News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Alexa Now Sets Up 2-Hour Deliveries, Walmart to Make More E-Commerce Acquisitions
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Extends Alexa’s Voice Shopping Smarts to Include 2-Hour Prime Now Deliveries… Walmart E-Commerce CEO Marc Lore Says the Company Will Make More Acquisitions… Yext Hits $124 Million in Revenues in 2016-2017…
Foursquare Analytics, a Dashboard for Location Intel, Debuts
Today marks the public debut of Foursquare Analytics, a dashboard that puts location intelligence in the hands of brands the company works with. The dashboard, he says, leverages Foursquare’s location tech capabilities for restaurant chains, retailers, and others who need deeper consumer analytics.
Latest Posts
Digital Pioneer David Cohn: Hyperlocals Need Passion AND Revenue
David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, a nonprofit pioneer in community-funded reporting, has been hired by the UC/Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to help develop a sustainable business model for hyperlocals. He will run three Ford Foundation-funded, student-staffed hyperlocals in the Bay Area, with the aim of making them self-supporting. As he began his new assignment, […]
Case Study: Portland Salon Uses Scoutmob to Increase Exposure, Not Financial Risk
As a new business owner in Portland, Ore., Robin Carlisle has relied heavily on local press and word-of-mouth to promote her salon, Holiday Hair Studio. She initially shied away from daily deal promotions out of fear that an influx of customers would overwhelm her studio, located inside a vintage trailer. She ultimately decided to give Scoutmob a try this past July, in part because the company was new to Portland . Carlisle felt confident that she would be able to use the promotion for exposure without taking on more financial risk than she could handle…
Street Fight Daily: 09.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
In an effort to diversify revenue and maintain its rapid growth, Groupon is fast evolving its business model. Recently Groupon deals have gone mobile, real-time, and location aware. Now the company has launched “Groupon Goods,” an ecommerce product that marks the company’s most aggressive departure away from its core daily deal offers. (CNET)…
Daily deals service Signpost is growing its sales force at a rapid pace that could surpass competitors like Groupon and LivingSocial by the end of the year, according to the company’s CEO, Stuart Wall. Signpost employs local contractors, called Deal Scouts, to sign up local businesses for the service. (SocialBeat)…
Patch Pushback: Warren Webster Fires Back Amid Analysis and Criticism
Rick Robinson gets the lowdown from Patch’s president about why they’ve lost sales execs; the network’s plans to “stand on its own financially; and a reply to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s suggestion that Patch could possibly, at some point, be considered for a sale. He also comments on the HuffPo-Patch dynamic, neither confirming nor denying that Patch will merge editorial operations with HuffPo.
CEO Josh Williams Explains Gowalla’s Overhaul
Last Thursday, Gowalla released a much-anticipated revamp of its location-based application, capping off a blockbuster summer for the geo-social space. The company’s CEO Josh Williams announced the redesign in early September, citing a return to Gowalla’s fundamental mission of encouraging people “to go out and explore.” The driving force behind the Austin-based company’s renaissance appears to be elsewhere — less an ideological about-face and more, an extensive retrofitting aimed at making Gowalla a potentially profitable company….
Street Fight Daily: 09.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
New data from Yipit finds that in August each of the industry’s top five deals was from a different category – and all were from Groupon. The top-grossing deal last month was a travel deal from Groupon Getaways, a new category that Groupon entered less than six weeks before. (Yipit Blog)…
Groupon is about to roll out a new product called Groupon Rewards that tries to give merchants a way to increase customer loyalty. With a Groupon Reward, a business that offers a regular Groupon deal will be able to follow up with another reward that gets unlocked after the customer spends a certain amount of money. (TechCrunch)…
Freeing Retail Data Will Enable Innovation
If mobile commerce is to move ahead, the current closed structures around offline data will need to to change. Our society’s perceptions of what is acceptable private and public information have changed, and we will need a similar paradigm shift in retail and consumer commerce data provisioning…
Street Fight Daily: 09.27.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
September can’t end soon enough for Groupon. The month brought a string of staff departures, SEC spats and the indefinite shelving of the company’s long-awaited IPO. Now a second class of employees has filed a class action against Groupon over unpaid overtime. (PaidContent)…
Facebook is offering up to $10 million in free advertising to small businesses in the middle of slight changes to how the social networking site allows brands and consumers to interact on its Pages. (ReadWriteWeb)…
The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation