ShopLocal Blog

What is the difference between a rich media capability and a product? Easy.  With a product, there is typical an underlying code base, a developed platform and a host of client configurable features that come “out of the box”.  With just a capability, all of this base build out needs to be undertaken from scratch [...]

Let’s take any given circular / weekly ad page.  Doesn’t matter which retailer, which page, which newspaper.  Any old page will due just fine for this example. Examine the image above careful.  What factual statements would you make?  A few of the more obvious ones may include: There are a total of seven (7) items [...]

The latest and greatest SmartCircular feature is now live.  Multi-page circular printing. Prior to the release of this feature, a user that wanted to print out an entire online ad would have to manually click the ‘Print This Page’ button for every single page.  What a drag.  Now a user can very easily print the [...]

So “selling futures” is a common PR trick in the technology world.  I’m not a huge fan, but I am a fan of showing real customers and partners glimpses of what is about to happen so that real market feedback and guidance can help shape the product. Reading crystal balls and tea leaves is difficult, [...]

IP Geo-Location Quova ip2location MaxMind Geo-Coding Geonames Webservices Google Geocoder Class Yahoo Geocoding API Geocoder.us Geo-Term Extraction Resolve an arbitrary string into a geographical point or area: “food in Cambridge” = “food” in “Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA” MetaCarta Query Parser API Urban Mapping GeoMods Location in the Browser navigator.getGeolocation() LocationAware.org W3C Web API

Customers in regional geographies speak the same language, have similar buying patterns, and similar cultures. However these site visitors are often impatient with web sites that force them to identify those particulars over and over. Geo-IP targeting (eg the process of matching a user’s IP address to a physical location) enables retailers using SmartCircular to [...]

Screen readers welcome.  That is the message that ShopLocal wants to send to any site visitor that is trying to access a SmartCircular site that has accessibility enabled. However along the road of determining what level of accessibility is right for your business are many key decisions such as: Section 508 compliance? Adhering to the [...]

I am a huge fan of the WayBackMachine that the Internet Archive runs (check out this link if you want to see what ShopLocal.com looked like way back in 2004), but this concept of going back in time has many useful implications in today’s world. Within the context of circulars, ShopLocal’s retail clients have come [...]

It’s all about perspective.  To be specific, there is typically a very narrow perspective that is used to judge the performance of localized rich media ads – impressions, interactions & clicks.  Those three metrics are the most understood and most used in today’s digital display advertising world.  But the story should never start and end [...]

Via the ever deepening rich media platform that Pointroll rich media ads are built on top of (AdPortal + AdControl) is a new and exciting feature that many a retailer that has used PaperBoy ads have asked about. Custom geographical based display ad targeting and reporting Retailers can finally define exactly how they want to [...]