MerchantCircle is joining the ranks of companies creating local and vertical content, including Demand Media, Associated Content, Examiner.com, AOL’s Seed and Patch, Perfect Market, Helium, Brafton Media and others. MC’s new Local Content Studio is being helmed by Andy Halliday, who many of us remember as former head of eCommerce at Excite@Home, who has since [...]
Category Archives: Social/Reviews & Ratings
Oodle’s iPhone App: Mostly About the Camera
August 20, 2010 – 4:01 pm
Classifieds haven’t been especially enhanced by mobile apps – although it is nice to have them on the go when shopping for a car or a house. But Oodle keeps pushing the envelope with its effort to bring the world of social media to classifieds.
The classifieds site, which also acts as a platform for clients [...]
HomeRun Shows What-and-When You Bought on its ‘Daily Steals’
August 18, 2010 – 10:54 pm
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 entire social network, and going deeper on the game mechanisms?
That’s the approach [...]
GroupTabs: Check-ins = Group Buying
August 13, 2010 – 7:16 pm
Some people (like me) don’t like games. Game mechanics-driven “check in” media like FourSquare, GoWalla, Loopt and BrightKite mostly leaves them cold.
But what if check-ins triggered group buying discounts? That’s the concept behind GroupTabs, a new service launching in New York City next week. The idea is that offers could be floated on smart phones [...]
Redbeacon Raises $7.4 Million; Interview with CEO Ethan Anderson
August 5, 2010 – 8:44 pm
Redbeacon, the six person San Francisco based service referral company, announced today that it has raised a heady $7.4 million in Series A financing from Mayfield Fund and Venrock. CEO and Co-founder Ethan Anderson tells us that the company needed such a huge round to quickly ramp up the staff, including engineers, designers and [...]
CampusLive Connects College Students to Local SMBs
August 5, 2010 – 4:38 pm
College students are a rich market for local businesses in college towns. Indeed, advertising has become more important to local SMBs as colleges increasingly compete for the business and try to keep students (and their money) on campus.
CampusLive, the brainchild of UMass Amherst students in 2008, is positioning itself to serve as a media [...]
Groupon Personalizes Deal a Day for User Interests
July 29, 2010 – 5:36 pm
Groupon has been working to bust out of the limited inventory that seems inherent in its “deal a day” space. First, it added a “side” deal in many markets. Then it started breaking out some of the larger markets into urban and suburban areas –something that Living Social has pushed even harder on. [...]
