News and Analysis
The In-Between Stage for Startups: Visions of Growth and the Value of Pivots
The stages of business growth may have no end point, but the opportunities that lie within them are more abstract than they seem. Moz CEO Sarah Bird says that Jeff Bezos’ well-known assertion that it will always be “day one” at Amazon resonates with her, but that financials can cloud the view of that goal.
Location Data Shows Which Brands Coachella Attendees Favor
Attendees at the annual music festival may seem somewhat heterogeneous from the outside, but a new study of InMarket’s anonymized location data gives a sense of the concertgoers’ brand preferences, and insight into the effectiveness of sponsors’ campaigns.
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Growing Rapidly, Gannett Earnings Suggest Bleak Outlook for Newspapers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Gannett Earnings Forecast a Bleak 2017 for Newspaper Companies… Instagram is Growing Faster Than Ever and Now Has 700 Million Users… Waymo Is Hitting Uber Where It Hurts…
Latest Posts
BiteHunter CEO: Learning From Kayak
BiteHunter launched amid the height of deal mania this Spring, as an aggregator for dining deals. With the June launch of its iPhone application and subsequent addition of instant deals to the mobile product last week, the company has grown into a real-time search engine for dining deals. Street Fight recently spoke with the company’s CEO, Gil Harel, a veteran in the dining vertical, about the aggregation industry and the variable future of the deals space…
#SFS11 Company Profile: JiWire
Calling itself a “mobile audience media” company, JiWire connects advertisers with laptop, tablet and smartphone users taking advantage of public wifi connections. The company sells off of a comprehensive list of free and fee-based wifi connections across the country. Users who connect to those wifi hotspots see relevant location-based ads from JiWire partners…
Street Fight Daily: 10.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Huffington Post’s purchase of Localocracy is further evidence of the “neighbor connect” online space heating up. At least two dozen significant startupshave popped up in the past year focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like Localocracy, aim at niches (local ballot issues and related), while others intend to promote a general sense of community. (MediaShift)…
HopStop, the online service that provides door-to-door subway and bus directions for major cities in the U.S. and abroad, has kicked off “HopStop AdLocal,” a new program that offers businesses up to 12,500 free advertising impressions over a 30-day period, a value of $250, the company says. (Entrepreneur)…
Yelp Helps Local Restaurants Beat the Big Chains
Positive Yelp scores translate into real revenue boosts for local restaurants but not for chains. That’s the basic finding of a recent study by Michael Luca, a researcher at Harvard Business School. He found that a one-star differential in ratings on the popular crowd-sourced review site can bump revenues by 5% to 9% at a local restaurant. This is not entirely surprising. What is more interesting is that chain restaurants did not benefit from any significant increase in profitability or revenue corresponding to Yelp ratings…
Local Quotables: Clay Graham, Perry Evans, Claire Hughes Johnson and more…
The best words about and around the hyperlocal industry.
Perry Evans gets tongue in cheek on deals, while Rocky Agrawal soberly analyzes the Groupon-Yelp correlation and Pat Kitano shows the hyperlocal-Facebook correlation. More wise words and wise-cracks:
Street Fight Daily: 10.14.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
MapQuest’s new Vibe uses data collected from the past 10 years about cities’ most popular destinations. Vijay Bangaru, MapQuest vice president of product, writes that the concept originated out of a shift in users’ needs from “maps and directions” to “local search.” (Mashable)…
Groupon and LivingSocial succeed because consumers perceive them as great deals. But is that true? Perhaps not. Thumbtack.com called 10 vendors offering daily deals (five from Groupon and five from LivingSocial) and found eight instances where they were quoted a price over the phone that was cheaper than the advertised regular price being offered. (Business Insider)…
SCVNGR/LevelUp’s Mobile Payment Application Goes National
SCVNGR has announced the national rollout of its mobile payment product LevelUp, which the company has been testing in Philadelphia and Boston for the past two months. The company’s “chief ninja” Seth Priebatsch talks with Street Fight about what LevelUp’s launch is all about…
In Jefferson’s Hometown, a Hyperlocal Focuses on Digital Democracy
Brian Wheeler is executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow, a thriving nonprofit hyperlocal in Virginia that focuses on land use and other civic issues that are key to protecting the character of the community that was the home of Thomas Jefferson. We talked to Wheeler about his unusual definition of user engagement, and how he’s working to take it to a new level…
Will Big Brands Cut Out the Middleman to Go Hyperlocal?
We’re on the brink of seeing brands start to carve into the hyperlocal pie simply by providing an online space to offer localized content and capture the “neighborhood” conversations that locals want to see.
Street Fight Daily: 10.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
The next update to Foursquare’s iPhone app includes a new feature called Radar, which pulls suggestions from the app’s Explore feature. Depending on your location, it might suggest a nearby restaurant, or remind you that the coffee shop on your to-do list is nearby. It will also tell you when your friends are meeting nearby. (TechCrunch)…
LocalResponse, a local marketing system that pushes targeted ads to users based on their check-ins, has raised $5 million. The money will go toward expanding the sales team and building out an enterprise version of the service for brands and agencies. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
The Agency Offering Your Clients Need: Citation Intelligence for AI Search