News and Analysis

Amazon Rolls Out Free Whole Foods Deliveries for Prime Members in San Francisco & Atlanta

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Further encroaching on one of hyperlocal’s oldest verticals, Amazon sent shivers down the spines of grocers in San Francisco and Atlanta on Tuesday, announcing it would begin delivering Whole Foods orders for free to Prime members in those cities.

SMB Index: Local Stocks Take a Hit in February

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In a turbulent February, which saw stocks give back gains from January over 2 days (Feb 7–9), the SCP SMB Index retreated 2% during the month.

SMB OS Operators, Part I: Upserve

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The first in our series of interviews on SMB OS is Upserve founder and CEO Angus Davis. Formerly Swipely, UpServe had been living out the principles of SMB OS long before we started calling it that.

Commentary

Hyperpublic: Structuring Place Data, Redefining Hyperlocal’s Scope

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What might we see spring forth from the ether when local data is properly structured? It’s easy to imagine various applications of search — i.e. “Show me all wine bars that serve croquettes.” Similarly, one can imagine that this type of data would be immensely valuable to advertisers who want to target, for example, everybody who drinks beer and is in walking distance of an establishment…

Why Local Will Dominate Mobile Ad Spend

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BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Mobile Local Ad Revenue Forecast projects that local mobile ad spend will go from $320 million last year to $3.37 billion in 2015 — when it will comprise about 2/3 of overall ad spend. Why will locally targeted ads be so dominant in the coming years?

Why Hyperlocal Marketing Will Best Gamification

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Hyperlocal marketing strategy and gamification both strive to accomplish the same purposes: attract new customers and drive increased customer-visit frequency. And yet one of these won’t be fueling marketing efforts just a couple years from now. In my mind, it’s hyperlocal that wins, while gamification, as defined and promoted today, disappears.

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Redesigned App, HomeJoy Raises $38M

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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’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…

What Programmatic Buying Means for the Small Business Market

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Search has dominated digital spend for years, overshadowing a display market that has struggled to overcome surging inventory and lackluster targeting capabilities. But that’s starting to change. Street Fight caught up with Acquisio co-founder Marc Poirier to discuss how the growth of programmatic buying, and the emergence of Facebook Exchange, may make the display market more appealing for small businesses in the coming years…

Street Fight Daily: Yext Launches Pages, Square Buys Photo App

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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

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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…