News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Walmart Grows As Advertising Platform, Amazon Paves Way for Alexa Everywhere
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Walmart Leverages In-Store Data to Grow as an Advertising Force… Amazon Opens Up Access to Developer Tools for Adding Alexa to Commercial Products… Facebook Is Giving Advertisers More Flexibility When Buying Mid-Roll Video Ads…
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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…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Snaps Up Savored, Ebay’s Mobile Momentum
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Groupon Moves Into Restaurant Reservations With Savored Deal (New York Times)… EBay’s Mobile Momentum: 100M App Downloads, 100M Items Listed (All Things D)… Data Firm Hits Craigslist With Monopoly Claim (GigaOm)…
iOS6: Can Google Beat Apple in its Own Backyard?
Mapping is a game ultimately won on function rather than form. This requires lots of listings data and search algorithms; in other words, things that are non-core to Apple. Relative to Google’s tenure in this area, Apple is only starting to stitch together local vertical content partners like Yelp and TomTom. And it’s already starting to show…
7 Reporting Tools for Hyperlocal Journalists
It can be difficult for journalists covering hyperlocal news events to find enough relevant information and quality sources to generate the types of comprehensive articles and reports that readers find useful. Here are seven tools that hyperlocal journalists can use to streamline the process of gathering data and generating the types of multiplatform content that readers embrace…
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