News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: User Time on Facebook Drops, Highlights from #SFSW18

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… User Time on Facebook Declines for First Time Ever… Google’s Rivals Say Search-Page Practices Still Unfair… Alexa Can Now Send Text Messages to Phones…

#SFSW18: How Yelp Is Partnering Its Way into the Future

“We’ve made sure there’s an authenticity in Yelp so that people going to the service for reviews can count on it,” said Yelp SVP Chad Richard in the final conversation of Street Fight Summit West in Los Angeles. Richard called authenticity “the essence of the business.”

#SFSW18: Local’s Visual Future: The Rise of AR, VR, and New Customer Experiences

“We want to please the restaurants and we want to please the users,” said Danny Gordon, CEO of Auredi, just one company at Street Fight Summit West using visual technology to enrich customer experiences. “It’s unbelievable the amount of excitement we see when we show customers dishes that look exactly like they do in person.”

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: OpenTable Tests Payments, New Life for EveryBlock

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyOpenTable Begins Testing Mobile Payments (New York Times)… Five Months After Everyblock Shuts Down, A Media Company Revives The Product (PBS Media Shift)…
Groupon’s Restaurant Reservation Service Goes Mobile (Mashable)…

Behind Big Retail Brands’ Complicated Relationship With Loyalty

More and more, loyalty startups are looking beyond the SMB market, and to larger brands as a potentially lucrative market with substantially lower sales costs. But, the outcome could be more complicated than it first appears. In a recent conversation with Street Fight, Dawn Maire, creative director at Rockfish Interactive, suggested that retailers might be better acquirers than partners for many loyalty companies…

How the GeoWeb Will Change Consumer and Business Behavior

Digital location-based technologies are now a transformative force for consumers and businesses, particularly when coupled with the rapid adoption of mobile and the growth of big data. I’m a big believer in the future for “GeoDisruption” — the potential for consumers and businesses to interact in fundamentally new ways to take advantage of increasingly precise location-based technologies…

8 Tools For the In-Store Delivery of Mobile Coupons

Sixty-three percent of shoppers say they would be more likely to make a purchase if they received a coupon during their shopping experience. Still, only 27% of companies have plans to implement location-based marketing in 2013. Here are eight straightforward tools that retailers can use to satisfy consumer demand and drum up additional sales with the delivery of mobile coupons…

Sponsored Post: Case Study in Finding a Robust Ad Serving Platform

It is common for large publishers to face a challenge in finding an ad serving platform that is simultaneously scalable, reliable, secure, simple in usage, and can meet the specific needs of a company. After evaluating some alternatives, Wooga decided to start testing Epom’s Ad Server with Asynchronous Tags in a controlled environment to analyze and compare the new Ad Server efficiency. With successful results, Wooga decided to move all advertisement inventory to Epom.

Street Fight Daily: Google Revamps Zagat, Groupon Loses Mobile Chief

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologylogo_zagat_twtGoogle Unveils Revamped Zagat Website, Apps (TheNextWeb)… Groupon Loses Mobile Head David Katz (TechCrunch)… New Facebook for Business Hub Launches With Tips, Tools, Case Studies (SearchEngineWatch)…

Powering the Payment Stream

For years, local search has fed consumers to a technological black hole. The systems on which local businesses rely to manage day-to-day operations have remained offline, relegated to legacy tools or silo-ed in digital products not built for the web. But that’s changing. Thanks to a number of new companies that are reimagining the way consumers shop and reprovisioning the systems that business owners use to monitor and transact the exchange of goods locally, that “source code” is coming online, filling a critical gap in the local commerce stack…

Is Foursquare’s SMB Monetization Here for Real?

The company may discover that SMBs paradoxically prefer the simplicity of flat pricing over relatively complex (albeit more efficient) performance-based ads. The latter requires some degree of ongoing maintenance which challenges non-tech-savvy or time-starved (read: majority) SMBs. This is one reason for famously high churn for SMB self-serve advertising…

Street Fight Daily: Top Patch Exec Resigns, Mobile Payments At Starbucks Increase

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyTop Executive At AOL’s Local News Business, Patch, Resigns (BuzzFeed)… Mobile Payment At U.S. Starbucks Locations Crosses 10% (TechCrunch)… I’m Still Waiting for My Phone to Become My Wallet (New York Times)…

LivingSocial Narrows Losses In Q2

Losses at LivingSocial slowed in the second quarter as the company began to rebound from a tumultuous start to the year. The company posted a $31 million net loss last quarter — a 38% decrease from the quarter earlier — as operating expenses and revenue sank slightly over the same period, according to a quarterly filing by Amazon, the company’s lead investor…