#LDS15 Stefan Weitz: Machines Have Enough Data to Understand the Real World
“We now have enough data to allow machines to figure out what the real world is,” Weitz said during a presentation at Street Fight’s Local Data Summit in Denver Thursday. “Technology will not replace us — it will augment our lives; and search, in particular, is about to radically enhance reality.”
Street Fight Daily: Square Adds Loans, Foursquare Declares Search Broken (Again)
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Square Expands into Small Business Loans (Financial Times)… Foursquare Declares Local Search (Yelp And Google) Broken, Vows Fix With Personalization (TechCrunch)… The FTC Condemns the Data Brokerage Industry’s Collection Practices (Pando)…
7 Strategies For Local Merchants Using Big Data Services
One of the biggest misconceptions about big data is that it’s only relevant for large businesses. In reality, big data services are often just as useful for local merchants on Main Street as they are for global retail chains and CPG brands. Here are seven strategies for local merchants looking to take better advantage of big data services…
5 Tools to Target Customers Based on Past Purchase Behavior
By tracking a consumer’s past purchasing behavior, marketers can design highly targeted ads based on the specific preferences and tastes of individual customers. Here are five tools that marketers can use to gather information about their customers’ past purchasing habits…
5 Platforms For Location Data Analysis
Location data analysis platforms track the spatial behavior of consumers based on previous ad exposures. Although competing platforms work slightly differently from one another, each with its own features and limitations, the overall effect is that marketers can finally determine whether mobile ad exposures are actually luring customers inside their physical stores. Here are five examples of platforms that marketers can use for location data analysis…
Placeable CEO: Local Directories May Die Off
Thanks to changing strategic incentives and evolving trends in the search market, Placeable’s CEO Ari Kaufman believes that Google may make changes to its local algorithm that work to push traffic directly to first parties, or keep traffic within its own ecosystem altogether. Street Fight caught up with Kaufman to talk about the state of the local search ecosystem, why Google might devalue directories, and what it means for large brands.
With New Products, Factual Aims to Make ‘Big Data’ Smaller
After five years of ingesting, cleaning and packaging the world’s information, the startup is focusing exclusively on local, improving its geo-fencing product and moving up the data stack to build out a location analytics business. The company announced this morning that it has launched a new line of services aimed at helping mobile developers, publishers, and marketers make sense of the reams of location data collected from consumers…
Humanizing ‘Dry’ Data Is Only Part of the Challenge for Community News
I’m utterly convinced that data will be the salvation of community news sites, both in delivering more audience-engaging content and doing so cost-effectively. But the big problem in community journalism is not data that’s dry and creepy. It’s data that’s incomplete, badly formatted, sloppily collected or – most serious of all – withheld…
The Local Conundrum: Rich Content or Accurate Information?
Google may have thought that situating local within Google+ would somehow obviate the need to fix it, but the presence of engaging content does nothing to modify the basic requirement that information services provide useful information. Perversely, information services spend too much time pretending they are content services but offer none of the openness of those services where it’s really needed…
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…
Choosing a Data Partner for Local: What to Ask
Jeff Wood is a guest author. To submit a guest post, go here.
With all of the talk about data in our industry, I’m surprised that so few of the people I talk to in the Local space have a true data strategy — one that gives them real control over their own data and, most importantly, access to this data for decision-making.
It’s the nature of Local that a publisher loses the scale of large network buys. However, you gain the value of a centralized audience. With granular data, a site focused on the hyperlocal market can quickly understand the value of small pockets of inventory, and make educated decisions around how to package and allocate that inventory for sale across appropriate channels.
It’s amazing how many people simply don’t know who owns the data collected on their sites.
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Are We Giving Google Too Much Information?
While certain groups complain about certain content on the Web, the real danger is always found in that which is not seen, hidden in plain sight within the language that builds that which we can see. Google is the absolute master of doing business where it’s not seen, and I’ve reached the point where I think it’s time we all said “enough.”