Street Fight Daily: 05.20.11

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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)…

With Quiznos, Groupon Tries to Prove It Can Spur Repeat Business

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In an attempt to show its deals aren’t all one-offs, Groupon yesterday announced a deal with repeat business built in — a punch card for eight sandwiches or salads at Quizno’s sub shops worth approximately $50, offered for nearly half price.

For Seattle’s Garage Billiards, Lots of Daily Deal Offers

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Since running a campaign with LivingSocial last year, Garage Billiards co-owner Mike Bitondo says he’s been inundated with offers from every coupon site under the sun. Together with his business partners, Jill Young-Rosenast and Alex Rosenast, Bitondo remains picky about which companies he’ll work with, and generally makes his decisions based on what kinds of revenue splits they’re willing to offer…

Street Fight Daily: 05.19.11

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Google Places has announced a new feature that lets you import the places you’ve checked-in to on Foursquare into Google to rate and review. (ReadWriteWeb)…

Zaarly is looking to be a sort of Craigslist for local mobile users, helping buyers find a quick way to obtain what they’re looking for from neighbors and local merchants. (GigaOm)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.18.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

LivingSocial CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy talks about why there are so many daily deals sites and why his company is at the top of the mountain with Groupon. In short, he says that while there’s not much of a barrier to entry into the daily deals market, there is a huge barrier to scale. (Business Insider)… The Matchbook iPhone app allows people to bookmark places they intend to visit. Users walking by a location, viewing a website, or simply recalling a place can add it to their automatically-organized Matchbook list by clicking a button. (Business Insider)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.17.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Local directory company Yell Group has set a July timetable for announcing the conclusion of its strategic review, which it set in motion early this year in the face of continuing declines at its printed Yellow Pages business. (Paid Content)…

Groupon and Scvngr’s moves last week demonstrated how daily deals and geo-social are on a collision course. Here’s why Facebook might be a step behind other marketing options for deals and geo-social. (Clickz)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.16.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…

Google announced Friday that its “News Near You” product, tied into Google News, will be available from Android and iPhones browsers. If you visit Google News from your phone it will prompt you for location and ask for news categories that interest you. (ReadWriteWeb)…

There’s no doubt that the future of eBay is based on both online to offline purchases, local and mobile commerce. But as retail evolves, it will be interesting to see if the company can connect the dots with all these acquisitions and technologies to create a powerhouse in mobile and local commerce. (TechCrunch)…

Groupon Pulls a Netflix with Groupon Now (and That’s a Good Thing)

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As with other Groupon subscribers, a $10 credit landed in my in-box this week. The catch? I have to subscribe to Groupon’s mobile app. It’s part of the ongoing and accelerating full-court press by the biggest daily deal site around the launch of Groupon Now, a geotargeted deal product with much tighter time limitations. This is part of Groupon’s grand plan to shift towards becoming a real-time, location specific, expiring inventory deal site rather than a glorified coupon clipper. … Give Groupon credit for taking a page from the Netflix playbook in rapidly moving to seize a better sales mechanism after spying the declining value of its existing one.

Street Fight Daily: 05.12.11

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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

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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: 05.09.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Groupon is preparing to launch Groupon Now, a mobile app that will connect customers with real-time coupons for retailers in their vicinity. Tap the app’s “I’m hungry” button, and you might be offered a discount on a slice at a pizza parlor a few blocks away. But you’ll have to move fast: The deals will be time-sensitive and good for just a few hours. (CNN/Money)…

Lauren Fisher writes that “2011 could be the year that the check-in arrives, albeit differently to how we thought it might look.” (The Next Web)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.05.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Those who use social location-based apps such as Foursquare or Facebook Places represent just 17% of the mobile population, according to a new study. Of those opting out of participating in the checkin craze, or any other social location behavior for that matter, 48% cited privacy concerns as their primary reason for not doing so. (Mashable)…

During AOL’s earnings call, one of the top questions from analysts was what is AOL’s plan with Patch? The company dumped $40 million into the hyperlocal network for the second quarter in a row, and it didn’t generate much revenue. Here’s Tim Armstrong’s explanation. (Business Insider)…

