News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Alphabet Mulls Big Investment in Lyft, Pubs Not Making Money on Facebook

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amid Waymo-Uber Drama, Alphabet Considers Lyft Investment of About $1 Billion… Study Finds Publishers Are Not Making Much Money on Facebook… Why Amazon Is the New Google for Buying…

Will Local News Providers Make Virtual Reality an Actual Strategy?

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Trying to predict how popular VR will become is difficult because the most accessible virtual experiences so far, like those achieved with Google Cardboard and the New York Times’ “360 videos,” reveal only a glimpse of VR’s potential.

How Brands Are Targeting Moms with Localized Campaigns

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Moms control the purse strings year-round, but their influence on the retail sector is especially strong during the fourth quarter, when back-to-school and holiday shopping give the industry a much-needed boost. Here are five examples of hyperlocal strategies that brands are using to target moms right now.

Latest Posts

A Quick Guide to SMB Success on Mobile

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Less than 5 percent of local businesses have a website optimized for mobile devices. In some cases, a company’s site isn’t even “findable” through searches on mobile devices. Worse, consumers, when they do find the local business’s website, can only see a desktop-specific version. Here are a few tips to help demystify mobile for business owners and help them get started right away…

Conference Notebook: Yelp ‘Focused,’ Foursquare Denies Slower Growth

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It doesn’t look like Yelp has plans to push across the local marketing stack anytime soon. Responding to a question of whether Yelp planned to position itself as a local operating system for local business like Groupon, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said it was “hard to say what tangential businesses [Yelp would] get into” but “its safe to say we’re focused.”

Street Fight Daily: Groupon CEO on Hot Seat, Apple Maps Manager Out

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Is Andrew Mason on the Bubble as CEO of Groupon? (AllThingsD)… What Kinds of Local Stories Drive Engagement? The Results of an NPR Facebook Experiment (Nieman Lab)… Apple Fires a Manager Over Its Misfire on Maps (New York Times/Bits)…

How Mobile’s Demographic Shift Impacts Local

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It seems that young people in the 18-24 demographic spend, on average, more time on mobile devices today than they do watching television. It also appears that mobile usage is far ahead of “playing games and computer use for leisure.” What does this mean for the future of local search and local media? I would say it’s not unlike the lessons the Republican Party was forced to confront in the aftermath of its recent election defeat…

Wifarer CEO: Indoor Location Is a Multibillion-Dollar Market

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Indoor mapping has the potential to become a big business. But it’s early days and big questions are still looming — particularly regarding Apple. Last year the tech giant closed off iOS’ wifi API, the data most companies use to determine a user’s position indoors, dealing a major blow to a number of startups. Street Fight recently caught up with Phillip Stanger, the CEO of indoor mapping startup Wifarer, to discuss why indoor location matters for marketers and how companies can navigate around Apple’s obstruction…

5 Hyperlocal Tools to Help Retailers Curb Showrooming

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The biggest threat to the average local retailer this holiday season isn’t the big box store down the street, but the e-commerce outlet selling the same products for less money online. In an effort to help curb “showrooming” and entice customers to make more in-store purchases, local retailers are increasingly utilizing hyperlocal solutions. Here are five tools that retailers can use in their efforts…

Street Fight Daily: DNAinfo Launches in Chicago, Zillow Acquires HotPads

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.After a Few Twists, DNAinfo Officially Launches (Crain’s Chicago Business)… Zillow Acquires Rental And Real Estate Search Site HotPads For $16 Million To Grow Its Rental Marketplace (TechCrunch)… Not Just Another Web 2.0 Company, Yelp Basks In Its Star Power (Fast Company)…

Mobile-Local Shopping Comes Into Focus

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Customers are getting poached right under retailers’ noses by Amazon and the rest of the showrooming brigade. So what are retailers doing to combat these challenges as we enter the biggest shopping season in the biggest year of local retail transformation since the invention of the department store? The results so far are mixed…

PaperG CEO on the Mobile Opportunity for Small Publishers

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For hyperlocal publishers, mobile may or may not be an imminent priority today — but it’s critical that they have a plan for tomorrow. Street Fight caught up with Victor Wong, CEO of local ad tech platform PaperG and former co-chairman of the IAB local committee, to discuss how local publishers can best tackle mobile in 2013…

Local Social Spend Projected to Hit $2.95 Billion by 2016

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Local spend on social media in the U.S. is set to jump 1.7x by 2016, according to the Fall Update to BIA/Kelsey’s Social Local Media Forecast. The numbers show a slight reduction in the firm’s earlier projections, which had put the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for local social spend at 28.9%…