In a reflection of the industry's ongoing interest in developing SMB promotional and loyalty services, Yodle founder Nate Stevens' venture fund announced last week that it is putting $1.7 Million into Punchey, a new mobile-oriented payments and promotions platform. The…
One of the biggest areas of mobile growth will be to help businesses establish, optimize and host a mobile presence. That includes both websites and apps, and is pronounced by the low penetration of optimized mobile sites, compared to ramping…
Trulia, which provides real estate Web and mobile leads, display advertising and real estate-oriented social media services, has followed in the footsteps of its rival, Zillow, and issued an S1 in preparation for going public and raising $75 Million. Zillow's…
Well, another shoe has dropped in the U.S. directories market. This morning Dex One and SuperMedia announced plans to merge, creating an an entity called Dex Media with roughly $3.1 billion in revenue, based on 2011 results. Dex shareholders will…
This week we caught up with Yodle CEO Court Cunningham to talk about how his company uses data and technology to gain insights that help improve results and drive down customer acquisition costs. Cunningham will be a featured speaker at…
Local advertising continues to get smarter as data sets are unlocked to provide more context around places and their interconnectedness. This goes into hyperdrive as smartphone penetration turns the corner on 50 percent of mobile users -- more signals and…
A major feature of the current crop of loyalty and rewards programs is that they link to credit card or debit card accounts. This gives them the ability to process transactions and provide deeper analytics. But a number of players…
Last week, xAd and Telmetrics released new data from a report administered by Nielsen that measures mobile local user behavior. Earlier today, we had the chance to catch up with TelmetricsCEO Bill Dinan to get some more color on the…
As you've probably heard, earlier this week Starbucks knighted Square as the core payment processing engine at its 7,000 U.S. locations. Now a few days later, its time to clear some things up and talk about the finer points: boosted…
The SMB Digital Marketing conference in Chicago Sept. 17-19 is truly shaping up to be a cutting-edge event. This week, we've added a number of top speakers to program that already includes such featured speakers as Alfred Mockett, CEO, Dex…
When eBay purchased Jack Abraham's Milo.com in December 2010, it caused some head scratching. While retail Inventory is helpful to track goods availability and has some value in developing location-based promotions, it seemed an unlikely anchor for eBay's SMB and…
On last week's Q2 earnings call, local online marketing firm ReachLocal emphasized how its international expansion will fuel its growth. Plus the company offered a glimpse into its efforts to expand into smaller U.S. markets via telesales. ReachLocal has long been among the…
Earlier this week, Yelp announced its Q2 earnings. One of the most notable moments of the earnings call was CEO Jeremy Stoppelman's assertion that mobile monetization is finally coming. This is something we've been looking at for some time, because…
A study commissioned by YP Holdings (formerly AT&T interactive and AT&T Ad Solutions) has concluded that phone calls generated from listings distributed on YP.com and its Local Ad Network outperformed those sourced from Google Ad Words, as measured by cost…
The card-linked loyalty and rewards space is seen by a lot of the smart money as the next Groupon. Today, we saw new money being poured into FiveStars ($13.9 Million), LevelUp ($9 Million) and LocalBonus ($900,000). The companies have now…
Expensive ad agency solutions regularly push video and rich media ad campaigns into six figures. AdReady, Mixpo and others have used templates, stock footage, networks and other solutions to bring the cost down. How about crowd sourcing the creative? Genius…
Google is adding Wildfire to its social-oriented suite of business services, paying "about $250 Million," according to a source cited by The Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco-based company provides social media analytics for 16,000 customers, ranging from large SMBs…
Our inaugural SMB Digital Marketing event keeps building and building. We’re being welcomed to Chicago for the Sept. 17-19 event by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and have already announced key speakers, including Dex One CEO Alfred Mockett, Constant Contact CEO Gail…
As we may have mentioned, this will be the year that Foursquare starts to more directly monetize the local engagement on its mobile app. Just a week after its Local Updates announcement, today it goes further down the monetization path by…
We’ve calculated that more than $287 Million has been invested in more than 20 transaction marketing players. The investment reflects the inherent opportunities in transaction marketing, which is a synergistic mash of loyalty programs, offers, reputation management and the "big…