Superpages turned some heads this week when its flagship mobile app took home the "Appy" for best Marketing/Branding/Advertising app. The event thrown by MediaPost is judged by a panel of mobile industry leaders. Other categories include games, news, health, social…
The Australian telecom Telstra announced yesterday that Bruce Akhurst, CEO of its Sensis directories unit, has resigned. Akhurst had once been seen as a rising start at Telstra, but his failure to complete the transformation of Sensis from a traditional…
We've seen some early growth over the past year in the subsector of services and toolsets for SMBs to build a mobile presence. We've had lots of coverage of players like Duda Mobile and Mofuse, while Steve Espinosa's AppStack was…
On Friday, Peter posted about a conversation we had earlier in the week with Milo founder and current head of local at eBay Jack Abraham. To divide and conquer, I wrote up separate thoughts on the mobile angle, as Part…
Bloomberg News is reporting today that AT&T is close to a deal to sell a majority stake in its Yellow Pages operation (AT&T Advertising Solutions, the world's largest directory company, in a deal that prices the business at US$1.5 billion.…
The Local Search Association and BIA/Kelsey have assembled an agenda for this year's Search Starts Here conference (April 21-24 in Boca Raton) that focuses heavily on industry transformation. The agenda features 17 sessions with more than 20 speakers representing 17…
Since our first coverage of local Q&A app LocalMind, we recently had the chance to catch up with its founders about its new changes to the service. This comes a few weeks after its v2.0 release and one year after…
Yesterday, we held a webcast to talk about the top 15 trends in local. These are the things we're paying most attention to on a daily basis, and as we build the content around the upcoming ILM East show. It's…
Today local search agency 15 Miles released its annual Local Search Usage study. Now in its fifth wave, the comScore administered study (n=4,000) also included Localeze's participation for the first time. It's quite a "data dump" with lots of different…
As part of Google's GoMo initiative (past coverage here), it's trying to support and evangelize omptimized mobile Web pages for businesses. The idea is that a more optimized and user-friendly mobile Web will draw more people there, as opposed to…
Mobile local loyalty play Punchcard announced that after less than a year, it has rounded the corner on 147,000 merchants in Southern California. Founded and led by local veteran Andy Steuer, the company recognizes the challenges in reaching time-starved SMBs.…
Mobile app analytics provider Flurry is out with its most recent data dump, showing that mobile has a disproportionate imbalance (when compared with other media) between usage and ad dollars. Specifically there is a 23-to-1 difference in the share of…
Mobile local ad network xAd just released its Q4 Mobile Insights Report, detailing the activity seen on its network. Like its Q3 report (covered here), it further supports the growth and the opportunity in mobile local search. XAd, for those…
The French directory company PagesJaunes Groupe reported 2011 revenues of 1.1 billion euros today, with 575 million euros from digital sources. That's 52.2 percent of total revenues. The company, which has a dominant position in directories in France, posted a…
After some time passed since we last covered Fanminder, we caught up with CEO Paul Rosenfeld last week in advance of yesterday's announcement of new funding and its 2.0 release. First, for those unfamiliar, Fanminder is a "freemium" SMB marketing…
The agenda is shaping up well for the Local Search Association's April conference, the first involving a partnership with BIA/Kelsey. The event runs April 21-24 at the Boca Resort in Boca Raton, FL. We've lined up headline presentation from Ursula…
On Thursday's Q4 and full-year 2011 earnings call, Eniro announced that it will phase out its print Gula Sider (Yellow Pages) directory in Norway, leaving only local directories as a print product choice in the Nordic country with a population…
We've long looked at the online-offline gap. This comes down to the challenge in connecting the dots between increasing levels of online research and the sheer volume of offline spending (95 percent of U.S. retail). This is ROBO: research online…
In an effort to get "back in the game" for briefings with interesting mobile start-ups, this week I had the chance to catch up with Trover cofounder and CEO Jason Karas about some new features. If you haven't heard of…
As part of the information overload that is Facebook's long awaited S-1 filing, the company announced it is up to 845 million active global users (defined as monthly users). That's a 39 percent year-over-year jump. That total has slowly been…