Street Fight Daily: 06.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Just-over-two-year-old Foursquare has just announced an important milestone: 10 million user accounts. The company will pass 750 million check-ins later this week, with users are now averaging about 3 million check-ins a day. (TechCrunch)…
EveryBlock, the website that collects community news and connects neighbors with each other, has hired a new president, Brian Addison, to oversee its growth and marketing efforts. Founder Adrian Holovaty remains with EveryBlock, focusing more on product than business. (Chicago Tribune)…
Case Study: Restaurant’s Major Discounts for Foursquare ‘Mayor’
When Amelia Sawyer and her husband Jonathon jumped on the Foursquare bandwagon, they had no idea what an impact location-based services would have on their bottom line. Years later, customers are “fighting to the death” to become mayor of the Greenhouse Tavern – both for the bragging rights and to take advantage of the 40% discount – making it one of the most sought-after mayorships in Cleveland…
Fwix’s Shirazi: Layering Location on Top of the Web
San Francisco-based hyperlocal search database Fwix made news last week when it announced a new product called Geotagger that will allow publishers to tag Web pages with locations — in effect allowing them to create a layer of precise location information on top of their content, and giving them another method to index the information in that page by. The company is partnering with NBC to roll the service out onto the network’s local news Web sites. Street Fight visited Fwix’s offices in San Francisco last week and caught up with the company’s CEO, Darian Shirazi…
Street Fight Daily: 06.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Foursquare has teamed with 7-11 to offer a trip to suborbital space as a prize in an online contest. While the US spaceflight program is getting its budget shut down, there’s something rather poetic about this opportunity. (ReadWriteWeb)…
A study of U.K. salon owners found that only 1% of Groupon buyers go on to become regular customers. Moreover, Groupon’s churn rate could be as high as 90%. (Dylan Collins)…
Case Study: Minneapolis Music Club Becomes a Foursquare Hot Spot
Minneapolis isn’t a city that’s lacking for nightlife options, but First Avenue marketing coordinator Machen Davis believes her music club has been able to stand out from the pack by using location-based services as promotional tools and by turning the club’s Foursquare mayorships into a fierce competition…
Street Fight Daily: 06.01.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… What’s next in the evolution of geolocation? Foursquare’s most attractive qualities — the social game of checking in and the availability of local deals — arguably provide a foundation. But will we need more value if checkins are ever to hit the mainstream? (Mashable)… Google is beginning the roll-out of its Daily Deals service, Google Offers, today. The news that Google is getting into the daily deals space is not a surprise. Google attempted and failed to acquire Groupon for $6 billion last year. Google claims that Offers will take the heavy lifting of marketing off of the business owner, allowing the business to simply focus on the customer. (Mashable, The Next Web)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Groupon is either creating a new approach to commerce that will change the way we eat and shop and interact with the physical world, or it is a sure sign that Internet mania is once again skidding out of control. Or both. (New York Times)… Amazon is entering the daily deal space with myhabit.com, a members only daily deal site focusing on designer clothing. (Daily Deal Media)…
Case Study: Restaurant Chain Builds Loyalty With Check-In Discounts
Scott Wise is the president and CEO of A Pots & Pans Production, a management company that runs seven restaurants in Indiana. He says businesses need to approach online media like they would a cocktail party, and that it’s better to take notes and learn from what other people are saying than to “go in screaming, drinking, and trying to enter everyone’s conversation.”
Street Fight Daily: 05.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Groupon seems to be dancing around the issue of mobile. Location-based social networks like Foursquare can be great partners, but they can also be competitors. (Business Insider)… Real estate website Trulia is set to roll out a new feature that will allow users to view crime statistics for 50 metro areas in the U.S. The crime maps are based on data collected from more than 1,000 different sources, aggregated into more than 5 million data points on the maps. (GigaOm)…
Partnership With Foursquare Is a Natural Step for Groupon
Earlier this week All Things Digital reported that Groupon and Foursquare were discussing a partnership to push local deals targeted to location-aware check-ins. The media world has been buzzing about the rumor, but neither company has broken an official silence to confirm (or deny) the partnership or discussions. Perhaps it’s just a foregone conclusion, though, that Groupon would add immediacy and social distribution to its model. In fact it already has…
Street Fight Daily: 05.24.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… Dennis Crowley says Foursquare is growing at a rate of 1 million users per month. The company currently boasts 600 million check-ins total, averaging 3 million per day from its nearly 10 million users. (The Next Web)…
Patch President Warren Webster says the company’s criteria for growth in new communities is sound and sustainable, as is its locally centric business model. He says early reader metrics are exceeding expectations. (NetNewsCheck)…
Local Deals’ Second Act: Dynamic, Mobile
In the tech and media worlds, it’s no secret that local deals and mobile are exploding — both in terms of revenue growth as well as in the attention and investment being lavished upon them. Surprisingly, though, the two elements haven’t yet come together to the degree that they probably should…
Google’s Plan for Places: Third-Party Data
How does the saying go? “If you can’t beat them, join them”? Google Places’ market share trails that of rival Facebook, and Yelp, so it’s taking the portal approach: add a feed of any of your check-in services, and it’ll link up with ratings data found on Google Places. It hasn’t officially partnered with Foursquare or any other service, but that’s exactly the kind of data likely to be added.
Street Fight Daily: 05.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Main Street Connect, which owns 10 hyperlocal news sites in Connecticut, just picked up CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts. That means the company will soon have 52 sites — when you include 32 sites that the company says it is launching next month in Westchester County, N.Y. (Paid Content)…
What can Foursquare tell us about how people live? New infographic data from the location-based social network, gives a pretty good picture of life for a certain demographic in New York and San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.12.11
Murphy USA, a gas station chain with 1,000 locations situated in the parking lots of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, announced Wednesday that it’s offering $2 off a $20 purchase of gas with a Foursquare checkin. (Mashable)…
Gannett Co. is in the process of launching dozens of hyperlocal Web sites in 10 different markets, in a bold and risky initiative. DataSphere handles ad sales for Gannett’s hyperlocal sites, which are viewed as a growth medium because they provide smaller local businesses with an affordable, highly targeted ad platform. (NetNewsCheck)…
Yelp’s international sites have been growing like crazy, with non-U.S. traffic doubling in the past year….
Street Fight Daily: 05.11.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Groupon has just launched Groupon Now, the company’s much-anticipated time-based deals app that wants to redefine how society eats and shops. The simple application within Groupon’s mobile apps gives a user the ability to find local deals in realtime. (Mashable)…
Google has announced the opening up and general availability of the Google Places API. The service gives developers access to Google’s database of restaurants, bars, hotels and various other points of interest. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: 05.10.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Foursquare and Google are joining forces to enable a trial of Foursquare checkins via near field communication (NFC). The test starts Tuesday at Google I/O, the annual developer conference in San Francisco. (Mashable)…
LocalResponse takes the location data from other services and combines it with implicit location information, gathered from status updates, to create a marketing platform that lets companies target consumers wherever they are in real time. (GigaOm)…
Foursquare, Groupon, and the Market-Making Problem
With Groupon’s filing to go public last week, there has been even more debate over the two-sided market strategy of consumers and local merchants. Another business that has focused on this approach is Foursquare. Is the window of opportunity closing for Foursquare to become the breakout success it could be? The answer depends on how much the company is willing to change its DNA to serve both sides of their market — and perhaps take a few lessons on self-serve and average selling price from Groupon…