50 Cases in Digital Across Cultures: Superglobal Or Hyperlocal? ~ Elliot Polak, TextAppeal @CultureShocks #canneslions. Shoptiques Lets You Shop Boutiques Like a Local. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Shoptiques Quick Pitch: Shop local boutiques online. Genius Idea: Brings an offline industry online; lets you shop by neighborhood. It all began with Paris and a shoe. While shopping in France's capital four years ago, Olga Vidisheva stumbled across what she describes as a "tiny, one-location wonder boutique with the friendliest, most stylish owner. " Vidisheva says she has wanted to go back to that boutique ever since, but has never been able to. Shoptiques isn't the first business that's attempted to bring the boutique industry online.
So what makes Shoptiques different? Shoptiques also invites you to shop differently: that is, like a local. Mobile is also on the roadmap, with an emphasis on bridging the online and offline shopping experience. Image courtesy of iStockphoto/Alija. Hyperlocal » Blogging Writes. Capitalizing on News Assets Noted journalist Bob Garfield is the author of The Chaos Scenario, a 2009 book about the collapse of traditional media. Garfield was recently interviewed by Peter Conti, EVP of Borrell Associates, an advertising and media industry research and consulting firm. (Garfield will be presenting the keynote address at Borrell’s annual Local Online...
Read More Why Blogging Writes? When I first conceived of this blog I had intended to write about the remarkable technical work that rocketed DNAinfo.com, the hyperlocal Manhattan news site, from 0 to 1.2 million visitors/month in about 18 months–something of a record in a town known for the competitiveness of its news outlets. (Here’s a link to an article that gives context...
Daily Deals Industry Moving Into Consolidation Mode. With over 600 companies currently in the daily deals space in the U.S., industry consolidation is bound to occur — with larger companies buying up smaller rivals while other competitors go belly up. Given Groupon’s and LivingSocial’s ongoing acquisition spree and the departures of Facebook and Yelp from the deals game, it seems like this consolidation is already beginning to happen. To find out more about what to expect in the deals space, Street Fight recently spoke with two industry watchers from local media adviser BIA/Kelsey, vice president Peter Krasilovsky and economist Mark Fratrik. Krasilovsky sees opportunities for differentiation around strong and scalable tech infrastructure, a large email list and superior curation of deals. With regard to curation, he points out that several companies, like B2B deals site MarketSharing, have begun to stand out by narrowing their audience to specific verticals: “I love the niche.
“And how much did it cost them to try out? Hyperlocal in 2012: More Consolidation and Scale, Less ‘Free’ In 2011, we saw the explosion — and the beginnings of the implosion — of the deals industry with the shrinking, and even folding, of several companies. The most shocking example of this was the crippling of BuyWithMe, which showed that the market wasn’t mature enough for a deals company to sustain such an aggressive roll-up strategy when it was forced to slash its staff in half and continually needed more cash and couldn’t interest any investors to participate in another round. Others in the deals space disappeared altogether — particularly in the Chicago market, where Groupon towers over other deal hopefuls. In the fall, dog deals company Doggyloot absorbed PetSimply; Local Offer Network acquired Raleigh’s Redeemio. But generally, we’re expecting more consolidation. In the LBS arena, Facebook’s purchase of Gowalla was the first sign of more consolidation to come. The second part of this is less of a prediction than a hope.
Laura Rich is Street Fight’s co-founder and CEO. NPR’s Bob Garfield: Hyperlocal News Ventures Doomed. Media analyst Bob Garfield has put a voice behind the industry rumblings about hyperlocal news ventures. As standalone business operations, hyperlocal news “just doesn’t make for a sustainable financial model,” Garfield said in a recent video interview with Borrell Associates. Garfield, author and host of NPR’s “On the Media,” thinks hyperlocal news coverage is doomed because of the incredible fragmentation and its downward pressure on advertising prices. The YouTube video interview was with Borrell Associates executive vice president Peter Conti. In it, Garfield says he thinks that the winner in every market will likely be the entity that forms strategic relationships for content and revenue in its market.
