Commentary
How Groupon Will Expand in 2012
As Groupon matures, its path will doubtless expand beyond its core product. Perhaps that’s why I have such a hard time keeping a straight face when people say that Groupon’s model for daily deals is fundamentally broken. It’s not. If anything, their second act has the potential to be even bigger than their first…
Hyperlocal in 2012: More Consolidation and Scale, Less ‘Free’
What it comes down to is that hyperlocal companies like Foursquare and Groupon, despite their “hyperlocal” raison d’etre, need scale to bring an effective proposition to merchants and big brands. Scale helps, even if that just means a larger audience within a metro area or even a single neighborhood…
Doubling Down on SinglePlatform
Your average small business owner has a limited marketing budget and precious little time to spend on their online presence — those that do have the resources want to see short term, tangible returns on their investment. SinglePlatform, a one-stop shop for restaurants to build a digital presence, may have an inside track on finessing this elusive small business relationship…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Redesigned App, HomeJoy Raises $38M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Foursquare 7.0 Brings Passive Location Technology To All (GigaOm)… Homejoy Raises $38M As It Looks To Expand Beyond Home Cleaning (TechCrunch)… EBay, PayPal Pinpoint Stores For Mobile Shopping (USA Today)…
New Borrell SMB Report: ‘The Deer Have the Guns’
The 903 small business owners surveyed in a new study from Borrell Associates said they expected to spend only 12% of their digital advertising budgets in 2013 on banner advertising, sponsorships, and classifieds. Meanwhile they expected to spend more than half of their marketing budgets on owned channels, investing heavily in managing their website (35%), running email marketing campaigns (13%), and social media (14)%.
Watch Out Intuit — Booker Guns For Demandforce With New CRM Tools
Eight months after raising a massive Series A round, Booker is making its push into a new, and potentially massive, market: CRM. Today, the New York-based company, which began selling booking and business management software to service businesses, rolled out Promote, a Demandforce-like product that allows businesses to tie email messaging and social media campaigns to the goings-on of their business…
Buttry Sees Progress for Digital First’s ‘New Model’ for Community News
Steve Buttry, the digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, began his career in community newspapers more than 40 years ago in Columbus, Ohio – as a teenage carrier. In the years since, he’s been a reporter, editor, and teacher of journalists around the world. These days, Buttry’s job is to complete the “print-to-digital transformation” of two slimmed-down “legacy” news media companies, Journal Register and MediaNews Group. To find out how it’s going, I put these questions to him…
5 Keys to Making Location Work for Mobile Marketing
Smartphones generate billions of bits of location data every day, creating an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to understand and engage with local consumers at scale. In a Street Fight webinar Wednesday sponsored by YP, Patrick Dolan of the IAB joined David Petersen of Sense Networks and YP’s Luke Edson to discuss the trends that make location data a must for mobile marketing, and outline a handful of ways advertisers can use big data to unlock local relevance in their campaigns…
Street Fight Daily: Uber’s Financials Leaked, Intuit Buys Docstoc
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Leaked: Uber’s Internal Revenue and Ride Request Numbers (ValleyWag)… Intuit Acquires Docstoc To Broaden Its Offering To The Smallest Of Small Businesses (AllThingsD)… NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide, Snowden Documents Show (Washington Post)…
In Search of a Local Twitter, Circle Discovers the Problem of Proximity
After failing as a dating app, Andreessen Horowitz-backed Circle thinks it can find a second life as a localized version of Twitter — helping people message and interact with others in the area. The app allows users to share content with users nearby, using algorithms to surface posts based on proximity on relevancy to each user. A small portion of the content — around 10% — is sourced from Twitter, but the bulk of the posts come from the service’s 1 million active users. Today, the company is rolling out new functionality that allows users to tag content with specific categories, and follow topic feeds…
Street Fight Daily: Yext Launches Pages, Square Buys Photo App
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Square Buys Photo-Sharing App Viewfinder (PCMag)… Newly Internationalized Yext Launches “Pages” To Help Businesses Sync Their Website Data (TechCrunch)… RetailNext Buys Eric Schmidt-backed Nearbuy Systems (Silicon Valley Business Journal)
Bezos Might Get His Delivery Drones Sooner Than You’d Think
If Amazon really wanted to get unmanned delivery aircraft into our skies by the end of the decade, maybe Jeff Bezos could set up a series of challenges, working with DARPA. They could perhaps use U. S. government facilities like simulated urban environments on bases as contest venues. The FAA could chip in with providing specific guidance on how to make drones urban airspace legal for commercial purposes. Bezos could underwrite the contest. All IP created would remain the property of the participants…
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