Street Fight Daily: 05.02.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Online local media and search company Local.com has acquired location-based shopping data aggregator Krillion for $3.5 million in cash. The company provides local shopping information on over 70,000 consumer products from over 50,000 retailers, including in-store availability, comparison pricing, current discounts and images. (TechCrunch)…
Startup thruSocial offers neighborhood pizza places and Pilates studios a one-stop platform to create their own promotions, which the company distributes to social-networking sites, as well as its own consumer-end deals site, thrupon.com. (GigaOm)…
AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal blogs, which has suggested that a number of initiatives are coming to increase community engagement with its sites, has hired well-respected Brooklyn hyperlocal blogger Liena Zagare to lead the effort. (PaidContent)…
Daily Deals by the Numbers
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.
Study: FB ‘Likes’ Driving Buzz for Local Biz
The Facebook “like” button, which has been around for just over a year, has already become an important cultural phenomenon. A couple of months ago, a study by Yahoo Labs’ Yury Lifshits looked at how “likes” affect traffic to news stories by reinforcing memes, making the most popular content even more popular as it is passed around.
Street Fight Daily: 04.29.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
For AOL to have real success with Patch, the company will need to employ the model of companies that probably want Patch to fail. (Forbes)…
“The problem with local is that everything is local,” writes CityVoter’s Josh Walker. “An agency should be able to talk intelligently about the combination of these approaches and be comfortable working with multiple vendors to reach the audience in the geography a client needs to activate.” (Business Insider)…
In the midst of a busy month of expansion, LivingSocial has announced its expansion into nine new U.S. markets. (Daily Deal Media)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.28.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.…
Guardian News & Media is ending Guardian Local, a project it launched in 2010 to try and figure out the future of local journalism. “Unfortunately, while the blogs have found engaged local readerships and had good editorial impact, the project is not sustainable in its present form,” writes the publisher’s digital engagement head Meg Pickard. (PaidContent)…
Though two years old, the Daily Deal market is now worth billions and specialty layers are forming to slice apart that value. Jim Moran offers “The Daily Deal Stack” a visual representation of the different segments forming within the market. (Yipit Blog)…
Sparkfly, a provider of promotion redemption and tracking technology has raised $2.5 million in funding for SparkQuest, its patented mobile engagement platform that connects consumers deal redemption with merchants at the point of sale. (Daily Deal Media)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.25.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is reportedly exploring a new funding round at a $500 million valuation. The company’s last round of funding, in the summer of 2010, valued it at $100 million. (WSJ)…
Both Foursquare and Gowalla are making inroads in marketing entertainment properties via mobile platforms to users who check in at various sites recommended by the broadcast television networks or their talent. (Variety)…
Michael Arrington thinks the massive valuations for Web services like Groupon signify that we’re in the middle of another tech bubble that is waiting to pop. (TechCrunch)…
Gowalla Eyes Entertainment to Drive Check-Ins
Earlier this month, Gowalla tried something new: it signed deals with indie band The Freelance Whales and small but superior film “Win Win” in a bid to take the check-in service is taking into local music and film promotion – and drive check-ins up 500%.
Street Fight got the low-down on this new direction from Gowalla’s Jonathan Carroll, the music and community manager who handles the service’s events, the Gowalla blog, interaction with the street teams and helping build a worldwide user base. (Read our interview with Gowalla CEO Josh Williams here.)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.21.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups… EBay is buying location-based service and ad network WHERE in a deal that gives it added ability to drive more local and offline commerce. (GigaOm)… Foursquare has grown to almost 10 million users by connecting them to where they are now. But the company now will focus on the future movements of its users, said Dennis Crowley.(GigaOm)… Whatser, the location-based service that lets users share their favorite locations with friends, is launching a “marketing platform” in which local merchants and brands can “claim” a location that they operate and then communicate with users. (TechCrunch)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups…
Groupon is buying Pelago, maker of local discovery app Whrrl, in a bid to improve its ability to bring together consumers and local discount offers. This could also mean a broader direction for Groupon as it looks to expand beyond daily deals to more mobile and personalized discounts. (GigaOm)…
LocalResponse is a “social advertising platform” that lets small businesses sift through the stream of public check-in and review data to see who their most loyal customers are, and send them coupons and messages on Twitter. (NYT/Bits)…
Foursquare has added a feature that will bring some context to your historical check-ins. Now, when users look back at their check-ins, they won’t see only their pictures, but also pictures taken by friends who were also checked in at the event. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… LivingSocial’s February revenue was reportedly $50 million, and projected revenue for 2011 (assumed calendar) is a cool $1 billion. That makes it roughly half the size of Groupon. (TechCrunch)… Naveen Selvadurai, one of the founders of Foursquare, talks about how the company has quickly grown from nothing to a user base of over 8 million people, with 35,000 new users joining every day. (PC Mag)… Earlier this month, LivingSocial announced that it had raised $400 million in new funding to pursue “aggressive domestic and international growth and continued product innovation.” But approximately $200 million of that is being used to partially cash out early investors and members of company management. (Fortune)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Groupon is expected to pick Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley as its two lead underwriters for a planned public offering later this year. The IPO is expected to value the company at between $15 billion and $20 billion. (Wall Street Journal)… Google’s mobile search business has grown incredibly quickly. Sales chief Nikesh Arora said Google may build out a local salesforce to take advantage of the new mobile and local advertising opportunities. (TechCrunch)… strong>What types of articles work best for news organizations on Foursquare? Opinions, reviews and evergreen content — but maybe not the news. (Nieman Journalism Lab)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.13.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Arianna Huffington says that AOL will hire as many as 800 full-time employees at its Patch sites across the country, reducing the use of freelancers and beefing up local content. (Bloomberg)… Will 2011 be “the year the check-in died?” Mark Watkins thinks services like Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla need to find a way to deliver deep value to people beyond the check-in. (ReadWriteWeb)… Google has decided to take its Google Latitude Check-In offers nationwide. The service allows users share locations on a map, rewarding frequent users with exclusive discounts. (Daily Deal Media)…
Street Fight Daily: 04.12.11
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)…