Garfield stresses that, paradoxically, this vast fragmentation we see, could lead into consolidation in order to achieve success. Garfield will be the keynote speaker at the Borrell Associates’ Third Annual Local Online Advertising Conference , March 21-22, in NYC at the Grand Hyatt. Hyperlocals Need to Protect Their Social Media Branding. Customer lists, brand names, and social media accounts are valuable assets for hyperlocal news publishers, and they should be protected like money. PhoneDog, LLC is battling former contributor Noah Kravitz in a San Francisco Federal Court after Kravitz left PhoneDog and used a Twitter account provided by PhoneDog to promote his new endeavors to PhoneDog’s followers. Last week, the dispute over PhoneDog’s property claim in its followers heated up when a magistrate judge refused to throw out the suit. PhoneDog provides reviews of mobile products, which includes research information and price comparisons.
The company claims it attracts about 1.5 million visitors per month. PhoneDog requires its employees and agents to maintain their own Twitter accounts to tweet links directing followers to the site. According to court documents, Kravitz served as a video blogger for PhoneDog from 2006 until October 2010. Hyperlocal publishers can take steps to avoid PhoneDog’s dilemma. Hyper-Local Ad Targeting Startup PlaceIQ Raises $4.2 Million And Moves To New York City. Ah, the allure of the Big City. PlaceIQ, a hyper-local ad targeting startup from Boulder, Colorado is moving to New York City, flush with $4.2 million in series A funding.
New investors include U.S. Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners. Existing investors IA Ventures, kbs+p ventures, and angel investor Jerry Neumann also invested in the round. PlaceIQ breaks up the world into 100 million tiles and gathers as much location data about each tile so that it can infer what people in those locations might be interested in at different times of day. As I explained in a post earlier this year: Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. The company is still doing mobile ad targeting (on an anonymous basis), but now thinks there is a broader opportunity in location-specific audience analytics across mobile phones, tablets, digital billboards, and even online and TV. Indexing the Real World: The Enormous Potential of Hyperlocal Data. Shane Snow is a Mashable contributor and the co-founder of Contently.com.
Do you think there's a lot of data on the Internet? Imagine how much there is in the offline world: 510 million square kilometers of land, 6.79 billion people, 18 million kilometers of paved roads, and countless objects inhabit the Earth. The most exciting thing about all this data? Technologists are now starting to chart and index the offline world, down to street signs and basketball hoops. For the past decade, social technologies such as Meetup and Match.com have used the web to help people connect in person. The new wave of hyperlocal data is surging. Step 1: Location-Based Infrastructure At SXSWi 2011, Internet luminary, publisher and media thinker Tim O'Reilly called President Ronald Reagan "the Father of Foursquare. " At the time, laypeople weren't generally interested in spending thousands of dollars on GPS receivers. Step 2: Crowdsourced Data Capturers Armed With Phones Step 4: App Development Bonanza. Yext CEO: ‘Fairly Intense Consolidation’ En Route for Local Marketers.
Unlike most startups, Yext makes money. After launching in 2009, the New York-based company soon sacked an already lucrative pay-per-call and pay-per-action business to build its Power Listings product, which allows businesses to update and alter listings across multiple sites – among others, Super Pages, Yelp, City Search, Map Quest, and Yahoo Local — through a single portal. In July, Yext raised $10 Million in series D funding to power the new venture and has since amassed a massive customer base, onboarding over 40,000 paying subscribers in a little over a year after the launch.
In December, the company updated its listings sync tool with new multi-media capabilities as well as new partnerships with a handful of hyperlocal publishers, including foursquare, EZLocal, and AOL’s Patch. Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Howard Lerman, to take a deep dive into the business of local information and to talk about which hyperlocal companies he sees coming out on top.