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)…
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)…
#SFS11 Company Profile: Urbantag
The local review and recommendation space is in need of some tidying up. User-generated reviews on sites like Yelp fail to incorporate taste, and often are littered with disingenuous reviews created by the merchants themselves. Meanwhile, recommendation engines like Bizzy and Foursquare Explore require users to share their location on a geo-social network — an activity that remains uncommon in the general public. Urbantag wants to help solve the problem…
Street Fight Daily: 09.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Margo Georgiadis is leaving her job as Groupon’s COO after just five months on the executive team to return to Google, her former employer, as President, Americas. The company has also filed an amended S-1, which includes revised revenue numbers based on a change in accounting. (TechCrunch)…
One self-described “riled” Patch editor from the East Coast says that in addition to his or her normal job responsibilities, this editor has also been asked to start drumming up ad sales leads. (Business Insider)…
Narrative Science – Closer to a True Robot Reporter?
The New York Times recently published an in-depth article about Narrative Science, a fascinating startup founded by two computer scientists who are also journalism professors at Northwestern University, and a veteran executive from DoubleClick. Their product is a software engine that can, given a box score, a crime log, or a real estate transaction, generate a brief , well-written news article in the classic who-what-when-where-why canon. While not works of art, these articles are credible and often beat what human scribes have to offer…
Street Fight Daily: 09.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Google Offers didn’t do particularly well in August – but the daily deal product radically improved in September. Through just the first three weeks of the month, Google has already surpassed last month’s total revenue of $265k and is on track to more than double this figure by month’s end. (Yipit Blog)…
A source says that AOL is using “smoke and mirrors” trying to get 10 Patch sites profitable by the end of the year. It all has to do with some clever accounting, pushing a bigger chunk of ad dollars from regional campaigns into the target towns at the expense of the rest. (Business Insider)…
Twitter Local: @PaulCarr, @AndyEllwood, @LizaBarista and more
All the tweets that fit… listening in on the hyperlocal Twitterverse.
This week, Erin Carlon, Andy Ellwood, and Clara Shih point their words at customer experience. Vin Vacanti has some grounding advice for startups. Paul Carr, who made waves this past week with the news of his TechCrunch resignation, makes some thinly veiled barbs. And more…
Tippr Launches Affiliate Network: ‘AdSense for Deals’
Group-buying service Tippr has announced the launch of an affiliate network program this morning to supplement the company’s featured white-label product. Publishers who use Powered by Tippr software to host daily deals will be able to syndicate these offers across a network of affiliate sites — including major aggregators like Yipit and Yahoo Deals as well as over 1,000 hyperlocal and vertical niche publications…
Nielsen’s Undercount of News: Why the Numbers Don’t Add Up
Social networking has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Internet. That’s what Nielsen is trumpeting in a new report. And news, it says, is a tiny mouse.
Or is it?
Nielsen’s Social Media Report says news accounts for just 2.6% of Internet use compared to 22.5% for social networking and blogs. But that news number doesn’t hold up under examination…
Street Fight Daily: 09.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Ad sales chief Scott Colontonio is leaving AOL’s hyperlocal network Patch after little over a year to join Google. Meanwhile, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong reiterated his assertion that some Patch outposts would be profitable by the end of the year. (PaidContent)…
LivingSocial may raise more than $200 million in funding that would give it a valuation of as much as $6 billion, rather than proceeding toward an initial public offering. (Bloomberg)…
What Hyperlocal Startups Can Learn From Mary Kay
What comes to mind when you hear the name Mary Kay? A yellow-tinged business model from the Tupperware era for “housewives” looking to make a little extra money? Maybe so, but if you’re looking to succeed in “local,” you ignore the wildly successful local mid-brow tastemaker at your peril…
Street Fight Daily: 09.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare has just hit one billion checkins. The app had gone from 100 million checkins in July, 2010 to 200 million in Oct 2010 to 750 million checkins in June 2011. Along with the milestone, Foursquare has launched a new version of its app. (TechCrunch)…
HipGeo, a location based social network backed by CitySearch and eHarmony execs, has launched an iPhone app that tracks your travels, then stitches together your photos, comments and pinned locations into an animated diary of each day. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: 09.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Amazon Local, the e-retail giant’s recently launched daily deals initiative, apparently does not count the space’s no. 2 player — LivingSocial — as a true competitor. LivingSocial, which received $175 million in funding from Amazon last December, is selling the majority of the ads for Amazon Local — a platform that’s been dramatically expanded in the last seven weeks and now appears in 44 markets. (Clickz)…
Success breeds nothing if not copycats, and few industries have seen more imitators in the last 12 months than the daily deals space. But companies looking for hefty exits might be sobered by a new report on the deals space that notes the price of acquisitions has been plummeting. (Fast Company)…
Case Study: For Seattle Video Store, Print is Still King
Remaining relevant is a challenge for any independent video store that has to compete with subscription-based companies like Netflix. Next Door Media, an ad network of hyperlocal sites, took on that challenge with Scarecrow Video in Seattle, adding its sites to the store’s traditional mix of weekly newspapers, free magazines, and public radio stations…
Why the Merchant API Is Key to Foursquare’s Future
Last week, Foursquare updated its business page, adding case studies for merchants and use studies for brands, and generally improving the user experience. Since updating its merchant platform in the spring, the location-based social networking company has quietly launched an offensive to create a viable B2B component in their business, laying the groundwork for future monetization…
Sonar CEO: ‘Location Is Reaching an Inflection Point’
“We spent the last five years uploading our lives to the Internet – our likes, preferences, activities and so on,” says Brett Martin. “Now, we are downloading that information and spreading it over the suitable world. So there is a gold rush of applications which are working to help navigate that data in a physical context.”
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…