Verve Mobile this week released its second "State of the Market" report containing the activity seen on its ad network. In this case it focused on the Quick Serve Restaurant (QSR) category -- a leading area of search and user activity…
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…
Making the rounds last week in London's burgeoning digital media community, we met Footfall123, a London-based company offering a loyalty marketing solution with a strong social marketing component. Footfall123 white labels its solution through partners and also works directly with merchants.…
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…
This is "Internet Week" in New York City as MediaPost hosts a series of conferences on the heels of the the second annual Digital Content Newsfronts. This is the Internet industry's answer to broadcast and cable television's "Upfronts" where the major…
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…
BIA/Kelsey recently published the second in a series of reports based on specific cuts of data from our Local Commerce Monitor research. LCM is BIA/Kelsey’s long-running study of how U.S. small business advertisers are evolving their use of media to…
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…
I recently had the chance to sit down with Kendall Fargo, CEO and founder of Rewarder. Some of you may remember Fargo from his days leading StepUp Commerce, and early leader in what is now the growing area of real…
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…
There are rumors swirling this morning that Facebook will acquire Waze. For those unfamiliar, Israeli based Waze is a red hot social navigation app that focuses on traffic conditions among a growing set of features. If the rumor is true, it makes…
Though it's been covered since its release yesterday, we wanted to give a nod to xAd's latest Mobile-Location Insights Report for Q1, and dive into some of it's top findings. The report follows closely behind the Nielsen administered Path to Purchase report…
Dex Media, the newly minted company that was once SuperMedia and Dex One, is counting on a strategy of serving as the "outsourced marketing partner for small-businesses" as they wade into the complex and confusing world of digital media. That…
> I recently had the opportunity to speak with Bruce Burke, CMO of M-ize. That’s m-ize like monetize, and mobilize which is exactly what m-ize does with its social media platform. The focus of m-ize is on specific product categories…
Last week, we made the prediction that Yelp will buy build or partner to bring Vine-like functionality to its mobile products. This comes in the wake of Yelp's positive Q1 earnings, and moves by Facebook and Foursquare to compete more…
Twitter's Vine is blowing up for its ability to shoot quick and easy videos. Smartphone saturation and wireless broadband also make it an opportune time. And people are getting creative with the 6 second format. The ease of use makes…
Earlier this week, Placed CEO David Shim notified me that the company's "Insights" product would be launching today. As we wrote back in October, this is a key piece of the "big data meets local" trend to provide analytics around…
Companies that are successfully transforming their sales teams to serve a fast changing local and SMB marketplace tend to follow a common set of best practices. These include a focus on customer-driven key performance indicators, a heavy reliance on data…