualcomm Wants to Reinvent Retail

Qualcomm Retail Solutions works with retailers and other venue owners to put the company’s two positioning technologies, Gimbal and iZat, to use. Street Fight recently caught up with Kevin Hunter, senior director of product management for Qualcomm Retail Solutions, to talk about the explosion in retail technology, the emerging technology driving innovation, and what the introduction of mobile will mean for the existing retail landscape…

Openings and New Hires at Angie’s List, Resolution Media, Kenshoo, Sensis

Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, jobs at AOL, Yahoo, Google, VendAsta and Street Fight.

LBMA Podcast: Urban Airship, Future of Privacy, Facebook/WhatsApp

Welcome to This Week in Location Based Marketing, a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association. Top stories of the week include highlights from Broadcom, Philips, rock band Archie Pelago, Baidu, Weve, Innovid and Cisco, eHarmony and Foursquare and Ruckus.

Street Fight Daily: Uber Confessions, Smartphone Adoption Slows

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyUber Cab Confessions (GQ)… 58% of US Adults Say They Have a Smartphone — And Other Sobering Stats From Pew (Poynter)… How Foursquare Uses Location Data to Target Ads On PCs, Phones (AdAge)…