News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Launches UPS & FedEx Rival, P&G Cracks the Code on Marketing
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon to Launch Delivery Service for Businesses, Challenging UPS and FedEx… Drawbridge Partners with mParticle to Help Brands Deliver Personalized Experiences… Liftoff Dating App Report Shows Cold Seasons’ User Behavior and Geographic Trends…
Commentary
7 Things I Want From My Phone for Christmas
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:
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‘Location’ is at Apple’s iPhone Core (Patently Apple)
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
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
The Local Sharing Economy Is Here (But Scale Will Prove Difficult)
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
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
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Square 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
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
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
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… PayPal 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?
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
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’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Give 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
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…
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