Street Fight Daily: 08.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is getting out of the daily deals business after four months of testing, a move that may ease some competitive pressure on industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. (Reuters)…
The global location-based advertising market will reach $12.8 billion by 2017, according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts. (Press Release)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.26.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Local business reviews site Angie’s List filed for an IPO yesterday. The company will raises as much as $75 million. Angie’s List offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web. (TechCrunch)…
Yipit’s data report revealed substantial shifts in the daily deal space occurring over the past month: Daily Deal industry revenue declined 7% in July in North America’s largest markets. Groupon’s revenue declined 4% while LivingSocial’s revenue declined 18%. (Yipit Blog)…
CityPockets Acquires DealBurner for Location-Based Deal Alerts
Citypockets, the site that began as a niche tool for deal hounds to manage and track purchased deals, has taken a big step towards becoming a full-service offers provider, acquiring Dealburner – an application that alerts users of nearby deals via SMS – in an all-stock transaction yesterday…
Street Fight Daily: 08.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Amazon.com is rolling out its daily deals offerings in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. One thing AmazonLocal can do, which Groupon and other deals sites cannot, is promote still more deals on Amazon itself. (New York Times/Bits)…
Local news remains – oddly – one of the final frontiers not yet conquered under the Internet’s mighty dominion. But its time seems to be arriving, and experiments abound. (American Journalism Review)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Facebook is killing off Places. To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. (TechCrunch)…
Group Commerce, which sells a software platform to let publishers host their own daily deal applications, has acquired geo-location startup Socialight. The Socialight team and technology will be put toward fleshing out Group Commerce’s mobile strategy. (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Placecast’s ShopAlerts service, which delivers retailer and merchant offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones, has announced its integration with mobile smartphone apps. (TechCrunch)…
With millions of Americans carrying GPS-enabled smartphones around all day, mobile marketers dream of using their locations to serve them targeted ads. But recent studies show that consumers and advertisers aren’t yet ready for location-based advertising to take over our touchscreens. (Poynter)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Imagine if Groupon starts instructing its sales force to start focusing on opportunities other than restaurants, spas, massages and pilates classes. Theoretically, the company could leverage its enormous international subscriber base to venture into offering deals for groceries, household items and other goods regularly purchased offline. (TechCrunch)…
“Patch is AOL’s last, best chance to build a growth engine,” writes Maxwell Wessel. “Investors shouldn’t be calling for AOL to back off the business. They should be calling for AOL to double down — not by increasing Patch’s $150M+ yearly cash burn, but by increasing commitment. ” (Harvard Business Review Blog)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare announced new features on Thursday that allow check-ins at events, like concerts or movies, instead of just the places where those events are happening. The company said the new features will simply formalize the existing behavior of its users. (New York Times)…
Groupon has not only faced questions about its controversial accounting practices, but is now also having to respond to questions from members of Congress about its privacy policies. (AllThingsD)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
According to a new report from location-based media company JiWire, 53% of the “on-the-go” U.S. audience is willing to exchange their location in exchange for more relevant content and better information, including mobile deals. (TechCrunch)…
Groupon is running seriously low on cash. The company is not broke, by any means. It can also presumably raise additional capital in the private markets if its IPO gets further delayed. But Groupon’s cash cushion relative to its liabilities is small — and the gap between the two is going the wrong way fast. (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Mobile location service Localmind lets you use your phone to ask questions of people who are hanging out at a restaurant, bar, park or other venue. With yesterday’s update to the app, Localmind users can now send photos in response to questions, answer questions older than real time and get forwarded all questions for places they are regulars at. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Foursquare has added photos inline with checkins in an update to its iPhone application Tuesday. The new version adds color to the activity stream and refreshes the look and feel of the app. (Mashable)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare has launched a new feature that allows users to create distinct lists of the places they’ve checked into or plan to visit in the future. This new functionality brings Foursquare more into the realm of user-generated recommendations long-dominated by review sites such as Yelp. (GigaOm)…
Miguel Ferrer, General Manager of AOL Latino says Patch Latino is set to be introduced this fall and is already hiring journalists in selected markets. “We are not yet commenting on the exact locations of the Patch Latino sites, but yes, they will be in Southern California.” (Portada)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
