The Good and Bad of Local Discovery on Our Summer Road Trip
Greetings from a summer road trip in the Pacific Northwest. Amid games of twenty questions and alphabet animals, we have faced the typical needs of the traveler: shelter, food, gas, and fun. Naturally, we’ve turned to local search, just like the other 31% of leisure travelers (up from 18% in 2010). I’ve written mainly about local search on the homefront and travel is another kind of use case entirely, one that in many ways has been “solved” by existing services — but has it? In our experience, you often have to be creative to get what you need…
Street Fight Daily: Revel Raises $10M; LevelUp: We’re ‘Android,’ Square is ‘Apple’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Revel Systems Raises $10.1M To Help It Grow iPad Point-Of-Sale Business (TechCrunch)… LevelUp: We’re ‘Android,’ Square is ‘Apple’ (Local Onliner)… Why Angie’s List Hires an Auditor to Read its Business Reviews (Bloomberg)…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Challenges Yelp, Foursquare Rethinks the Web
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Facebook Challenges Yelp With Mobile Pages Redesign Featuring Actions, Local Biz Details, And Ratings (TechCrunch)… Foursquare Revamps Business Pages to Take on Yelp as Web Visitors Hit 50 Million per Month (Verge)… Can Yelp Hold Off Foursquare and Facebook? (Screenwerk)…
When Will The Last Yellow Pages Book be Printed?
With the rise of local search sites, social media, and mobile directories, the physical Yellow Pages books delivered to consumers’ doors — long a staple of local marketing — are quickly becoming obsolete. We asked a few folks from around the industry what date they would envision for the directories’ final print run…
Managing Local Presence on Mobile Devices: A Developing Challenge
The continued strong growth of mobile local search combined with the high value of mobile customers indicates a shift in attention is required on the part of local search publishers, in order to make it easier for businesses to manage their listing content on the devices consumers are turning to in ever increasing numbers.
Street Fight Daily: Desktop Local Search Drops, Print YP Death Watch
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Search On Smartphones Up 26 Percent, On Tablets Up 19 Percent In 2012 (Search Engine Land)… Annual Print YP Death Watch (Blumenthals)… The Yext Big Thing (Crain’s New York Business)…
Street Fight Daily: Aol Under Armstrong, Big Moves in Online Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… At AOL Under Tim Armstrong, the Only Constant Is Change (AdAge)… Made To Order: Big Moves In Online Food Delivery (ReadWrite)… Report: Geo-Aware, Geofenced Ads Outperform Other LoMo Targeting (Screenwerk)…
Street Fight Daily: Mobile Ad Spend Jumps, Web Only Gets Physical
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… US Mobile Ad Spending Jumps to $4 Billion (eMarketer)… Once Proudly Web Only, Shopping Sites Hang Out Real Shingles (The New York Times)… Garmin Integrates Foursquare and Glympse with Mobile Apps for Non-Creepy Location-Sharing on the Go (The Next Web)…
Street Fight Poll: Peers and Company Websites Are Go-tos for Local Biz Info
In a poll conducted in early November by Street Fight, 500 U.S. consumers were asked who or what sources they are most likely to consult before visiting a local business. The survey found that 37% say they ask a friend or colleague about their opinion of the business; 36% visit that merchant’s website; 16% examine the merchant’s reputation on review sites; and just 11% conduct local searches for information about that business and/or nearby competitors…
Report Identifies ‘Avid Local Search Users,’ 50% of All Searches
Twenty-four percent of consumers who conduct “local” searches are highly tech-savvy early adopters who own multiple mobile devices, use mobile shopping apps, purchase daily deals and post reviews of businesses more than the average population, according to a new white paper. The report also notes that this group accounts for 50% of all local searches.
Street Fight Daily: Local Search Share Increases, The Bubble That Wasn’t
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology... Study: 43 Percent Of Total Google Search Queries Are Local (Search Engine Land)… The Bubble That Wasn’t: What Happened to ‘People Discovery’ App (The Verge)… St. Louis Public Radio, St. Louis Beacon to Explore ‘Combining Talents and Resources’ (Poynter)…
Street Fight Daily: Pew Studies Local News, LevelUp White Labeled
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… New Pew study: Where You Live Helps Shape Your News Diet (Nieman Journalism Lab)… LevelUp Arms Merchants With White Label Payment Apps (GigaOm)… Local Corp., a Web 1.0 Company, Thrusts Itself into Mobile Era with New iOS and Android Apps (Pando Daily)…
Where to Look if You’re a Job-Seeking Professional in Local
Based on our conversations with presidents and CEOs and other data we track in the marketplace, we have seen a strong demand in two key areas: sales and technology. Companies continue to build up both inside, outside and national sales forces across the country. On the technology front, if you have experience with a consumer driven web company, you know how robust the job market currently is for people with your skill set. Learn more about who’s hiring and who’s not…
Deep Data and the Semantics of Local
In the case of local search, there is no prevailing reason beyond lack of attention to prevent the industry from doing a better job of serving the full range of consumer needs. For the time being, industry attention is still directed in a self-fulfilling way toward the activities that have always received attention. This is the safe bet, but safe bets don’t lead to progress…
Street Fight Daily: Twitter’s Mobile Success, Foursquare Apps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
… Twitter’s Mobile Ads Begin to Click (WSJ)… Foursquare now includes other apps inside its own, adding context to your location (The Next Web)… Tim Armstrong Reportedly Asked An Old Friend To Save Patch, And He Said No (SAI)…
MapQuest Tries Its Hand at Social Discovery With mqVibe
The newish social mapping project debuted by MapQuest last October has been trying to create a neighborhood-centric “discovery” engine. The service launched in 50,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. and uses social media information about an area to generate a score for these neighborhoods.
Information Wants to Be Free, but Local Data Is Currency
The sizable overlap between consumer-generated information and enterprise control is experienced every day in the world of local search.Though few local search companies could exist without licensed data, once that data gets inside their walls, it becomes a foundation upon which consumer-generated data adds value to a service…