Leading off the day at the Internet Summit, Chip Perry, CEO of AutoTrader, revealed that the company's main business focus is not on e-commerce but on filling the gaps in the consumer shopping experience and providing valuable tools for sellers.…
Google has been telling anyone that will listen just how bullish it is on local/mobile commerce, and it has backed the bombast with a series of initiatives (Places, Place Search and Tags just to name three recent, relevant examples) to aggressively court…
(Image is of Zinio Newsstand for iPad, but you get the idea ... ) The release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab will give the iPad some competition. It reminds us that the rise of tablets has been positioned as a…
With more than 150 brands offering daily deals, and traditional media companies now building out their own deals platforms, the need for differentiation is apparent. LivingSocial, which according to compete.com boasts as many monthly unique visitors as Groupon, has acquired social adventure company…
The future of city guides has been morphing beyond events and features. This was driven home today by the launch of Metromix Deals, a JV between Metromix, the 50+ site city guide chain co-owned by Gannett and Tribune, and Local…
With 200+ deal-a-day sites and vendors, the only way to carve out a niche is to find dramatically different takes on group buying (i.e., focusing on verticals or integrating with other content). How about making your buys visible to your…
Some people (like me) don’t like games. Game mechanics-driven “check in” media like Foursquare, GoWalla, Loopt and BrightKite mostly leave them cold. But what if check-ins triggered group buying discounts? That’s the concept behind GroupTabs, a new service launching in…
EBay is pushing to do more to integrate the flagship auction site and its Marketplaces products with ProStores, its online storefront software company. The effort to integrate ProStores is part of a broader effort to integrate its properties (i.e., eBay…
Small businesses are gaining the ability to interact with customers anytime, as e-mail marketing gives way to “the social graph,” says local marketing pioneer Perry Evans, who is introducing Closely Inc., a new firm dedicated to helping SMBs leverage the…
Small businesses are gaining the ability to interact with customers anytime, as e-mail marketing gives way to “the social graph,” says local marketing pioneer Perry Evans, who is introducing Closely Inc., a new firm dedicated to helping SMBs leverage the…
Google’s $700 million acquisition of ITA, a search leader in online flight reservations, doesn’t have a direct impact on local advertising and services. Its immediate impact is on rival metasearch-based travel solutions, especially Orbitz, which gets 40 percent of its…
Living Social, the No. 2 "deal a day" site after Groupon with $44 million raised, announced today that it has expanded beyond the U.S., adding London as its 27th market. Additional U.K. sites in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool are up…
Living Social, the No. 2 "deal a day" site after Groupon with $44 million raised, announced today that it has expanded beyond the U.S., adding London as its 27th market. Additional U.K. sites in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool are up…
Center’d, the local/social events and city guide site, has consistently reported growing traffic. But in its three-year existence, the site has never really found a niche that would set it apart from the competition. The site, however, has kept on…
Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We'll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week's Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he…
Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We'll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week's Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he…
I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics, a Cleveland, Ohio-based call measurement and conversion analytics company. Reynolds was quick to point out that it is not simply a call tracking company, but rather it…
Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional…
Serial Web entrepreneur Mark H. Goldstein has been the founder of such sites as Kmart’s BlueLight and Impulse Buy. More recently, he invested in green ecology-based ventures, but he grew bored and came back to ecommerce with Loyalty Lab and …
Sears is loath to invest in its physical stores but has built a collection of “shop your way” online and mobile services as a high margin substitute, according to an article on WSJ.com. The article notes that Sears’ e-commerce division…
