News and Analysis

Raise Report: Sense360, Yieldify, Heap Secure New Funding

Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for LoveCrafts, Orbital Insight, Bonsai, and Farmdrop.

Street Fight Daily: Can Walmart Compete with Amazon?, Uber Slapped with Federal Inquiry

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Can Walmart’s Expensive New E-Commerce Operation Compete with Amazon?… Uber Faces Federal Inquiry Over Use of Greyball Tool to Avoid Authorities… Mark Zuckerberg Is Still in No Hurry to Monetize Facebook Messenger…

GoDaddy Balances Tech and Self-Service in a Fragmented Marketplace

“The way that you cut through the noise is to build products and services that are loved by the people who use them so much that they proactively tell their neighbor next to them, or proactively tell the business group they are a part of,” says the company’s product chief, Steven Aldrich.

Latest Posts

Opportunity Ripe for Hyperlocals to Help SMBs Get Social

There is a wide-open opportunity for companies to step in and service literally hundreds of thousands of SMBs who need to develop a social marketing plan. Hyperlocal publishers are well positioned to support their business communities by providing turnkey social marketing services…

Case Study: DFW Airport Uses LBS Offers to Spur Traveler Spending

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is a massive, luxurious airport that in some areas resembles an upscale mall. Many of the travelers who passed through, the airport found, were tech-savvy. 84% owned smartphones and 36% were checking in on location-based services while waiting to board their flights. So to connect these travelers to the stores near their […]

Street Fight Daily: 11.10.11

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

News Futurists DNAinfo Expanding to NYC’s Outer Boroughs and Chicago (New York Observer)
DNAinfo, a neighborhood-centric Manhattan news start-up, will expand to all five boroughs in early 2012. After rolling across New York City, the company will begin national expansion, starting in Chicago and hiring about 30 reporters total…

Rumor: LivingSocial & Groupon Looking to Acquire SCVNGR (BostInnovation)
Gregory Gomer: For the past few weeks, we have heard rumblings that both LivingSocial and Groupon are interested in acquiring SCVNGR, and that the options are currently being evaluated by SCVNGR’s top level execs and board of directors…

Trada Expands Crowdsourced Marketplace to Facebook Ads

Trada, the crowdsourced advertising marketplace launched in 2010 to connect advertising experts with small and medium-sized businesses, announced the launch of its Facebook ad platform this morning, marking the company’s first foray beyond paid search…

Passive Profits? A Discussion with Grabio and Others Leading the Way

With the dawn of smartphones and geo-fences (a virtual radius that can be used to alert devices when they breach the invisible border) passive mobile computing can be taken to a higher level…

Street Fight Daily: 11.09.11

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

Yelp Hires Goldman and Citigroup to Lead I.P.O. (NYT/Dealbook)
Yelp, the online reviews site for local businesses, has hired Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to lead its initial public offering of stock, which is expected to value the company at $1.5 billion to $2 billion…

CrowdMob Builds a Tapjoy+Groupon for Distributing Local Deals (GigaOm)
The company offers merchants and retailers a way to distribute their local deals through third-party apps, incentivizing mobile users to buy a deal in exchange for virtual currency or goods…

Will the 2012 Election Be a Hyperlocal Breakthrough?

As we approach 2012, hyperlocal sites and networks around the country are gearing up to leverage their content and attract what promises to be a huge windfall of political advertising. At the recent Street Fight Summit in New York, we gathered four top executives who are already thinking deeply about the potential opportunity for hyperlocal in next year’s election cycle…

Gilt City’s City Unlisted: Merging Commerce and Content

Gilt City, the group-buying offshoot of luxury commerce brand Gilt Groupe, has — among other things — built its business on developing a strong editorial voice mostly through the selection and presentation of its offers. In May, however, the company launched an under-the-radar beta project called City Unlisted to experiment with an alternative approach to pairing content and commerce…

Case Study: Non-Profit Uses Foursquare For Fundraising

At BART stations in the Bay Area in 2010, commuters were encouraged to check-in on Foursquare to posters placed by Earthjustice, a non-profit focused on environmental awareness, as part of an effort to gain traction in the tech community. They hit 6,000 in just a few months’ time and earned media as well, in the New York Times, Mashable and elsewhere. Senior marketing manager Ray Wan discusses the organization’s strategy.

Street Fight Daily: 11.08.11

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

Daily-Deal Sites Face Problems Ahead, Report Says (Wall Street Journal)
Forrester Research e-commerce analyst Sucharita Mulpuru says in report that the deal sites face challenges that threaten to slow down, if not end their businesses…

Starbucks Taps China’s Foursquare for Holiday Check-in Campaign (Ad Age)
While Foursquare slowly experiments with near-field communication technologies here in the U.S., one of its Chinese lookalikes is rolling out a massive NFC-powered campaign in Eastern China…