Groupon founder Andrew Mason’s concept of Groupon as “the operating system for local commerce,” had a certain catch to is, but what does it actually mean in practice? That’s the challenge being addressed by Groupon’s “Breadcrumb” team in Silicon Valley,…
ReachLocal is moving boldly to find new ways to boost the business of its SMB customers. While the independent sales organization is still largely supported by the sale of advertising packages to its 32,500 active advertisers, it is now focused…
Cloud-fed Tablets are powerful, game changing tools for SMB payment processing, marketing and promotion. That's the view of Clover Co-President Leonard Speiser, who was speaking this week at The Street Fight Summit West conference in San Francisco. Clover is a…
Big Data means a lot of things to people. The analytics certainly help. But is it really helping promote new sales and services? That’s the challenge, as companies seek to add coupons and consumer info directly to the payment card…
People are getting excited about Content Marketing again this year, with Website, mobile and video editorial content, ratings and reviews, promotions and listings broadening the content farm/search ranking algorithms segment we saw several years go. Q&A sites are a key…
The scheduling space is heating up, with a number of key vendors competing for SMB business, companies such as Groupon and Merchant Circle acquiring and integrating scheduling companies into core activities, and new companies such as MyTime attempting to aggregate…
Photo: CNN Online restaurant ordering and discovery giants GrubHub and Seamless have agreed to merge their operations, creating a single company. Chicago-based GrubHub currently serves more than 20,000 food ordering establishments in 500 cities, while New York-based Seamless serves more…
We like the idea of using corporations as a distribution base for media and services. In the 1990s, The Family Education Network built a great newsletter business distributed in corporate lobbies. The concept's been widely extended with the addition of…
Payment processors and related companies work with most SMBs and are increasingly seen as a potential sales channel for reaching them with additional services. This week, we talked with one processor, Boston-based Merchant Warehouse, about its efforts to leverage its…
Former Localeze business develoment guy Gib Olander is back in the game, this time switching his focus from local business listings innovation to maximizing effective local business reviews. Think of a variation of "Net Promoter Scores" for local business. Olander's…
Is appointment scheduling poised to be a new anchor for service promotions? That vision --"look for an appointment, get a deal or upsell " -- has been articulated by a number of scheduling vendors, such as Agendize, FullSlate and Schedulicity.…
Will tech companies like Google, Apple, eBay/PayPal, Amazon, Microsoft, Square and Intuit move in on the role traditionally played by banks? It is a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, as digitized transactions, mobile payments and offers, and digital wallets…
Disruption happens. In the local space, we’re seeing it happen with Yellow Pages and newspapers. Banks are seeing it happen as well, which will cause a major change in the way that customers keep track of their money, buy goods…
Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. The average Facebook user has 124 friends, and 70 percent of its users have "liked" at least one local business. But at this point, how local is Facebook really? And as an…
I think Yelp is a fantastic service and a top resource, especially when I am travelling. But it was disturbing to read a column in The Los Angeles Times on Saturday by Sandy Banks, which suggests that Yelp is suppressing…
Ads aren't just valued for bringing in calls and walk ins. Local businesses increasingly place value on consumers looking up maps and directions, or participating in loyalty efforts, notes SuperMedia Director of Mobile Development Chris Folmer, who was speaking on…
Seven years ago, in 2006, we began evangelizing a vision of local media driven by vertical specialties. These would drive high value leads with better, more relevant searches. In this light, Google was seen as a "perpetual vertical machine," driving…
The newspaper consortium-owned Wanderful Media is rolling out a retooled version of Find & Save, a shopping info site that it hopes will reinforce ties between the newspapers and the national retailers and brands that have traditionally driven their (estimated)…
Chip Perry, the visionary who was asked by Cox in 1997 to facilitate its own disruption with the launch of AutoTrader --going right after its print classified revenues -- has resigned as President and CEO of Cox Enterprise's AutoTrader Group.…
The Long Tail in advertising may be SMB-centric. The Short Tail may be ad agency centered media buying, which only go to the Top 100 sites on the Web. If that's the case, the "Mid-Tail" comes from local publishers, suggests…
