News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Walmart Ups Delivery Game, Small Businesses Rely on Antiquated Tech
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Walmart Launches Free 2-Day Shipping on Purchases of $35 or More… Survey: Small Businesses Have a Long Way to Go on Digital Strategies… Marketers’ Data Priorities Shift from ‘Collection’ to ‘Value’…
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Street Fight Daily: 04.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… EBay is buying location-based service and ad network WHERE in a deal that gives it added ability to drive more local and offline commerce. (GigaOm)… Foursquare has grown to almost 10 million users by connecting them to where they are now. But the company now will focus on the future movements of its users, said Dennis Crowley.(GigaOm)… Whatser, the location-based service that lets users share their favorite locations with friends, is launching a “marketing platform” in which local merchants and brands can “claim” a location that they operate and then communicate with users. (TechCrunch)…
Journal-Register’s Brady: Local Advertisers Have a Tech Gap
Jim Brady made a name for himself turning WashingtonPost.com into a serious player on the Web before he went to TBD.com last year, going all in on hyperlocal. But TBD shifted course on strategy last fall and let Brady go at the same time. In March, he was scooped up by Journal-Register Company, which has been a leader in transforming local papers into digital properties.
Street Fight recently spoke with Brady about the future of hyperlocal, including mobile’s key role, the hold daily deals companies have on the local ad market and why Patch should be applauded.
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Zaarly: Toll Taker on a ‘Buyer-Powered Commerce’ Highway?
Rick Robinson’s Turf Talk column appears every Wednesday. ..
Zaarly – it’s not a new verb expressing something extra cool. Not yet, anyway. But it’s got a pretty good start if you’re judging by its remarkable first two months alone. In that time they’ve pitched and launched the product, wowed celebrity judges at a startup competition in LA and accepted a million bucks in seed funding from, among others, Ashton Kutcher and venture fund Lightbank created by Groupon’s founders. And that’s all before the semi-official launch at SXSW or making a single dime.
Street Fight recently caught up with with the 32-year-old CEO behind this i-need-it-you-got-it service, Bo Fishback…
Yipit’s Jim Moran: Lots of Winners in Hyperlocal
With so many daily deals sites popping up in the past year (following the mad success of Groupon), it’s natural that consumers would want a way to sift through, aggregate, and personalize these e-coupons to fit their needs. Enter Yipit, which launched in 2010 and draws on over 400 local deals sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Scoop St.) to deliver customized lists of nearby deals...
Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Jim Moran, for a quick Q&A about Yipit’s mission in the hyperlocal space, and whether the daily deals craze might be a “bubble.”..
A Chicago Retailer is Skeptical of Services Like Groupon
Shelley Young is the chef and founder behind The Chopping Block, a recreational cooking school and retail store in Chicago. Since opening her doors in 1997, Young has seen a dramatic change in the advertising landscape. Whereas she once employed a publicist, she now manages multiple social media accounts in-house and offers check-in specials on Foursquare. She remains skeptical about the long-term viability of daily discount sites.
Baristanet’s Debra Galant: How Patch Is Like Wal-Mart
Since its 2004 launch, Essex County, New Jersey-based Baristanet has often been held up as a hyperlocal news success story. Veteran journalists Liz George and Debra Galant created their local information site to be like a coffee shop where people in the three suburban towns they covered could learn about small-scale news and events around them.
Street Fight spoke recently with Galant about the site’s scope and history, whether stories about potholes can really be monetized, and what she thinks of AOL’s Patch...
Street Fight Daily: 04.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Groupon is buying Pelago, maker of local discovery app Whrrl, in a bid to improve its ability to bring together consumers and local discount offers. This could also mean a broader direction for Groupon as it looks to expand beyond daily deals to more mobile and personalized discounts. (GigaOm)…
LocalResponse is a “social advertising platform” that lets small businesses sift through the stream of public check-in and review data to see who their most loyal customers are, and send them coupons and messages on Twitter. (NYT/Bits)…
Foursquare has added a feature that will bring some context to your historical check-ins. Now, when users look back at their check-ins, they won’t see only their pictures, but also pictures taken by friends who were also checked in at the event. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Topix CEO Chris Tolles: Community Over Content
When hyperlocal news and community site Topix was founded in 2004, the company’s plan was to take all the local news out there and aggregate it into niche news Web pages around hundreds of thousands of topics. The site’s algorithm sorted through 50,000 news sources and created feeds around all kinds of subjects, creating niche content aggregation. But in 2007, the company shifted gears after finding what it thought was an even more compelling product: harnessing the flood of user-generated commentary and debate around their topic areas. Street Fight spoke with CEO Chris Tolles about how hyperlocal has evolved, Patch’s place in the pack, and how journalism is actually just a means to an end…
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