Month: June 2009

Coinciding with its high showing in the Quantcast analysis, MerchantCircle today announced that it has added a local city coupon feed for Twitter. Merchant coupons will now be fed to city-specific Twitter feeds (i.e., @MCircleNY) so local consumers can find local coupons and events in real time. MerchantCircle reports that more than 50,000 coupons and…

Figuring out who is on top of the heap in the online directory business is a complex task: On one hand, a “directory” category is kind of an oxymoron, given that so much of what is quantified is based on search engine optimization. Only 25 percent of Citysearch‘s traffic, for instance, comes from its destination…

Today is Herb Gordon’s last day as a consultant to the Association of Directory Marketing, Inc., although he will continue to edit ADM Flash. Flash, the newsletter of the ADM, is sent to more than 1,500 people, and its stories, factoids and tidbits provide direction to those of us in the Yellow Pages industry. Herb…

MojoPages, a 12-person local search/directory player based in the San Diego beach town of Solana Beach, has landed $5 million in Series A funding from Austin Ventures. Mojo has settled on $5 million as the amount it needs to get to breakeven on a cash flow basis, says CEO Jon Carder, who founded the company…

Kaesu, a provider of online services to free community papers, has received “more than $1 million” to jump-start its efforts. The strategic investment, from Media Space Solutions, is geared to open up community paper inventory around the U.S. for Media Space’s national advertisers. Kaesu, a four-year-old company with fewer than 10 employees, has ties with…

Niche publications serving specific demographics, like gays, seniors or Koreans, can make a lot of sense, whether they are online or in print. But not every niche is the same. Longtime YP executive Dick Larkin, the “Small Business Commando,” lays out some rules of the road for niche advertising in the latest edition of his…

In an action that could have broad implications for the classifieds industry, Yahoo HotJobs has added a “Pay Per Candidate” model that guarantees recruiters aren’t paying for untouched “ghost” listings. Pay Per Candidate only charges recruiters when candidates view a listing and act on it. The HotJobs model, similar to efforts launched by niche recruitment…

EBay’s Shopping.com has teamed with Krillion to launch The Krillion 360 Product Locator, which steers shoppers toward both online e-commerce sites and local retailers. The Locator can be added as a button to any Web site. On one level, The Locator doesn’t seem to aid Krillion’s core mission: boosting local retailer sales. Just when you…

AOL’s video search site Truveo hasn’t seen its name on this blog in some time. Founder Tim Tuttle used to speak at our conferences back in the day (as in 2005 … Internet years). Since then the company has quietly built itself up to the second-largest video search engine behind “Google sites” (which include YouTube…

Following our recent conversation with Verve Wireless’ Greg Hallinan, the company announced today that it has expanded its list of newspaper partners to include MediaNews Group, A.H. Belo Corp., Hearst Corp. and Cox Newspapers. This will bring The Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News, The Palm Beach Post and Examiner.com into its roster. With this…

After years of resisting the urge to buy a GPS — I generally know where I am going — GPS prices have come down so much that I broke down and paid $190 on Amazon for a Garmin Nuvi 760 that cost $399 last year. I know it’s a short-term piece of equipment. Next year’s…

Today I had the chance to talk to Big in Japan cofounder Alex Muse. The company is behind the popular ShopSavvy mobile application that scans bar codes to offer consumers product info. This includes pricing, specs, online availability and other info that is continually building into the product. Recently, for example, the company partnered with…

AdReady‘s template banner ads and media campaigns for SMBs will soon be available via Yahoo. The deal represents a major win for AdReady, which is already resold on a white-label basis by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Univision and MSNBC and runs 10,000+ ads a month. SMBs that wouldn’t ordinarily take the initiative…

TV stations have been behind the curve to leverage the local Web, but top station groups now routinely have dedicated new media executives, often with the rank of vice president or higher, according to a new survey by TV Newsday. The executives, many of whom in place for less than three years, oversee local Web…

MobileCrunch reports leaked info that the Sirius iPhone app has been downloaded 500,000 times in the past week. Along with the growing success of other music apps such as Pandora and imeem, this is telling of the level of demand for radio-like music discovery mobile apps. It’s also telling of the opportunity for the radio…

Intel and Nokia announced yesterday that they are working together to build a mobile platform. This will utilize the mobile chipsets to which Intel has increasingly been devoting resources lately. It will be an open platform built on a Linux-based OS, available for mobile devices including smartphones and netbooks. We’ve heard rumors that Intel was…

After TomTom’s much touted iPhone app announcement, made in conjunction with the 3G S announcement, AT&T yesterday announced it will launch an iPhone version of its Navigator personal navigation system. It will include spoken directions, business listings from Yellowpages.com, and a pretty standard list of features for navigation apps and PNDs. Here are the rest:…

Following our interview with location-based mobile company Geodelic, it put out a release today announcing a $3.5 million funding round and an app for the upcoming HTC MyTouch 3G (a.k.a. “G2”). The funding, led by Clearstone and Shasta Ventures, appears to be the public disclosure of an earlier round. The app, customized for the G2,…

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full. JitterGram for Local Merchants: ‘Show the Phone!’ A lot of small businesses are tinkering with mobile media, especially adding Twitter. We heard recently from sales consultant Mel Taylor that Naked Pizza in New Orleans,…

A lot of small businesses are tinkering with mobile media, especially adding Twitter. We heard recently from sales consultant Mel Taylor that Naked Pizza in New Orleans, which is backed by netpreneur Mark Cuban, is getting 15 percent of its walk-ins via Twitter. But how can most businesses really work with mobile? That’s the challenge…