News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Begins Whole Foods Deliveries, SEO Metrics To Bear in Mind

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Begins Offering Whole Foods Deliveries via Prime… SEO Metrics You Should Be Tracking But Probably Aren’t… A Crazy Idea for Funding Local News: Charge People for It…

Whole Foods Comes Out a Brand Winner on Super Bowl Sunday

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Eagles fans weren’t the only ones cheering about Super Bowl LII on Sunday. Upscale grocery chains like Whole Foods saw increases in foot traffic in the hours before kickoff, even while multi-purpose stores like Walmart saw fewer shoppers than normal, according to newly released data from Simpli.fi.

Street Fight Daily: Snap Shows Signs of Life, GroundTruth Launches New Platform

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Snap Shares Skyrocket As It Makes Ad Buying Easier and Sees User Growth… Understanding the B2B Content Marketing Landscape… Poll: Facebook’s Algorithm Change Isn’t All Bad for Publishers…

Commentary

7 Things I Want From My Phone for Christmas

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I’m a little weary of the “Holiday Tech Stuff” roundups, as I suspect are you, so let’s just leap right into what I’d demand from Cell-a-Claus and his App Elves, were he to ask.

I’ve been a goo… not horrible guy this year, Cell-a, really. And I’m not asking for anything current technology would not permit. So please bring me the following:

‘Location’ is at Apple’s iPhone Core (Patently Apple)

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The site Patently Apple has a rather interesting observation about some of the recent patent filings by Apple related to its iPhone. According to PA via records it has surface Apple is attacking the big and the small around geolocation, with technological tweaks and improvements (that are actually

quite complex) and practical setups to solving common human needs like “what am I about to pass on my trip to grandma’s that I might be interested in?”…

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…

Latest Posts

Case Study: Blimpie Closes the Loop With New Mobile Gaming App

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“For a restaurant company like ours, millenials are hugely important,” says Steve Evans, vice president of marketing at Blimpie, the quick-serve restaurant with nearly 1,000 franchise locations. “They tend to be a huge customer base for years to come, and all the research that we’ve seen shows consumers make their brand choices — and their brand loyalty — early on in life. If you get people in their earlier years, they’re still open to change.”

Street Fight Daily: Fake Yelp Reviews Rise, Yahoo Gives Maps A Facelift

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyA Whopping 20% Of Yelp Reviews Are Fake (MarketWatch)… Surprise: Yahoo Maps Gets A Facelift, New Features (SearchEngineLand)… Hyperlocal Power: Urban Compass Raises $20M At A $150M Valuation; Adds Advance Publications And Marc Benioff As Investors (TechCrunch)…

Digital First Partners With PaperG For Digital Ads

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Digital First Media has teamed up with PaperG to build custom multi-device advertising campaigns for both desktop and mobile. The partnership allows PaperG, which automates display advertising campaigns for small businesses, to provide Digital First Media’s network of nearly 1,000 sales representatives with a full-service platform ad solution for mobile and desktop…

The Local Sharing Economy Is Here (But Scale Will Prove Difficult)

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Every iteration of things that can be shared, from baby clothes to power boats, has been picked through by college students who have been steeped in the gospel of Zuck and turned into a local service set to scale. The problem, however, is that almost every startup gets stuck at city one. The reason? If the sharing requires some sort of physical exchange of goods or services, then it requires the commitment of two people who live close to each other to complete transaction. And they need to find each other even though the just-launched app won’t reach critical mass for a long time…

Mobile Is Huge — But Two Key Elements Could Slow Its Growth

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We in the media think we’re in the information business, when the reality is that we’re very much in the advertising business, and advertising is in disruption right now. In their effort to influence and produce results, marketers are simply unable to demonstrate even a modicum of restraint when it comes to the line between useful and nuisance.

Street Fight Daily: Square and Intuit Play Nice, Confidence Crisis With Reviews

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologySquare and Intuit Play Nice With New QuickBooks Integration (AllThingsD)… Confidence Crisis: 40 Percent Don’t Trust Online Reviews (MarketingLand)… Finding a Model for Sac Press by Looking at The Hawaii Independent (ScramentoPress)…

Study: Mobile Users More Willing to Share Location Than Browsing History

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When it comes to mobile marketing, consumers are more willing to share the places they go in the real-world with brands than the websites they visit, according to a new study conducted by Millward Brown. The research, which surveyed 1,572 consumers who have downloaded a mobile app in the past year, found that 43% of respondents were willing to share their location with companies compared to one of every ten who said they would share their browser history…

5 Tools for Building a Community Marketplace

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With their built-in audiences already in place, hyperlocal publications are able to easily overcome one of the biggest obstacles to getting a community marketplace off the ground. However, technical challenges still remain, and building a marketplace from scratch can be extraordinarily time consuming and expensive. Now, a handful of vendors are offering a solution, providing publishers with the tools they need to create custom marketplaces that can be up and running in a matter of days…

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.”