American Express has recently been leveraging its powerful relationship with SMBs on the Web, including a tie to search engine marketing and lead generation via a deal between American Express Open and Clickable. Now Amex is going deep with social…
SB Nation (Sports Blog Nation) presents a fan-centric, highly verticalized (i.e., local) view of sports from dozens of bloggers. The site has completed a new $10.5 million "C" round of funding, pushing it past the $23.5 million mark. The new…
In case you missed them, here are a few headlines and links to recent posts on our Mobile Local Media blog. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here, and the e-mail alert here. -- Mobile Local Evolutions: A Conversation With DexOne…
My latest column at Search Engine Watch examines the emerging area of visual search. This includes things like mobile bar code scanners and augmented reality. We've seen a lot of activity in this area over the past month, covered in…
We've long had an ax to grind about mobile products that simply port over online experiences to a smaller screen. This can be said for apps, as well as advertising. The latter too often inherits the creative, targeting and campaign objectives of…
With the rise of consumer-facing real estate sites such as Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia, it seems only natural that Multiple Listing Services would break out from behind the Realtor and brokerage firewalls, and provide truly local, for-profit real estate sites,…
Today we ran a webinar that was part ILM conference preview, part data presentation and part analyst round table. We even had comScore's Gillian Heltai join the discussion. Among the items discussed were the changing ways people are consuming mobile content,…
Local.com has dramatically upgraded its destination site, with soft colors, an excellent user interface and renewed focus on three core categories -- “business,” “coupons” and “events.” The categories are clearly aimed at driving organic traffic from its intended audience of…
After a packed day of participating in webinars and victory parades, it's time to catch up on a full slate of news items. Chief among them is Facebook's "mobile" press event during which it announced updated apps, a single sign-on…
Mobile local ad network WHERE today announced an ad distribution deal with Constant Contact. To boost the value it delivers advertisers, WHERE will now add e-mail distribution via Constant Contact's platform. The latter meanwhile adds mobile distribution for its advertisers.…
Back in April, I talked to 4Info CEO Zaw Thet about a number of mobile themes and the directions in which he's taking the company. One of those directions was diversification beyond its flagship SMS content and ad serving. 4Info…
Google announced today that it will add trackable numbers to AdWords campaigns. Known as AdWords Call Metrics, this will offer advertisers analytics on call activity such as total calls per campaign, origin, time of day and duration. The underlying technology…
The competition among white-label “deal a day” providers is increasingly intense. At the same time, local media companies are beginning to verticalize their deal a days to differentiate themselves. Case in point is The Washington Post, which has rolled out…
ZipLocal, the U.S. independent directory publisher, has launched a new "hyper local" leads-based advertising model called Local Leads that taps into a distribution network featuring 18 properties and 80 billion monthly impressions, according to ZipLocal execs who briefed us last week.…
I just had the chance to catch up with mobile app developer Appcelerator and mobile analytics vendor FortiusOne, regarding a new partnership they've formed. Appcelerator is a heavyweight in the app production space, with an output of roughly 1,000 apps per…
Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head…