The vision for Hyperlocal -- if you believe in it -- boils down to two camps. The first camp says it is a labor of love that must be hand-curated to work with merchants and engage the citizenry, town by…
Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers,…
ILM East keynoter Ted Leonsis, in a BIA/Kelsey pre-conference webinar, proclaimed a “new generation and reinvigoration of local products." The new opportunity in local is “where social, video and mobile intersect,” Leonsis said. What surprises Leonsis, who currently serves as…
ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team…
The decline of newspaper readership opens a door for other media to head the news cycle, with everything else trickling down to the TV and radio stations and websites that feed off the original content. That’s the premise for GoLocal24,…
A few years ago, the location of businesses became a big question mark, as well as a strategic issue, as people wanted to shop or dine nearby. These “geo-fencing” issues were especially important for Yellow Pages companies. Since then, search…
No one talks much about certain topics after public crashes -- even when the opportunity remains clear. Hyperlocal is one of these. TBD.com in Washington, D.C., crashed last February, and there is a lot of speculation that Patch.com has become…
One of our big complaints against hyperlocal sites is they haven’t really invested in the commercial lifeblood of their community. They’re more like the (almost totally irrelevant) equivalent of a public access cable TV channel. That’s why we like the…
We’ve liked the idea of an ad network that makes it easy for place bloggers, local news sites and others to combine their audiences for advertisers wanting to target on a hyperlocal basis. The Sacramento Press has been working on…
The appeal of real-time promotions allowing SMBs to add or update a sale or special offer on the fly is fairly apparent. It is a segment that’s been chased after by such players as Google, Yext and others. Add Chalkboard…
Ease of transaction, rewards and “exclusives” will be key to the next generation of deals, and the credit card companies are determined to play a major role. MasterCard is working with NextJump for a special rewards programs, and has a…
Pixelfish, armed with $3.5 million round of new capital raised since October, is evolving its model from a white-label provider of affordable SMB video to a destination site for SMB offers. Today, it announced that it has acquired Steve Espinosa’s…
When hyperlocal zeroes in on local marketplaces, it makes a lot more sense to me. Witness ShopBuffalo, an attractive new marketplace from The Buffalo News launched as a companion to Buffalo.com. The site has partnered with ShopCity and Hero, a…
Q&A sites like Answers.com, Yahoo Answers and ChaCha have been around for a while. They generate huge amounts of traffic because they create millions of pages that target common (and not-so-common) search queries like "how tall is justin beiber?" And…
What do you do to keep your customer after your deal of the day runs? That’s a big question for tens of thousands of SMBs -- many of which have used deal a day as a loss leader and have…
Gannett announced during its earnings call yesterday that it is now producing 264 hyperlocal neighborhood sites in 10 markets. This includes the recent addition of 30 hyperlocal neighborhoods in Sacramento. The hyperlocal neighborhoods, produced in conjunction with DataSphere, have put…
I take great delight in the Carlsbad Patch updates on my smartphone every morning. And the Fwix local app on my iPad. But why do I feel they are my “guilty pleasures”? Because there is a rap out there that…
There is a lot going on in online media on the East Coast evidenced by the panel on geolocation here at the Internet Summit in Raleigh, North Carolina, sponsored by TechMedia and Southern Capital Ventures. Geolocation continues to be major…
CityGrid Media (formerly Citysearch) will extend its paid base of 800,000 advertisers across thousands of neighborhood news pages, courtesy of a display advertising deal with Outside.in. The two companies have been quietly conducting pilot tests of custom ads in “a…
One of the big hopes for local this year is ... national. As local targeting tools get more granular, there has been an upsurge in national/local advertisers, especially as they focus on touching consumers on the local purchase level. Gannett…
