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Latest Posts

Case Study: Chelsea Piers Goes Beyond Groupon

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Since 2009, the recreational complex Chelsea Piers in New York City has sold approximately 20,000 group coupons — until recently, all Groupons. But after a two-year exclusive came to an end with the deals giant in the spring, Chelsea Piers SVP in charge of marketing and sponsorships, Dana Thayer, began tracking other services, looking at verticals, price points, and what her competitors were doing…

Street Fight Daily: 10.25.11

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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?

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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?

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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

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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)…

What BuyWithMe (And All Daily Deals Companies) Could Learn From Woot

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We here at Street Fight and other media sources have been calling for a big consolidation in the daily deals market for some time now. But consolidation can take two forms. To date, that has been acquisitions. Going forward, there may be more outright closures. Woot did an amazing job in the daily deals space before getting acquired by Amazon last year. What Woot was trying to pull off, however, was far less complicated than what is being attempted in the local deals space right now…

Local Quotables: BJ Emerson, Joe Meyer, Tim O’Shaugnessy and more…

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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.

Street Fight Daily: 10.21.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

Groupon has put to rest speculation about its IPO. It is on, albeit at a slightly lower valuation than originally expected. It intends to raise between $480 million to $540 million in the public markets, setting a valuation range between $10.1 billion and $11.4 billion. (AllThingsD)…

“The daily deal companies are version 1.0 of great things you can build with the Internet that help local merchants drive foot traffic into the door,” says Dennis Crowley in an interview. “What we are doing with Foursquare is version 2.” (TechCrunch)…

What Independent Hyperlocals Need for the Long Haul

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The surging growth of hyperlocal news—today there are more than 3,000 sites in operation and hundreds more in various stages of formation—is being driven by independents. The media disrupters are the people who have the passion and gumption to develop and run their sites with financing from their own personal credit cards.

I’m thinking of entrepreneurs like Debbie Galant, who with $3,000 co-founded  Baristanet in the crowded media market of northern New Jersey in 2004,  expanding it to seven communities. And Scott Brodbeck who, while he was completing a master’s program, started ARLNow in  Arlington, Va., in suburban Washington D.C.

Case Study: The Trouble with Mobile Marketing for a Small Town Restaurant

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At Chattan Loch Bistro & Public House in Bellefontaine, Ohio (pop. 13,069), owner Tracy McPherson is struggling to find cost-effective ways to reach customers in her small town. After a promising start with Foursquare in 2010—when customers were checking-in and claiming specials at least a couple days a week—McPherson says interest in the app has waned, in part due to a lack of resources at the restaurant. She now relies on a mix of local ads, email newsletters, and successful beer and wine clubs to get new customers through the door.