Is Location More Than a Feature in Mobile Advertising?
The rise of smartphones has created a wealth of location data that marketers on both the buy- and sell-side are desperate to capitalize on. But is location really more than just another targeting mechanism for mobile advertising? That was the question posed to a Street Fight Summit panel Tuesday…
Exit Interview: Thinknear Founder Eli Portnoy Leaves Telenav
Two years after Telenav acquired Thinknear, the startup’s founder Eli Portnoy has left the company. We caught up with Portnoy to talk about some of the surprises in the mobile advertising industry over the past few years, whether location merits its own sandbox, and how his views about the small businesses market have evolved…
Street Fight Daily: First Data’s Turnaround, Offline Sellers’ Search Spending
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… KKR Banks on Bisignano Forging Apple Deal at First Data (Bloomberg)… More than Half of Top 25 Google AdWords Spenders Sell Mostly Offline (Screenwerk)… The Case Against Everything on Demand (Recode)…
How Marketers Can Use Mobile to Shape a Back-to-School Strategy
It’s that time of year again — time to get ready for school. This presents marketers with a huge opportunity to implement a back-to-school strategy, especially when it comes to mobile. According to a new report from Thinknear, 40% of customers spend at least an hour planning for back-to-school shopping on mobile…
Thinknear Launches Scoring Metric for Location-Based Targeting
Location-based advertising is more popular than ever, but the mobile ecosystem is littered with inaccurate data. That’s why Thinknear, the mobile advertising wing of Telenav, has unveiled Location Score Tags, a new free tool that measures the quality of the location data used in across a campaign.
LBMA Podcast: Mobile News at Apple’s WWDC, Thinknear’s Location Score
Top stories of the week include Brian Eno’s new acid trip, Hoxton Analytics profiles based on the shoes you wear, Prexter’s location-based app marketplace, AT&T tracks overseas customers, Floow2 Uber-fies farm equipment, Coca-Cola brings college students together, Yext raises $50M, Uber raises $1.2B and Verizon’s Run…
Study: Rampant Data Fraud Poses a Threat to the Mobile Advertising Industry
According to a new report, roughly two-thirds of the location data which mobile publishers pass on to advertising exchanges, and eventually to marketers, is inaccurate. The report, released by Thinknear, the mobile advertising wing of Telenav, found that of the 67% of mobile advertising impressions, which include a latitude-longitude data, only a third can accurately predict the location of a user down to 100 meters…
xAd CEO: Small Businesses Still a ‘Huge, Huge Market’ for Ad Tech
Location marketing company xAd, which started as a search advertising firm five years ago, generated over $65 million in run-rate revenue by the end of last year, half of which came from small and medium-sized businesses. Street Fight recently caught up with the company’s chief executive Dipanshu Sharma to discuss the challenges in finding recurring revenue in mobile, how location can solve that problem, and where the money would come from to build a lasting local advertising company in mobile…
Street Fight Daily: GrubHub Prices IPO, Flurry Tracks Users Offline
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GrubHub Sets Price Range for I.P.O. (New York Times)… Flurry Launches Service to Track Mobile App Users, Offline (AdAge)… China Set to Cap Transfers Using Mobile-Payment Services (Wall Street Journal)…
Street Fight Daily: Square Valuation Hits $5B, NFC’s Continued Decline
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Square Valuation Rises to $5bn (Financial Times)… Au Revoir NFC? Carrier Bouygues Reportedly Cools on Contactless Payments (GigaOm)… What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You (Wall Street Journal)…
Place Off: A Week in the Life of the Mobile Local Revolution
A couple columns back, I covered the collision of big data, mobile and local (please refrain from acronyms… “BiDaLoMo”!). That covered some location analytics players like JiWire and Sense Networks. But since then, the action has picked up. In the last week alone, I’ve had in-depth conversations with others defining this space including Placed, PlaceIQ, and Telenav…
Transaction Overview: Telenav Acquires ThinkNear
ThinkNear provides Telenav with a product that can drive near-term advertising revenue and is well suited to be integrated with Telenav’s turn-by-turn direction capability. The ThinkNear team and their mobile advertising knowhow are also an important addition to Telenav’s engineering and product organizations…
Street Fight Daily: Urbantag Acquired, OpenTable Optimizes Mobile
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Social Network Tagged’s Fifth Acquisition: Location-Based Mobile Discovery App Urbantag (TechCrunch)… OpenTable Helping Restaurants to Lift Last-Minute Reservations on the Phone(AllThingsD)… A Waze Ahead of Apple in Map Race (AdWeek)…
Following Pivot, ThinkNear Finds Buyer in Telenav
A day after Esri snapped up location-technology firm Geoloqi, Telenav has agreed to dish out $22.5 million to acquire ThinkNear, a hyperlocal advertising startup. The TechStars alum will join Telenav’s two year-old mobile advertising group, and form a new platform called Scout Advertising that will serve both the company’s consumer facing mobile application, Scout, as well as other partners…
Hyperlocal Execs’ 2014 Predictions (Part Two): Locu, Radius, Placed
As we have for the past couple of years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2014. We ran the first installment of their responses yesterday — here are a bunch more…