The Importance of Responsive Web Design for SMB Sites
It’s critical for local businesses to have a beautiful site that doesn’t just scale down to low resolutions, but also looks great on all devices — from a 27” desktop display to a “smart” refrigerator, and every tablet, phablet, and phone in between. That’s why for the majority of local businesses, responsive design is the best mobile strategy…
4 Reasons Location-Based Services Will Become a Thing Again in 2015
With improved location accuracy, improved POI data, and efficient background location processing, developers will be equipped to build apps that can truly extract relevant real-world user experience. Location will mean more than a wandering blue dot; it will mean the places we’ve traveled, the relationships we’ve developed, and the resolutions we’ve kept…
Solving the Dirty Data Problem in Location-Based Advertising
Our work with leading ad tech companies has shown that 80% of the location data appended to ad inventories is inaccurate. The inaccuracies come from antiquated IP positioning providers who trace ad requests through the Internet to find the hub access point and assign the hub’s latitude and longitude to the IP addresses…
Are Community News Sites and Investors Ready for Each Other?
Venture-capital and angel investors have been avoiding digital community news — but there’s no mystery about why. There are some profitable one-offs, but most investors aren’t interested in one-offs. They want to put their money in the possibility of a good-sized payoff. That will only come with community news that is part of a network…
A ‘Radical Transformation’ Is Brewing in SMB Phones
For local businesses that rely on the phone for inbound leads (which is nearly all of them), the functionality of copper lines pales in comparison to what call-tracking-enabled lines have done for years. Unfortunately for business owners, the VoIP packages being sold to them also fall far short of the level of functionality that call tracking provides…
The Democratization of Local Commerce and the Future of Physical Exchange
While the analyst community obsesses over the share of spending that physical stores are losing to ecommerce, they overlook the vast transformation in the stores themselves. There’s a deeper shift underway in the way we sell and consume products locally that could have a substantially larger impact on the wider economy…
Can Traditional Retailers Nail Digital Before Amazon Figures Out Brick-and-Mortar?
It was never a question of if, but when. Anyone tracking the retail industry knew the day would come for Amazon to open… ahem… a brick-and-mortar storefront. Now Amazon’s familiar slanted smile logo will hang from a shingle in Manhattan right down the street from Macy’s flagship Herald Square store, just in time for the […]
Apple Pay Doesn’t Have to Kill the Wallet to Be Worth SMBs’ Adoption
More and more, software is influencing the way consumers evaluate the places where the shop in the real-world. As the small business technology ecosystem grows, it is crucial for small businesses to break down any potential barriers surrounding purchase, especially when consumers are offered numerous alternatives including national chains and ecommerce giants.
5 Tips for the Aspiring Hyperlocal Publisher
Although the business — and consumption — of journalism continues to evolve, its health certainly seems much more robust than it was five years ago. This is particularly true at a hyperlocal level. Yet at the same time some constants remain. In particular, issues around funding — and sustainability — continue to remain one of the sector’s biggest challenges…
Local News Pioneer Mike Orren on Industry’s Future: A Steep but Climbable Hill
“There are no silver bullets,” Mike Orren tells Tom Grubisich. Local news “has always been a complex industry, and advertising, marketing services, managing the print demand—all are going to continue to be a part of the equation.”