Street Fight Daily: Square Raises $100M, GoDaddy’s Turnaround
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Square Raises More Money to Make Small Business Loans (Fortune)… Liquor Distributors Invest in Tech Firm to Boost E-Commerce in Alcohol (Wall Street Journal)… Deal Talks for Here Mapping Service Expose Reliance on Location Data (New York Times)…
Street Fight Daily: McDonald’s Beacon Strategy, Yelp Stock Plummets
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… McDonald’s Beacon Strategy Pushes In-Store Conversion Rate To 20% (Mobile Marketer)… Analysts Lower Price Targets as Yelp Stock Tumbles (MarketWatch)… Leaked Lyft Document Reveals a Costly Battle With Uber (Bloomberg)…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Enters Local Travel, Facebook’s Coming Algo-Change
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Travel Launches New Brand, Amazon Destinations (Skift)… Facebook Is Making 3 Big Changes To Its Newsfeed Algorithm (Business Insider)… $47B Of Local Ads Programmatic By 2019 (NewNewsCheck)…
Street Fight Daily: Nokia Weighs Sale of Maps, GoDaddy Keeps Buying Startups
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Nokia Weighs Sale of Maps Business to Focus on Networks (Bloomberg)… GoDaddy Acquires Marketplace Startup Elto To Expand Its Services For Web Pros (TechCrunch)… Amazon, Google and More Are Drawn to Home Services Market (New York Times)…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Goes Public, ClassPass Struggles With Success
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GoDaddy Shares Soar in Debut as Investors Buy Into Revamp (GoDaddy)… ClassPass: Deep Discounts, but Some Discontent (New York Times)… China’s Dianping Valued at $4 Billion (Wall Street Journal)…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Launches Home Services, Angie’s List Freezes Indiana Expansion
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Launches Home Services To Sell Everything From An Oil Change To Piano Lessons (Verge)… Angie’s List Freezes $40 Million Indiana Expansion, Citing Anti-gay Law (Mashable)… Ten Red Flags On The GoDaddy IPO (Pando)…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Pay’s Slow Growth, Postmates Delivers Starbucks
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 85% Of iPhone 6 Owners In The U.S. Haven’t Bothered Trying Apple Pay, Study Claims (VentureBeat)… Starbucks Delivery Is Real and It’s Coming to Seattle and the Empire State Building (Recode)… GoDaddy’s IPO To Value Web Hosting Company At $2.87 Billion (Reuters)…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Resumes IPO Push, Google’s Local “Snack Pack”
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…All systems go for GoDaddy IPO (Street Fight)… Google Local Pack Displaying Logos In Web Search Results (Search Engine Land)..
You Don’t Have to Geotag Your Tweets to Give Away Your Location (Observer)…
Why Local Marketing Is a Function of Commerce, Not Media
I’ve come to believe that the initial narrative about digital — the one about eyeballs simply moving online — actually impedes an effective analysis of the local marketing industry. Once we see local marketing as a function of commerce (ad not media) we start to find a more dramatic shift than previously thought.
Hyperlocal M&A in 2015 — Here’s What Some Potential Acquirers Are Looking For
With the new year just around the corner, corporate development teams are undoubtedly gearing up for 2015 acquisitions. The local technology industry saw plenty of M&A activity in 2014 and remains poised for another busy year as established firms look to stay on top and a new batch of public companies come into capital…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Renews IPO Push, Amazon Eyes Hotels
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…GoDaddy Seeks Nearly $4.5b IPO Valuation, Talks Diversifying (New York Post)… Amazon to Get Into Hotel Booking With Launch of Travel Site (Skift)… Leaked Internal Uber Deck Reveals Staggering Revenue And Growth Metrics (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Redesigns Places, Local News Searching for Answers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Takes a Big Step Toward Competing in Local Search (Local Search Insider)… Is There Hope for Local News? (Atlantic)… Groupon Kicks Off First Analyst Day Amid Pivot to E-Commerce Site (AdAge)…
At GoDaddy, CEO Blake Irving Searches for a New Domain
Irving has an ambitious plan to turn GoDaddy into a much larger, and more profitable, company. The strategy begins with the company’s 12 million domain customers and ends with a constellation of concentric services intended to serve an increasingly entrepreneurial, and distributed, global economy…
Street Fight Daily: eBay Spins Off PayPal, Waze Crowdsources Places
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology]… EBay to Spin Off PayPal With New CEOs for Two Publicly Traded Companies (Recode)… With Places (and Your Help), Waze Mapping Gets Smarter On Android And iOS (GigaOm)… Yelp and Tripadvisor Launch Joint Campaign Against Google (Financial Times)…
As IPOs Near, Tech Takes Another Crack at Small Business
A handful of upcoming IPOs will add fuel to an already-competitive small business marketing and technology industry. But the fundamental question is how these companies slow an already rapid rate of commoditization, and “build a moat” around their businesses to hold back the next wave of startups looking to grab market share in their wake…
Street Fight Daily: Thumbtack Raises $100M, Uber Opens API
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Thumbtack, an Online Market for Services, Raises $100 Million (New York Times)… Uber Opens API in Bid to Be Everywhere (Recode)… GoDaddy Acquires MailChimp Competitor Mad Mimi To Beef Up Its Email Marketing Service (TechCrunch)…
Local Tech Businesses Diversify to Serve a Wider Range of SMB Needs — But Do They Really Know Their Customers?
In the rush to diversify their offerings, single-product local tech companies either move horizontally (reaching out to all the markets that could remotely utilize their product) or, more often, vertically (seeking to cater to all the nuanced needs of a niche market).