News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Google Bests Facebook on Web Traffic Referral, How BBC Uses Voice Assistants

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… In Reversal, Google Now Sending More Traffic to Publishers than Facebook… How the BBC Is Using Voice-Assistant Platforms… The Mall of America’s New Chatbot Makes Holiday Shopping Easy…

Google Websites — To Infinity and Beyond?

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“In the developing world, Google has a simplified path to the GMB where if a business first creates a website they can get verified more easily,” Mike Blumenthal notes. “Thus the website becomes the hook into Google’s data funnel. In the US, and most other developed countries, I would speculate that it is typically the other way around”

Big Political Ad Spend Set for Local in 2018, but Will News Sites Be Ready?

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Political ad spending totaling $1.9 billion will pour into the digital space, most of it on the local level, Borrell Associates estimates in its 2018 forecast. But daily newspapers and local news “pure-plays” will have to fight hard for their share against Facebook, Google and the other digital platforms.

Latest Posts

5 Reasons to Add Gift Cards to a Digital Loyalty Program

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Promoting customer loyalty is a broad goal that local merchants are tackling in many different ways. While plenty of platforms utilize mobile redemptions and out-of-the-box rewards or coupons to curry favor with consumers, an increasing number of loyalty providers are moving outside the virtual environment with pre-loaded physical gift cards…

Hyperlocal Sustainability (Round 2): Upbeat ‘Indies’ Say They’re Winning

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Following up on my column from last week, here are more unvarnished thoughts from “indie” hyperlocal editors and publishers I’ve been talking to about sustainability (a word, by the way, that sets the teeth of some of these entrepreneurial journalists on edge)…

Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Talks ‘Localization,’ Smartphone Adoption Reaches Majority

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Checking Into Foursquare? Yahoo’s CFO Talks About Next Mobile M&A — Including Importance of “Localization.” (AllThingsD)… Pew: 61 Percent In US Now Have Smartphones (MarketingLand)… Yelp Eyes Shopping On Site (SocialTimes)…

With Disparate Data, Factual Founder Sees Opportunity

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In a fireside chat with Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs at Street Fight Summit West Tuesday, Gil Elbaz, chief executive at Factual, the location data company, said there’s a massive opportunity for startups to help digest and analyze the massive amount of data coming from mobile devices. The challenge, says Elbaz, is folding additional information into location data to help better understand the context of the user…

Why Marketplaces Fail, and How to Make Them Work in Local

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Earlier this spring, Andrei Hagiu, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, published a piece in the Harvard Business Review looking at why marketplaces fail. Based on recent research, Hagiu, and his co-author Julian Wright, broke down the various pitfalls of building a marketplace, concluding that on the continuum between multi-sided platform and reseller, most businesses fell closer to the reseller end of the spectrum…

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Moves into Groceries, Foursquare Sells to SMBs

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Amazon Plans Major Move into Grocery Business (Reuters)… Foursquare Testing Paid Promotions With NYC Small Businesses (AdAge)… Could Offline Communities Be The Next Big Thing? (Forbes)…

What Investors Look for in a Hyperlocal Startup

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The hyperlocal industry has seen a spurt of big funding news over the past few months with companies like Booker and FoodPanda nabbing double digit rounds. During an afternoon panel discussion at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco, Alex Ferrara of Bessemer Venture Partners and Sharon Weinbar, a partner at Scale Venture Capital, broke down the way in which they approach investing in the local space…

Waze VP: What Search Did for the Internet, Maps Will Do for Mobile

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As the local market readjusts to a mobile-first world, executives from Waze, ESRI, and Placed discussed the role of mobile analytics and mapping in a changed scenario at a panel discussion during the Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco Tuesday…

With the Point-of-Sale, Simple and Open Breeds Success

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During a panel at the Street Fight Summit West moderated by Mark Canon of IBID Strategic Consulting on Tuesday, Patrick Gauthier, Head of Product Strategy, Retail Services, PayPal; Square’s strategic partnerships chief Chuck Kimble, and Clover CEO Leonard Speiser took a deep dive into the delicate dynamics of bringing local businesses’ payments into the cloud…

Yelp VP Ghaffary: 2.5 Trillion in Commerce Will Remain Offline

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Contrary to Marc Andreessen’s recent claim, offline retail is not going to die, said Mike Ghaffary, VP at Yelp, during the morning keynote at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco Tuesday. Ghaffary argued that the majority of the over $3 trillion in commerce will stay offline — and subsequently, the largest opportunity isn’t in bringing commerce online, but in using the web to support it offline…