News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Starbucks to Test Mobile Order-Only Store, Amazon and Walmart Wage Price War
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Starbucks to Test Mobile Order and Pay-Only Store at Headquarters… Amazon and Walmart Are in an All-Out Price War that Is Terrifying Big Brands… How The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and CNN Approach Platforms…
DoorDash Expands Jack in the Box Partnership, Continues Growth in Competitive Sector
Just four months after announcing that it would be launching a pilot program with Jack in the Box and delivering late-night orders to customers in San Francisco, DoorDash is expanding the partnership and will offer deliveries from more than 830 locations across 229 cities throughout the U.S.
With Metro D.C. Cool to Community News, One Publisher Pulls Back to Profitable Niches
Local News Now seemed to be on an expansion trajectory earlier in the decade with two sites in Northern Virginia and two in the District of Columbia. But today the company has just two — and while they’re both profitable, founder Scott Brodbeck isn’t thinking of launching more sites anytime soon.
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CBS Pairs Traditional and Digital Media to Reach Consumers
On the first day of the inaugural Street Fight Summit, Ezra Kucharz, president of CBS Local Digital Media, said that TV and radio are not going anywhere, but that broadcasting will continue to integrate more with online and mobile. CBS has dramatically reshaped its local online properties to combine content across platforms, resulting in major traffic growth over the past year…
Patch vs. Main Street Connect: How Will Hyperlocal Scale?
Does size really matter in hyperlocal? Publishers debated the point on a panel during the first day of the Street Fight Summit. Patch CEO Warren Webster, naturally, said yes: “2010 was all about scaling up. We do believe that size is important.” Main Street Connect CEO Carll Tucker disagreed, saying that his publication started small and built outward, not wanting to “mass produce and see the wheels fall off.”
Street Fight Daily: 10.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Hyperlocal task/errand site Zaarly has announced that it raised $14.1 million in financing, and that the company is gaining Meg Whitman as a board member. The site works by letting people post requests for an item or service, and then lets other people, businesses and companies bid to fulfill those needs. (New York Times/Bits)…
Stocks columnist Herb Greenberg looks at Groupon’s numbers, determining that the company is “technically insolvent.” (CNBC)…
Will Data Define Deals 2.0?
Industry data has become a commodity in the young, explosive deals space, with aggregators like Yipit selling reports on industry trends. For the most part, the data is publicly available. Aggregators use bots to scrape hundreds of deals sites, indexing the thousands of deals distributed each day across vertical, geography, and, until recently, number of deals sold…
Daily Deals Biz: A Race to Own Local, Not Coupons?
I think we may be witnessing a race to see who can capture the consumer on his own time and his own turf — and his preferred context — with content (and deals) of specific interest to him a few moments before he realizes he wanted it. The daily deals are just a foot in the door to the broader hyperlocal market. Whatever territory and mindshare the likes of Patch have, Goup-Social wants. All this will be chewed on in my panel session at the Street Fight Summit tomorrow, October 25, with Jonty Kelt, CEO of Group Commerce, Chad Billmyer, CEO of Dealbird, and Perry Evans, CEO of Closely.
Street Fight Daily: 10.24.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Groupon Now! generated just $1 million of gross billings in September, despite being available in 25 markets — only $40k per market. In other words, the product that Groupon is telling investors to view as the future of the company, still represents less than 1% of Groupon’s total gross billings in North America. (Yipit Blog)…
Group buying sites in China are reaching 42 million customers according to figures released by The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The figure represents an increase of 125% on the previous the year’s business, with the country’s group buying industry now estimated to reach 8.7% of China’s Internet users. (The Next Web)…
Local Quotables: BJ Emerson, Joe Meyer, Tim O’Shaugnessy and more…
In this week’s column, of all people, the VP of technology at Tasti-D-Lite, BJ Emerson, turned a sharp tongue on location-based services at the LocNav conference in San Jose (“they used to call it ‘stalking'”). Jim Brady talked scale; Joe Meyer described the realization that there was a business in local companies; and one small business owner cleverly noted that Twitter and Facebook don’t do a local merchant much good “if people don’t know where you are located.” Read all of this week’s the wise words and wise-cracks around and about the hyperlocal industry.
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