News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: DNAinfo & Gothamist Shut Down, CNN Wades Into Commerce
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… DNAinfo and Gothamist Shuttered Suddenly by Ricketts Following Vote to Unionize… CNN Dips Into Commerce with a Digital Product Guide… NYT Beats Profits Estimate as Digital Subscription Count Soars…
Latest Posts
Case Study: Walmart Expands Mobile Efforts With Scan & Go App
The retail giant isn’t trying to dissuade customers from using their smartphones while they shop. In fact, the retailer is beefing up the carrier signals inside its stores to make it easier for customers to get online. Instead, the company is combating the threat of showrooming by encouraging customers to fill their screens with its own mobile application.
DNAinfo’s NYC Schools Guide Shows Off ‘Network Effect’
The neighborhood-centric news site has created a guide that lets users zoom in and out so they can get the nitty-gritty about specific schools and compare it to other schools throughout New York City. The way the design uses dots and arrows to retrieve many pages of articles is a singular achievement in user-friendliness…
Pricing Engine Pools Data to Help VSBs Spend Wisely
With legacy local media companies starting to scale marketing services products, startups now have an increasingly viable channel to manage and distribute marketing products for very small businesses (VSBs). Pricing Engine has built a paid search and display manager that uses collective knowledge to help the smallest businesses effectively buy ads online…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Quantifies Its Value for SMBs, Identifying Anonymous Location
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp Announces A New ‘Revenue Estimator’ For Small Businesses (TechCrunch)… Why the Collision of Big Data and Privacy Will Require a New Realpolitik (Paid Content)… How Indoor Location Could Find Its Way into Apple Services (GigaOm)…
Local Retail Won’t Disappear — Mobile Will Transform the In-Store Experience
“The changes in the next five years in retail will be more profound and transformational than the last 100 years in retail have been because largely because of mobile,” said Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick. “I don’t think people will go [to stores] because they need something. I don’t even think they’ll go because they want something. I think they’ll go because they want to feel better.”
6 Tools for Creating Performance-Based Offers
As pure-play daily deals sites struggle to remain attractive to local merchants, a new model for offers is beginning to emerge. Rather than giving blanket discounts on general merchandise — a hallmark of the original Groupon deals — brand advertisers are increasingly opting to use performance-based offers as a way to drive traffic without necessarily hurting the bottom line. Here are six tools that merchants can use to create performance-based marketing offers…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Buys WifiSLAM, NYU’s Hyperlocal Finds New Home
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM (Wall Street Journal)… Changing Trains: The Local East Village, NYU’s hyperlocal blog, Moves from The New York Times to New York Magazine (Nieman Lab)… Local Search Service Roamz Shifts Again – Now “Local Measure,” Startup Brings Geo-Based Data To Businesses (& Gets Them To Pay) (TechCrunch)…
Restaurant Chain Looks For Location-Specific Trends in Online Reviews
Keeping up with customer reviews and social media chatter can be especially difficult for a national chain. As the director of digital marketing at Houlihan’s, a “polished casual” restaurant chain with 85 locations, Natalie Bass is responsible for making sure the company is being found online and communicating with customers through all the most popular digital channels…
Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels