Street Fight Daily: Shopkick Rebuilds App, LocalVox Raises $7.4M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Shopkick Totally Recreates Its Shopping App. Gamification Out, Design and Content In (Pando Daily)… LocalVox Raises $7.4M for One-Stop Shop for Local Marketing (GigaOm)… Buy Reviews on Yelp, Get Black Mark (New York Times)…
Case Study: Restaurant Rewards Customers With Cash-Back Promos
After being disappointed by the results of a yearlong advertising campaign with Yelp, The Range Kitchen & Cocktails general manager Edward Camarillo decided to partner with MOGL, a card-based loyalty platform that rewards customers with 10% cash back when they pay with registered credit and debit cards at participating restaurants…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Takes On Yelp, Glassmap White Labels
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Foursquare Takes On Yelp With New Homepage Search Box (Search Engine Land)… Location-Based Mobile Startup Glassmap Goes White Label: Lets Business Target Customers With Personalized Offers (TechCrunch)… Amid Layoff Rumors, PayPal’s Mok Oh Out as Chief Scientist (Xconomy)…
How Restaurants Can ‘Listen’ to Location-Based Services
Many restaurants take a pulse of the Twitter and Facebook conversation about them, but how is that information being combined with and understood alongside location-based services like Foursquare? Perhaps the bigger question to ask is, if you’ve invested in social media fan building, how are you correlating that social data with the behaviors of those fans in the physical world?
Apple Maps: Taking the Long View
There’s no dancing around the fact that the much-anticipated launch of Apple Maps has turned into a fiasco for the company. Yet there’s little doubt Apple will buff out this particular blemish with time. The interesting part will be seeing exactly how the company chooses to address the gap in expertise that led to the current sub-par product. A big acquisition of talent or technology seems likely…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Pays Up, Yelp Shines in Apple Maps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Groupon Promising Merchants “Lowest Cost” Payments Service (And It’s Using an iPhone) (All Things D)… You May Hate Apple Maps, But the Yelp Integration is Something to Love (Venture Beat)… How Better Location Data Could Mean More-targeted Mobile Ads (GigaOm)…
Street Fight Daily: Tribune Halves TribLocal, Yelp Pushes Into Asia
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… In Wake of Journatic, Tribune Reduces Number of TribLocal Editions (Crain’s Chicago Business)… Yelp Expands into Asia With Singapore Launch (CNet)… UBL Going After Huge Offline Co-op Ad Budgets (Screenwerk)…
More Hyperlocal Investment Content Coming to Street Fight
Over the last six months, our Hyperlocal Investment Report newsletter has aimed to guide investors through this new industry, to give context and insight into the market potential of pre-public companies, and to synthesize activity in the public markets as well as in private placement, venture capital, mergers and acquisitions, private equity and the like. With this issue, we’re moving it from a paid product to delivering this content on our public website for free, to engage in broader discussion around key issues in hyperlocal investing.
iPhone 5: What Passbook and Maps Could Mean for Hyperlocal
Apple is set to announce the iPhone 5 during a press event in San Francisco later today, and with it, a set of features that could deeply impact the hyperlocal ecosystem. Maps and Passbook have the potential to become core, high-growth platforms within the hyperlocal industry, and the deeper integration of Siri could move the needle in local search…
Street Fight Daily: DMN’s Marketing Venture, Google Offers Exec Exits
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Dallas Morning News Partners With Slingshot to Create Speakeasy Marketing Service (Dallas Morning News)… Google Offers Exec Eric Rosenblum Leaves for Mobile Ad Start-Up (All Things D)… Groupon Journeys Offshore for Customer Service (Wired)…
7 Strategies for Dealing With Online Reviews
While nobody doubts that positive reviews can be good for a business, many merchants aren’t quite sure how to encourage their customers to post their opinions online — and how to respond when they receive negative feedback in such a public forum. We spoke to five experts in the field and asked what businesses should consider when managing their online reviews…
While SMBs Focus on Social, Online Reviews May Have More Impact
If they have a choice between social media marketing and better customer service or a better product, small businesses may in fact be better off focusing on the product rather than the marketing push. You can have the best Twitter patter and the finest Facebook page — but a half-star rating change on Yelp because you failed to flip that burger in time or didn’t make eye contact with a customer might ultimately have a bigger effect on the bottom line…
Poll: 93% of Respondents Check Reviews Before Dining or Shopping
A majority of American consumers check online reviews before shopping or dining at a local business, according to a recent Street Fight poll. The three-question poll of 200 U.S. consumers points to a customer base heavily reliant on local reviews sites, particularly among the crucial 18-34 age demographic marketers everywhere covet.
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Surges, Google Monetizes Third-party Maps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp Surges as Growth Potential Counters Lockup Expiry (Businessweek)… Google Launches New Ad Formats To Help Developers Monetize Google Maps (TechCrunch)… Square Extends Its Retail Reach, Now Sells Its Card Reader at 1k AT&T Stores, 20k total (The Next Web)…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Bulls Get Bearish, Google Wants More Wallet
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp Traders Brace for Lockup Expiration; ‘Better to Be Safe Than Sorry’ (Wall Street Journal)… Google Wallet Aspires To Hold All Your Cards and Tickets (GigaOm)… How The Web ‘Check In’ Is Growing Up (Forbes)…
Echoer App Compiles and Curates Real-Time Feedback About Locations
Four months after its wide launch in iOS, the crowdsourcing, location-based service app Echoer has announced an expansion into Android and a new content partner program with more than 500 media, blogger and event partners. Street Fight caught up with Daniel Cowen, Echoer’s co-founder and CEO, to discuss the app’s progression, the difficulties associated with continually generating real-time content, and how it distinguishes itself from reviews sites like Yelp…
Facebook and the Latent Local Layer
If Facebook were to really turn its attention to local, it could do some amazing things. Imagine if all of our posts and check-ins related to local restaurants were correlated together in a meaningful way. There’s little doubt Facebook could recommend the new place down the street based on your preferences and those of others similar to you, with a high likelihood of successfully predicting what you will like…
Street Fight Daily: Retailers Get Into Mobile Payments, Holovaty Out at EveryBlock
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology... 
Target, Walmart and Co.: Why Leave Mobile Payments to Others? (GigaOm)… Did Yelp and TripAdvisor Push Google to Compete? (New York Times/Bits)… Founder Adrian Holovaty Leaving EveryBlock After 5 Years (Holovaty.com)…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…