AOL is spending about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate. AOL first focused on building traffic to Patch sites, and just recently started ramping up ad sales. (Wall Street Journal)…
San Francisco’s KQED is embarking on a couple of partnerships pairing it with hyperlocal sites in the area: one with just-launched Huffington Post San Francisco, the other with four hyperlocal news sites as part of J-Lab’s Networked Journalism Project. (Nieman Lab)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.12.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
An upcoming promotion with RedBox deal seems to go against Foursquare’s whole raison d’être — which is all about getting users out and about. But the new users that result will become increasingly valuable, particularly as Foursquare focuses not just on letting users share where they are now, but to suggest where they should be going. (GigaOm)…
Should investors run screaming from Groupon? Is it an overrated, hyped-up scam? Are we in the middle of another tech bubble? Well, Groupon does seem rather prone to hyperbole, perhaps because its business has proved so worthy of it in its mere months of existence. (Slate)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.11.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon is spending considerable money to acquire subscribers, but those subscribers are buying less Groupons. Groupon is also spending considerable money to acquire merchants but are making less revenue per merchant. That’s not good. (Yipit Blog)…
According to a new survey, it’s not location-relevant advertising that is most valued by mobile consumers; it’s mobile ads that are personalized to a users’ tastes. (Paid Content)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.10.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
SinglePlatform has raised another $3.25 million to launch new products. “If you want to monetize local, you will need to go through SinglePlatform one day, because they’ll own the best, trusted relationship with the merchant,” a confident venture capitalist says. (Business Insider)…
One year after the launch of TBD, the local news project barely exists. Journal Register’s Steve Buttry quietly lifts a glass to his TBD colleagues and shares some lessons for other digital pioneers from his TBD experience. (SteveButtry.com)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.09.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Bloomspot has secured $40 million in new funding. The company focuses on offers from high-quality merchants looking to connect with their best customers and deepen loyalty. The offers they serve are highly tailored for specific interests and demographics. (TechCrunch)…
In its quarterly earnings report, AOL said that Patch has added 44 towns to end Q2 in 846 towns and is on track to have about a 1,000 coverage areas by year’s end. (PaidContent)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.08.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Groupon’s subscribers have more than doubled to 115 million so far this year, according to a person familiar with the situation. Groupon had 50.58 million subscribers at the end of 2010. That jumped 64 percent to 83.1 million at the end of the first quarter. Since then, the number of subscribers has climbed to 115 million, the person said. (Reuters)…
While it may be curious that advertisers, investors, and Foursquare’s ever-growing horde of users continue to maintain faith in the company’s fortunes, this allegiance has almost entirely to do with the enchantments of a single person: founder Dennis Crowley. (Ad Age)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.05.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
“Location is no longer a service like maps or navigation, but increasingly an enabler of new product experiences,” writes Forrester’s Thomas Husson. “In a nutshell, the very notion of location-based services doesn’t not mean much anymore.” (Moco News)…
Mayorships, stickers, badges — these are the rewards new mobile apps confer on us for supplying them with the data of our daily activities. But there’s one potential stumbling block which could stop this gamification going global: the rest of the world might not be as competition-crazy as Americans are. (PaidContent)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.04.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Location-based media company JiWire reports seeing increases in the sharing of and the demand for local deals, like those offered by Groupon, LivingSocial and others, since last quarter. According to data from a recent survey, sharing of deals has increased by 21% and demand is up 20% from Q1 2011. (ReadWriteWeb)…
LivingSocial’s Groupon Now-killer, LivingSocial Instant, appears to now have an ad unit that promotes specific deals. This adds a new layer to how daily deals can be promoted or sold. (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: 08.03.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare has launched an update that allows anyone to sign up for a brand page that can push tips and check-ins to followers on Foursquare, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. Users had already been able to add new locations to the service, but, until yesterday, there was no good way for most places to actively reach out to users. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Despite the regular carping from pundits on the sidelines, LivingSocial believes it can show that daily deals are a good deal for businesses, and thus a sustainable long term industry. The company has released the results of a recent survey to bolster its argument. (Business Insider)…