News and Analysis
Follow-Up Thoughts on the SMB Marketing/Operations Universe
“Regardless of the right package, the key for both agencies and small businesses is to choose best-of-breed components in each galaxy that integrate with each other so that you can add relevant and profitable services over time,” David Mihm says to Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly column.
Dr. Soon-Shiong and His New ‘Patient,’ the L.A. Times: Will His Rx Be ‘Local’?
My hunch is that Patrick Soon-Shiong will find that applying advanced technology to local news is not as challenging as conquering cancer, especially if he listens to what Angelinos say is their biggest concern by a wide margin – getting from their home to work or other day-to-day destinations.
Commentary
2011: The Year the Check-in Reached Puberty
Michael Boland is a guest author. To submit a guest post, go here.
In the location wars of the past two years, one of the battle cries has been the need to continually innovate “beyond the check-in” — building things on top of the core check-in function, driven by evolving device capability and user demand (or boredom).
Companies have taken this in various directions — “checking in” to TV shows, for example. Sector leader Foursquare has dabbled in things like Superbowl check-ins.
At least week’s Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley talked about how the check-in grows up even as it stays focused on “the relationship between people and places.”..
Where ‘Hyperlocal’ Is a Movement, Not a Business Model
I’ll bet you £10 that “royal wedding” is the first thought that jumps to the mind of an American journalist asked about Britain today. Yet with the ever-present fixation on their profession’s future, perhaps journalists in the U.S. should look past the palaces to the real action happening at the hyperlocal level…
WhosHere? Two Billion Free Text Messages, That’s Who
I’ve been wondering what happened to WhosHere, and all at once a friend pinged me about them and I’m sent a news bulletin trumpeting how myRete (developer of WhosHere) has delivered its 2 billionth free message on behalf us its 2.5 million members. Nice.
So what is it? As the company states:
WhosHere is the first mobile social networking app for the iPhone to let users meet new people and interact based on proximity. The application introduces a user to others with whom they have something in common. When a user finds someone interesting, they can send free text and image messages and make free VOIP calls. All this is done without disclosing any personal information unless the user chooses to provide it.
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Latest Posts
Hyperlocal Site Xtraxtra.com Re-launches With Focus on Non-profits
Four years after launching, Massachussetts-based xtraxtra.com has re-launched with a focus on benefiting local non-profits and charities. The partnership between the hyperlocal website and non-profit organizations allows it to reward them for bringing in more traffic to the site, while simultaneously generating sponsorship and advertising revenue…
In Push to Measure Mobile ROI, Marchex Beefs Up Call Analytics
Marchex, the publically-traded call analytics firm, has released two new products this morning aimed at improving its ability to attribute calls to mobile actions and to determine the actual quality of a call. The move comes as a number of advertising technology firms have launched new attribution services in recent months, scrambling to measure return on investment for an increasingly interested, but skeptical, brand advertiser…
CardFlight Raises $1.6 Million In Seed Round
After launching a private beta of services in May, New York-based CardFlight has raised a $1.6 million seed round to expand the company’s mobile payments platform led by venture capital firm, ff Venture Capital. CardFlight, which provides apps and tools for large and medium-sized merchants, allows developers to incorporate in-person card payments into their own app…
Aisle411 CEO: Retail Will Be the Biggest Opportunity for Indoor Location Tech
The St. Louis-based company works with large retailers and small mom-and-pop shops to use indoor navigation apps to enhance the shopping experience for consumers while allowing retailers to track a shopper’s behavior in-store. In addition to a consumer-facing app, the startup, which raised $6.3 million in September, develops white-label applications for retailers, enabling clients like Home Depot and Walgreen’s to integrate indoor navigation into their existing products…
As Digital Media Gets ‘Horizontal,’ It Acts More Like Local Businesses
Local businesses are the most suited to life in the networked world, because they already deal with people directly, and often on a first-name basis. To the extent that local businesses have learned to do this, they can teach the rest of the business world how to behave in our increasingly collaborative environment…
LBMA Podcast: DoubleDutch, WordLogic Reach, and Gap’s New ‘Three Screen’ Strategy
Welcome to episode #149. On the show: Millennial Media partners with Placed and Neustar and, boom, value is created. Meanwhile, Joingo Places launches (and we wish it would stay just above the stratosphere). Our mobile minute with Chuck Martin focuses on the future of retail search, and our special guest is Cree Lawson, founder and CEO of Arrivalist..
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