News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Amazon’s Grocery Disruption Begins, Retailers Embrace Direct Mail
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon to Lower Whole Foods Prices Monday and Offer Prime Members Benefits Soon… Why Data-Driven Retailers Are Learning to Love Direct Mail… Two Uber Investors Seek to Defend Kalanick in Legal Battle…
Latest Posts
Transaction Overview: Telenav Acquires ThinkNear
ThinkNear provides Telenav with a product that can drive near-term advertising revenue and is well suited to be integrated with Telenav’s turn-by-turn direction capability. The ThinkNear team and their mobile advertising knowhow are also an important addition to Telenav’s engineering and product organizations…
Street Fight Daily: Shopkick Rebuilds App, LocalVox Raises $7.4M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Shopkick Totally Recreates Its Shopping App. Gamification Out, Design and Content In (Pando Daily)… LocalVox Raises $7.4M for One-Stop Shop for Local Marketing (GigaOm)… Buy Reviews on Yelp, Get Black Mark (New York Times)…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…
Case Study: Restaurant Rewards Customers With Cash-Back Promos
After being disappointed by the results of a yearlong advertising campaign with Yelp, The Range Kitchen & Cocktails general manager Edward Camarillo decided to partner with MOGL, a card-based loyalty platform that rewards customers with 10% cash back when they pay with registered credit and debit cards at participating restaurants…
Street Fight Daily: Urbantag Acquired, OpenTable Optimizes Mobile
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Social Network Tagged’s Fifth Acquisition: Location-Based Mobile Discovery App Urbantag (TechCrunch)… OpenTable Helping Restaurants to Lift Last-Minute Reservations on the Phone(AllThingsD)… A Waze Ahead of Apple in Map Race (AdWeek)…
Following Pivot, ThinkNear Finds Buyer in Telenav
A day after Esri snapped up location-technology firm Geoloqi, Telenav has agreed to dish out $22.5 million to acquire ThinkNear, a hyperlocal advertising startup. The TechStars alum will join Telenav’s two year-old mobile advertising group, and form a new platform called Scout Advertising that will serve both the company’s consumer facing mobile application, Scout, as well as other partners…
Placed Launches Platform to Measure Offline Consumer Behavior
Location analytics provider Placed has unveiled a new platform to measure offline consumer behavior, offering marketers and publishers the ability to measure the physical businesses their customers visit. With Placed Panels, which relies on opt-in consumer participants, marketers need only to create their own unique panel through Placed’s website and recruit consumer panelists…
Geoloqi’s Amber Case on Esri Acquisition: ‘Just Made Sense’
On Monday Esri announced its acquisition of Geoloqi, the makers of back-end location technology solutions for developers, bringing the startup’s real-time location and geocoding support to Esri’s sprawling online mapping product. Geoloqi will continue to serve its existing customer-base as a new Portland, Ore.-based research and development arm of Esri…
PaperG Survey Highlights Rising Importance of Mobile
A new survey released by local advertising technology company PaperG highlights the clear, continuing indication that mobile advertising is becoming increasingly important to media buyers. In the survey of 512 ad sales executives, 94% said their prospective clients are interested in mobile advertising. Meanwhile, 90% were optimistic about the prospects of mobile display ads…
Streets Ahead: Perplexity’s Ranking Logic, Instagram Metrics