News and Analysis

LMA Goes Small to Spread Disruptive Ideas Among Local Publishers

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A recent Innovation Mission to San Francisco/Silicon Valley drew 13 senior executives in the news business (newspapers, TV, radio and research and development). It was built around three themes: audience engagement, platform strategies and using human-centered “design thinking” to solve thorny problems that bedevil most news providers.

Street Fight Daily: Walmart Continues to Innovate, Mobile Video Ad Spend Overtakes Display

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Walmart Develops a Personal Shopper Service and Store Without Cashiers… Mobile Video Ad Spend Overtakes Display… Former Orbitz CEO Joins Uber as the Company’s First COO…

BUST: A Hard Landing as Soft Surroundings Files for Bankruptcy

Could Revamped Loyalty Programs Save the Retail Industry?

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As retailers grapple with finding ways to reinvent the real world shopping experience, some are revisiting their loyalty programs, which have gotten stale over the years. Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, and Sephora are just a few of the well-known brands trying to create added value by offering services through their loyalty programs.

Latest Posts

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…

The Local Search Shadow Economy

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We know that there exist a great number of businesses in our local communities that service a variety of needs at their clients’ homes or business locations. Aside from specialized services like Angie’s List and Service Magic, there are few local search outlets that serve potential clients or service providers well in terms of their ability to connect a need with the appropriate provider…

Street Fight Daily: Patch Sees Social Growth, Consumers Warm to Mobile Wallets

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.29% of Consumers Would Choose a Smartphone Over a Wallet When Going Out (MobileCommerceDaily)… Growing Consumer Interest for In-Store Delivery of Mobile Coupons, Says Study (i2G)…

Mobile Local Advertising: Not Just for Early Adopters Anymore

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Over the past few years I’ve done some axe-grinding about the lack of location targeting in mobile advertising — and the fact that desktop ad strategies have largely been ported over to the small screen, particularly among large brands and agencies. But in recent months we’ve started to see some of those habits break down, beginning with newer companies in mobile that don’t have to “unlearn” anything to get there…