News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Voice Really Is a Game-Changer, Alexa’s Stunning Rates of Consumer Adoption

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… The Voice Shopping Future… Even Amazon Is Surprised By How Much Customers Use Alexa… Unicorns Gorge As Investors Dish Out Bigger Rounds, More Capital…

Street Fight Daily: Local Mobile Ads to Soar in 2018, Amazon Posts Record Profits & Ad Revenue

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Mobile Ads to Soar in 2018, Especially in Local… Amazon Posts Largest Profit in Its History As Ad Biz Grows… Factual Expands Location-Based Ad Tools…

Upserve Uses Restaurant Transaction Data to Track Industry Trends

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Upserve recently released its State of the Restaurant Industry Report, using data pulled from thousands of restaurants and millions of transactions through the United States. Performing a retroactive analysis, Upserve’s data science team looked at 2017 trends to see which predicted trends lived up to the hype, and which fell flat.

Commentary

Newspapers + GeoMesh of Providers = Interesting

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In the olden days (1991) I earned a stipend-like salary working for a Gannett newspaper outside Philadelphia. I did a number of things there, some of them poorly (i.e. quickly copyediting stories on tax rate hike debates) and some well (writing headlines; teaching desktop publishing).

But one of the most fascinating jobs I got to do was man the Associated Press wire. On the old glowing-green terminals they had us looking into in the smokey and nearly windowless newsroom, the AP feed would pour in like a precursor to The Matrix’s cascading code imagery…

Grocery Guide: The Hyper-GeoMobileSavvy List!

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OK ShopKick, ShopSavvy, CardStar and all the rest of you: Time for a new challenge. We the lazy, the lost, the hurried, the ignorant need someone to not only lead us to water; we need to be led from pond to pond.

I’m talking of course about those of us (particularly of a certain gender) who when entering a grocery store with list in hand (or more likely on our phone) proceed to criss-cross the place looking for sugar among the paper towels and ice cream near the butter. Who lays out these places? And forget about the wayfinding provided by signage. There needs to be a better way…

‘Hyperlocal’ – Everyone’s Sold Except Advertisers?

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This guest post, originally here, is from BRANDWEEK writer Elena Malykhina

Hyperlocal is not all it’s hyped up to be as an ad medium – but such venues are making efforts to juice up their offerings and turn the focus on targeted consumer-centric content and experiences into increasingly compelling opportunities for advertisers…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nears Deal For Braintree, Intuit Overhauls SMB Product

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyPayPal Nears Deal for Braintree Payments (Wall Street Journal)… Intuit Overhauls QuickBooks Online as Competition for Small Businesses Ramps Up (AllThingsD)… < strong>eBay Unveils Click & Collect Service So Small Merchants Can Offer In-Store Collections (TheNextWeb)…

Is Content King in Local Too?

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In the pantheon of buzzwords overtaking pitch decks and CMO-speak, “content marketing” is the new darling. The term has legitimate grounding to be fair, but like “long tail” and “web 2.0” in days past, its overuse precedes it. Content marketing also isn’t anything new — it’s been done for years, albeit under the ethically challenged “advertorial” rubric among other flavors. Now it’s new, improved, and hitched to en vogue terms like “native.”

In Nod To SaaS Future, ReachLocal Rolls Out Lead Management Product

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The company is extending its subscription ReachEdge product to a general audience, providing tools for merchants to not only generate, but also manage leads that come directly to a business’s website or through a display or search campaign. Kris Barton, the company’s director of product, says the problem that software needs to solve for small businesses today is that of converting demand into customers…

Street Fight Daily: Regulators Crackdown on Fake Reviews, Facebook ‘Closes The Loop’

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyGive Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You (New York Times)… Facebook Connects Impressions To Offline Sales For Telcos (MarketinLand)… Mobile Payments Are One-Third of Braintree’s Business (PandoDaily)…

What Scale Means After Patch and Groupon

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Macroeconomic developments and internal politics aside, both Tim Armstrong and Andrew Mason succumbed to the flawed assumption, held by many at the time, that local was a land grab. They mistook opportunity with urgency, falsely believing that the local market was some homogenous block, which would open its coffers to the first company that invested enough money, or put enough feet on the street, to make it work…

5 Tools Retailers Can Use to Create Indoor Maps

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Mobile navigation apps can easily direct consumers to a business’ front door, but once shoppers step foot inside — where the real action takes place — they’re usually on their own. Now, a handful of indoor mapping vendors are using hyperlocal technology to help retailers, malls and other large venues take the next step in guiding customers through the purchase funnel, with tools for developing interior maps that can be used to direct shoppers toward specific aisles or locations within an establishment…

LBMA Podcast: Placecast’s New Mobile Ad Platform, Bing Partners With Local Corp

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On the show: Audi brings public desire and reward to the Mini in London, Estimote powered by iBeacon is just the start of the mote world, Coca-Cola’s Positivity Wall, and PayPal takes their hands-free payments to the masses. Plus Chuck Martin’s Mobile Minute gives us the Cool vs. Creepy scale for location based marketing…

Street Fight Daily: Google Wallet Comes To iOS, Groupon’s Monster Rally

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyGoogle Wallet Finally Comes to the iPhone (With a Big Asterisk) (AllThingsD)… Three Reasons Groupon’s Monster Rally Will Continue (Wall Street Journal)… Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Ignored Advice From Elon Musk and Peter Thiel And Succeeded Anyway (CNNMoney)…

Community News Revenues: How the Networks Compare to the ‘Indies’

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I was surprised — shocked, actually — to discover that the regional community news network Daily Voice has average ad sales of only $38,000 annually on a current basis at each of its 41 sites in suburban Connecticut and New York. Is this the new normal for ad revenue at community news sites? I went to four other community news publishers-owners, all independents, to get their reaction…

Case Study: Lowe’s Builds On Mobile Strategy With In-Store Item Locators

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As consumers get savvier in the way they use mobile technology while shopping at brick-and-mortar stores, retailers are beginning to provide their own tools to combat the showrooming effect. For Lowe’s, that means offering mobile tools that shoppers can use to locate items in-store, scan barcodes, read product reviews, check out image galleries, and manage their own loyalty program accounts…