ServiceMagic CEO Craig Smith started off his keynote address this morning stating that the current recession has been a good thing for the industry. His controversial point was that prior recessions have spawned innovation. "I think we'll see more innovation…
Avvo, the free legal ratings and review site that has taken on the giant legal publishers that have long dominated the business, announced that it has raised $10 million in Series C funding. The new round adds to $13 million…
Online scheduling appears to be one of the break-out features in the marketplaces space this year. Nineteen percent of respondents to BIA/Kelsey’s most recent User View say they made a non-restaurant online appointment in the past six months. Major appointment…
CBS Local has launched an auto shopping guide on the Web site of WCCO-TV Minneapolis, using vertical content and services from High Gear Media, a Palo Alto, California-based auto specialist publisher launched two years ago by Daily Shopper founder Hesky…
Events are a vertical that cuts across many segments: travel, retail, sports, entertainment, education, dining, culture and others. Major players include specialists such as Zvents, Eventful, Americantowns.com and Center’d. City sites such as Citysearch and Yelp are active in the…
Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells.…
SuperMedia has announced a new program that extends its SuperGuarantee idea into the autos vertical. The SuperGuarantee Autos program gives anyone who buys a car on SuperMedia's EveryCarListed.com automotive vertical a free limited powertrain warranty good for up to $3,000.…
Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau defended the role of the site in journalism and said it is helping to herald in “a golden age of journalism” that has more content and audience participation than ever before. Speaking at IAB’s Annual…
I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics, a Cleveland, Ohio-based call measurement and conversion analytics company. Reynolds was quick to point out that it is not simply a call tracking company, but rather it…
IAC’s ServiceMagic reported today that it saw a 51 percent boost in 4Q revenues, growing from $25.3 million in 2008 to $38.2 million in 2009. The boost was accompanied by 21 percent growth in the number of home and trade…
Yelp has been on a roll, and is now reporting that it gets 29 million unique visitors a month. Given that, the company’s immediate challenge is to move beyond its core base of restaurant and shopping reviews and dive deep…
Monster Worldwide has bought HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million. It will also be in charge of Yahoo's recruitment content in North America for the next three years, bringing in perhaps another $100 million for the life of the deal…
In the quest to produce good leads, no stone goes unturned. In coming years, one of the best sources of leads may be online scheduling (or "appointment calendars"). Former YPG executive JP Lion is working on scheduling solutions with Maxipage.…
Vertical businesses that have relied on Yellow Pages and newspapers and other classified channels aren’t always seeing the same performance-based results that they might expect in the Google age. But many of them also aren’t likely to become keyword experts,…
Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional…
Here’s a question: How long would directory publishers sit back and let new companies such as RedBeacon, AlikeList and others disrupt the leads economy for SMBs with search and socially driven features such as Twitter and Facebook? Or Google, with…
Canada's Yellow Pages Group has deepened its investment in verticals with its recent acquisition of Restaurantica, one of Canada's largest online dining communities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a report by Paul Steep at Scotia Capital suggests…
Serial Web entrepreneur Mark H. Goldstein has been the founder of such sites as Kmart’s BlueLight and Impulse Buy. More recently, he invested in green ecology-based ventures, but he grew bored and came back to ecommerce with Loyalty Lab and …
Rumors have been flying that Google is poised to buy Trulia, “the real estate search engine” that competes with, among others, Zillow (which just said it is aiming to IPO in 2011). But according to reports by attendees, no information…
Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly "verticalizing." Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among…