News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Google Makes Maps Interactive, Amazon Rolls Out ‘Instant Pickup’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Brings Q&A to Maps, Further Entering the Local Recommendation Space… Amazon Adds ‘Instant Pickup’ in U.S. Brick-and-Mortar Push… Aiming for Transformation via Acquisition, Non-Tech Companies Buy Tech Firms…
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New Jersey Hyperlocal Network TAP Celebrates 4 Years, Continues to Expand
Former lawyer Mike Shapiro’s The Alternative Press has now grown to 18 separate hyperlocal publications, including licensees, and is preparing for another major expansion. How does Shapiro do what some news industry experts have said is next to impossible for independent community sites like his? Street Fight caught up with him recently to find out…
Street Fight Daily: Pew Studies Local News, LevelUp White Labeled
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… New Pew study: Where You Live Helps Shape Your News Diet (Nieman Journalism Lab)… LevelUp Arms Merchants With White Label Payment Apps (GigaOm)… Local Corp., a Web 1.0 Company, Thrusts Itself into Mobile Era with New iOS and Android Apps (Pando Daily)…
How Restaurants Can ‘Listen’ to Location-Based Services
Many restaurants take a pulse of the Twitter and Facebook conversation about them, but how is that information being combined with and understood alongside location-based services like Foursquare? Perhaps the bigger question to ask is, if you’ve invested in social media fan building, how are you correlating that social data with the behaviors of those fans in the physical world?
Extending User Reviews to Places, Block by Block
Block Avenue launched last week with an offering that gives locals the opportunity to grade their neighborhoods, blocks and businesses down to the building level. Users assign grades from A to F on specific blocks and for businesses, which are displayed on maps to show the destination spots (A’s) as well as danger zones (F’s)…
Case Study: Boston Tattoo Shop Uses Deals to Build Email Database
At Stingray Body Art in Boston, events and promotions manager Adam Femino takes a more-is-more approach to hyperlocal marketing. In the past few years, Femino has used digital platforms like Groupon, LevelUp, and Privy to acquire new customers, promote brand awareness, and grow his company’s email database…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Sees Talent Drain, Analyst Slams Zillow
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… As Groupon Struggles, Some of Its Brighter Talent is Walking Out Door (Chicago Sun-Times)… Shares of Zillow Sink After Analyst Says Prospects Stink (GeekWire)… Apple v. Google Will Define the Fourth Wave of Online Mapping (Venture Beat)…
Apple Maps: Taking the Long View
There’s no dancing around the fact that the much-anticipated launch of Apple Maps has turned into a fiasco for the company. Yet there’s little doubt Apple will buff out this particular blemish with time. The interesting part will be seeing exactly how the company chooses to address the gap in expertise that led to the current sub-par product. A big acquisition of talent or technology seems likely…
We’ve Seen the Past — And It Is ‘The Neighborhood’
For the past few years, social startups have been spiraling inward toward a smaller and smaller target: your neighborhood, your block. Now Patch is going all in by to leverage neighborhoods through communities of interest. But maybe neighborhoods are an artificial constructs, with borders that mean little even to those they bind. If that’s the case, we need to rethink a lot more than design and tools and lessons of the past…
Nimble Commerce Expands Off of White-Label Model, Launches Deal Exchange
White label deal purveyor Nimble Commerce has taken a page from the online advertising industry’s book, rolling out an offers exchange this morning to play matchmaker between local publishers and sales forces. Called Nimble Network, the product takes much of the thinking from only ad exchanges and applies it to the deals space…
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