News and Analysis
Local Marketing on Alexa? The Real Estate Industry Gives It a Shot
There are almost 40 real estate “skills” currently listed in Alexa’s directory. This is greater than those related to lawyers/attorneys, doctors/dentists, and a host of other SMB categories, and overall there doesn’t yet appear to be much adoption of voice technology at the local business level.
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Fights Companies Soliciting Reviews, Snap Reckons with Post-IPO Disaster
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yelp Increasingly Cracking Down on ‘Review Solicitation’… Snapchat Is Having a Crisis of Confidence. So Are Investors… Postmates Launches Grocery Service, Scheduled Deliveries, and Revamped App…
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A Year After Its SXSW Moment, Highlight Keeps Working to Connect People Nearby
Paul Davison’s location-based startup Highlight has had a strange trajectory. It was the darling of South by Southwest in 2012, then soon lost its sheen for a variety of reasons, prompting a series of “What Happened to Highlight?” posts around the time of this year’s Austin event. Street Fight recently caught up with Davison to talk about retrenching, the definition of fun, and his very real belief that using Highlight can change the world around us.
PublicStuff Gets Answers for Local Citizens, Even in Chinese
Local publishers have long served their communities by shining a light on municipal issues until the folks at City Hall take notice and fill in those dangerous potholes. But in the past few years we’ve also seen several startups pop up that want to make an even more direct connection between citizens’ complaints and government action…
Street Fight Daily: Desktop Local Search Drops, Print YP Death Watch
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Search On Smartphones Up 26 Percent, On Tablets Up 19 Percent In 2012 (Search Engine Land)… Annual Print YP Death Watch (Blumenthals)… The Yext Big Thing (Crain’s New York Business)…
6 Things I Learned About Local By Failing in Local
I remember the bright-eyed conversation I had with my eventual partner Ed Lucero that sparked Tackable. It was 2009, and Instagram was being born somewhere else. The iPhone was brand new, and developers were racing to build apps that captured the power of local information. There are two worlds out there, I told Ed, the physical world and the digital world. Overlay the two, and things get interesting. Imagine!
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.”
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