Street Fight Daily: Yelp’s New Business App, Foursquare on the iPad
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Yelp Introduces New App For Business Owners With Push Notifications (Marketing Land)… Foursquare’s iPad App Is Finally Here (Mashable)… Uber Responds to Senator Franken’s Privacy Concerns (New York Times)…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Wine Label, Porch Keeps Growing
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Groupon Uncorks Its Own Wine Label (Chicago Business Journal)… Can Porch.com Become LinkedIn For Your House? (Fortune)… For Location-Tracking Startup, a Data-Privacy Odyssey (Wall Street Journal)…
The Rise of Marketing Automation in Local’s Next Act
Marketing automation isn’t just for the biggest companies in the world anymore. Thanks to companies like Booker, Signpost, Shopkeep, and others, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) have access to the data and the tools to reach their customers in smart, efficient ways while minimizing the hassle on the backend…
For Apple Pay to Thrive, Small Businesses Must Adopt
For a mobile wallet to really impact consumer behavior, its acceptance has to be ubiquitous — not just in the Targets and Macy’s of this world, but in our local bodegas, mom-and-pop shops, independent coffee shops and food trucks. You might think these businesses are a less important slice of the pie than the big-box retailers, but you’d be wrong…
In New App Marketplace, Signs of the Square’s Future
The company launched its Square App Marketplace yesterday to allow third-parties to develop applications that integrate directly into its point-of-sale product. The move marks an important step in Square’s evolution as it shifts focus from consumer-facing payments to an arguably much larger business software market…
Wooing Restuarants, Retail Software Startup LightSpeed Buys POSIOS
Point-of-sale startup Lightspeed said Wednesday it has purchased a belgian competitor, POSIOS, to help the firm enter the food service vertical and expand internationally. The deal underscores the potential for consolidation within a small business software segment that has seen an intense influx of capital and redrawing of product lines…
The Sharing Economy Goes Behind the Counter
We tend to think of the sharing economy as a consumer movement that helps us hail a ride or find a place to stay. But the basic logic driving the shift will soon start to impact the more mundane aspects of small business, allowing merchants to enjoy some of the advantages of scale that their larger competitors do…
Street Fight Daily: Tech Helps Small Business, Inside Uber’s War Machine
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Startups’ Modern Tools Help Small Merchants Compete (New York Times)… Inside Uber’s Political War Machine (DailyBeast)… Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages (Atlantic)…
For Small Businesses, A Reprieve After Decades of Retreat
Earlier this week, the National Federation of Independent Business announced that its small business confidence index rose 1.8 points to 95.2 in April, the highest reading since October 2007. With small business week coming to a close, small businesses are certainly better off today than they were a decade ago…
Shopkeep Raises $25M to Build a Better Cash Register for Indie Retail
The New York-based startup that builds point-of-sale software for mobile devices has raised $25 million in its third round of funding. The new capital thrusts the company to the forefront of a busy pack of upstarts looking to rethink the point-of-sale. It also sets the stage for a drawn-out fight between a handful of well-funded startups, the legacy point-of-sale providers who control much of the market, and a number of other tech giants looking in…
Street Fight Daily: Reddit Targets Locations, Facebook’s Billion Mobile Users
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.. Reddit Introduces Location-Targeted Promoted Posts (Wall Street Journal)… Facebook Posts Earnings Beat as Mobile Soars Past One Billion Monthly Users (Recode)… Uber Drives for Asian Expansion (Financial Times)…
With Perfect Information, Does ‘Awareness’ Becomes Obsolete?
In a world in which information is finite and often inaccessible, the ability for a business to be top of mind — to carve out a little spot in a consumer’s memory — was a powerful competitive advantage, and one that drove the way businesses sold goods and services to local consumers. But thanks to the rapid adoptions of mobile devices by consumers and the emergence of inexpensive cloud-based operations software, that’s changing…
Street Fight Daily: Turnover At Clinkle, Disney Nears Personalization At Parks
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… >A Lot Of People Have Already Left Clinkle, A Buzzy Payment App That Still Hasn’t Launched (Business Insider)… Disney World Characters Aren’t Greeting All the Visiting Kids by Name — Yet (AllThingsD)… Can Same-Day Delivery Succeed This Time? (MIT Technology Review)…
8 Strategies for Selling Cloud-Based POS Systems to SMBs
Cloud-based point-of-sale systems are an easy sell for vendors working with small businesses without existing mechanisms in place for handling transactions, but getting an established merchant who has already invested thousands of dollars in a legacy POS system to consider making the switch to mobile is a trickier proposition. So what is the secret to onboarding more merchants, including those who already have hardware POS systems in place? To find out, we spoke with several experts from the mPOS industry…
Powering the Payment Stream
For years, local search has fed consumers to a technological black hole. The systems on which local businesses rely to manage day-to-day operations have remained offline, relegated to legacy tools or silo-ed in digital products not built for the web. But that’s changing. Thanks to a number of new companies that are reimagining the way consumers shop and reprovisioning the systems that business owners use to monitor and transact the exchange of goods locally, that “source code” is coming online, filling a critical gap in the local commerce stack…
Case Study: Bakery Uses Mobile POS for Real-Time Business Analytics
When Tara Koenig first began researching mobile point-of-sale systems for her Virginia cupcake bakery back in 2011, her interest wasn’t driven by the lack of upfront costs or tablet integrations. It was driven by necessity. The location Koenig had chosen for her new bakery was a 500-square-foot garage with no telephone lines (a feature that’s typically necessary when installing a hardware-based POS system)…
Leaf CEO: For POS Startups, It’s a ‘Race Against Time’
“Anyone selling software to SMBs would love it if distribution was through ecommerce or retail,” says Aron Schwarzkopf. “The problem with the industry however, is that SMBs have never reacted well to that. Remote distribution never worked. … But I do believe that five years from now the POS could be the gateway to the SMB. And that the way you will get to the small business may be through applications that work through the POS.”
Hyperlocal Execs’ 2015 Predictions (Part Two): Cir.cl, xAd, Yodle, VendAsta
As we have for the past three years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2015. We ran the first installment of their responses yesterday — now here are the rest…