IAC-owned local media and advertising property CityGrid Media is acquiring social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform BuzzLabs. The company allows publishers to leverage social content, keeps consumers better informed, and helps local businesses monitor their presence across the web. (TechCrunch)…

Street Fight Daily: 05.03.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Add another big player to the list of Groupon competitors: AT&T. The telecom giant Monday began pre-registration to consumers in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth for a service via the company’s yp.com that will send daily deals to consumers. (Mashable)…

New York magazine is about to launch a weekly “deals” e-newsletter and online adjunct, but instead of matching offers play to advertisers, it will aggregate “the best of the best” of other e-commerce sites’ picks. (PaidContent)…

“Location is a serious battleground, and whoever has the best handle on it, both gathering it and using it, is best positioned to reap a lot of money as we build a lot of services based on location,” writes Ryan Kim. (GigaOm)…

Daily Deals by the Numbers

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If you’re confused about the whos and whats of the daily deals filling your inbox, clarity has arrived in the form of a quick primer from the folks at Online MBA. They’ve put together a lovely, old-timey visualization illustrating what four of the big guys dealing the deals are actually offering.

Keeping Tabbs: A DIY Deals Platform With No Rev Split

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In an effort to find a better profit balance for local merchants who are trying to draw in potential consumers, George Tung’s company Tabblr has created a platform that small businesses can use to initiate and manage their own daily deals.

Street Fight Daily: 04.27.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Consumer-reviews website Yelp is declining to seek another round of financing and instead has its sights set on going public, the start-up’s chief executive officer, Jeremy Stoppelman, said in an interview. (WSJ)…

Facebook Deals isn’t a Groupon-killer, writes Yipit co-founder Vinicius Vacanti. That’s because, among other reasons, Facebook doesn’t have a sales force and small businesses won’t self-serve. (Yipit Blog)…

Parsing the data on daily deals customers, Nielsen found that visitors to Groupon and Living Social are nearly two-thirds female and that they are more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to be affluent. (NielsenWire)…

Street Fight Daily: 04.26.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Facebook is planning to introduce a new service called Deals, an effort to tap into the consumer frenzy over online discounts. With Deals, the social networking giant is entering a crowded market led by overnight sensations like Groupon and LivingSocial. (NYT/Bits)…

Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. PlaceIQ sifts through tons of data about locations to give marketers a mini-zipcode-like profile of each block. (TechCrunch)…

Even experts acknowledge a serious lack of hard data about the commercial power of location-based services. “There are none of the data and feedback mechanisms that businesses need in order to know that location-based services are a good idea.” (BBC News)…

Street Fight Daily: 04.22.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Google Offers, the company’s long-awaited response to Groupon, has gone live with a signup for beta program in Portland, Oregon. The service promises “50% off or more at places you’ll love.” (Mashable)…

According to a survey conducted last month by Harris Interactive, 10 percent of the American adult population or approximately 23 million people purchased deals from sites like Groupon and LivingSocial last year. (Daily Deal Media)…

Groupon has hired Margo Georgiadis, a vice president of global sales operations at Google, to be its new chief operating officer. (NYT/Dealbook)…

Gowalla’s Josh Williams: Groupon Is One-Dimensional

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Location-based check-in service Gowalla is kind of a virtual tour guide, to use the analogy of the day for such companies. Mobile users log in with their location and get information about the places around them, nearby businesses and places their friends recommend. Gowalla integrates both Facebook Places and Foursquare check-ins, and lets users share photographs tagged to places.

Street Fight spoke to the company’s CEO, Josh Williams, who called Groupon “one-dimensional” for now, and discussed the scramble for local ad dollars, the inseparability of mobile and location, and the persistent privacy problem around check-ins...

Street Fight Daily: 04.12.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Patch’s local news module widget is hardly a new idea, but it’s one that few local newspaper companies have made work, despite the economy of its potential costs and benefits. Will Patch leapfrog newspaper sites with this old-is-new innovation? (Newsonomics)…

Twitter’s Local Trends feature has now expanded to 70 more places. This seems likely to foreshadow a future when advertisers will be able to purchase trending topics on a local level. (ReadWriteWeb)…

Four unsolicited lessons that Groupon’s Andrew Mason should take from what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg just did in China. (Forbes)…