News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Google Home Enables Retail Purchases, IBM and Visa Partner for IoT Payments
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Home Can Now Buy You Stuff from Over 50 U.S. Retailers… Visa, IBM Team for Consumer Payments through IoT Devices… Facebook Isn’t Going After LinkedIn, It’s Chasing a Much Bigger Jobs Market…
How 30A’s Multiple Revenue Streams Elevate the Local Site to New Heights
Founder and CEO Mike Ragsdale explains why diversification is such an important element of 30A’s fast growth into what is now a multimillion-dollar operation. He also explains how community news sites that don’t have a tropical beachfront to boast about can create their own unique, revenue-generating brands.
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ReachDeals’s Razgaitis: Mobile Is a ‘Key Catalyst’ in Deals Space
DealOn, a group buying company that launched in late 2009, was always meant to be more than just a Groupon clone. The site offered deals, but it also had plans for a white label deals solution for publishers as well as an “offer exchange” which sought to “empower the deals ecosystem,” according to Rich Razgaitis, who was the company’s CEO until it was acquired by ReachLocal last year…
Case Study: Optometrist Uses Foursquare to Court Tech-Savvy Patients
For self-avowed tech junkie Nathan Bonilla-Warford, Foursquare is more than just a tool for discovering new restaurants and keeping up with friends. It’s also one of the primary ways he markets his business as an optometrist and the owner of Bright Eyes Family Vision Care in Tampa, Florida…
Street Fight Daily: 06.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“How can LivingSocial beat a better-funded competitor with more name recognition who has a 22-country head start on them?” asks Sarah Lacy. “Ironically by moving more slowly, throwing around less cash and being smarter with local hires, not pricey consultants and MBAs.” (TechCrunch)…
“You can’t just jump into a crowded local news market with a product that’s about as good as the existing ones,” writes Erik Wemple. “Even marginally better won’t get the job done. It’s got to be so much better that you can eat the lunch of legacy outlets.” (Washington Post)…
TIPPR: Quality of Audience Is What Matters in the Deals Space
In the wake of Groupon’s recent S1 and the subsequent wave of criticism that has been aimed at the daily deals giant, deals platform and technology providers like Tippr are stepping in to the fray with new models to power group buying. Street Fight caught up with Tippr’s COO Samy Aboel-Nil at DIGIDAY: LOCAL last week to discuss how the company’s Powered by Tippr is hoping to change the game…
Local News Isn’t Local Enough for Meporter’s Andy Leff
Meporter, a citizen journalism platform for mobile phones that was launched in May, combines the check-in function of Foursquare with crowdsourcing and old-fashioned reporting. Using the app, journalists of all stripes can check in to a location or an event and then share their on-the-fly news report with the world at large…
Street Fight Daily: 06.27.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
LivingSocial seems to be following Groupon’s lead in acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale. (TechCrunch)…
Could Offers become a massive new revenue stream for Google — the “second huge growth engine” that Google has long searched for in vain? SAI spoke to reps of merchants who have signed on to offer Google Offers in New York, as well as Google’s Eric Rosenblum, the lead engineer on Offers, and Google spokesperson Nate Tyler. (Silicon Alley Insider)…
Hyperlocal’s Automated Future
At the hyperlocal level, the value is in the information, not the presentation. You read the local to learn, above all, what’s going on in your town or your nabe. If a computer can help collate and present that to you in a more digestible fashion, more the better. Will this kill the community journalist? I doubt it. The journalist still must be present.
Street Fight Daily: 06.24.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
In the automotive space, the responsibility for advertising is shifting from car makers to car dealers, and that means significant boost for local media, especially online, according to a report looking at the auto category from Borrell Associates. Online is pulling ad spending from car companies and dealers at a more accelerated rate, and display is likely to remain a key beneficiary. (Paid Content)…
In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Yesterday it announced a partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers. (TechCrunch)…
Loopt: Re-Energizing the Deal Business
Our pick in this week’s Street Smart Moves is Loopt. Daily deals is a hackneyed formula already, but Loopt is trying to bring some innovation to the fore by letting consumers pick their own deals. What Loopt is doing is almost exactly the answer to John Wannamaker’s famous quote about not knowing which half of his advertising worked (but knowing half did): By letting consumers suggest the items they want deals on, merchants will know what will sell.
Taking ‘Broccoli Journalism’ Hyperlocal
Mediameister Jeff Jarvis is the pluperfect phrasemaker. “There’s no why there,” he memorably summed up the Mark Zuckerberg-Facebook biopic The Social Network. But I wish his jibe about “broccoli journalism” didn’t prove so hardy. Jarvis coined the phrase in 2009 – in an attack on a report calling for federal subsidies to prop up the cost of reporting “serious” news stories…
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