Real-time reservations have moved beyond restaurants, hair salons and parking garages and are now being offered for self storage units. G5 Search Marketing, which specializes in self storage, has teamed with Centershift and United Stor-All Management to launch Web sites…
ReachLocal’s S1 filing to raise $100 million includes valuable details about the company. With grosses of $146.7 million for the first nine months of 2009, and operations in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, the local search and display…
EBay is expected to dramatically boost its efforts in classifieds in 2010, so we welcome clues into its historical and current thinking into classifieds via eBay vs. Craigslist. EBay has been seeking redress from Craigslist, which has diluted its 28…
The battle to win a digital slice of the $150 billion auto repair marketplace heated up a little today as RepairPal announced a new $4 million round, adding to $3 million it previously raised. The round was led by Tugboat…
Verticals that can engage certain demographics on a socio/geo basis and drive loyalty and conversion are the basis of our Marketplaces research program. A new one that has caught our eye is WineTwits from HappyHours.com founder Steve Gilberg. Three years…
Facing up to the reality of a real estate market in which many houses for sale end up becoming “shadow” rentals, Zillow has added rental listings and information to its real estate services. At the same time, Zillow is attaching…
Under the new leadership of CEO Carol Bartz, everything is up for review at Yahoo, and that probably includes HotJobs, its recruitment site. But recent press reports suggesting that HotJobs has already been designated for sale are off base. The…
Next week is the Newspaper Association of America’s Annual Convention in San Diego. I’ll cover Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote on Tuesday, in which he’ll express his support of the newspaper industry despite Google’s very public axing in January of…
The local appointment space has a new entrant in the form of Austin-based HourVille. The start-up, created by several friends from UT’s business school, premiered at SXSW. It lets users book anything by the hour, including services, rentals, classes and…
The Knot has launched 75 local URL sites as well as several niche sites, including Chinese weddings, gay wedding, beach weddings and destination weddings. More than 200 local and niche sites are planned by the end of 2009, according to…
Online leads for cars are broken. The vast majority of auto shoppers won’t even fill out a request for bid because they think they’ll get inaccurate, incomplete and tardy information from the dealer. But that doesn’t stop vendors from working…
Gabriels and Endeca have launched a new white-label auto portal. The effort formally kicks off a recently announced partnership to inject Endeca’s search capabilities into Gabriels' vertical sites. The new portal moves away from a simple listing product, offering a…
Vertical networks can leverage their knowledge of their consumers to sell marketers wide-ranging research and media programs, according to Active Network CEO Dave Alberga, who keynoted at the Marketplaces 2009 conference in Los Angeles. Alberga, a former Citysearch executive in…
AOL Yellow Pages has greatly benefited from search engine optimization, with 50 percent of its traffic coming from SEO, according to Chris Spanos, GM, local search, who was speaking today at Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference in Los Angeles. “We have a…
NCI President and CEO Dan McCarthy told attendees of Marketplaces 2009 in Los Angeles today that "local marketing spend is going to be reduced tremendously. It will have a big impact on all marketing budgets,” he said. “Local media starts…
There are many reasons why price comparisons for services aren’t generally done. (i.e., the difficulty of nailing down providers, price changes, the need for custom quotes in many categories). Generally, people should choose service providers on multiple criteria, not just…
Oodle has been describing itself as a “social classifieds” platform for some time, extending its reach via deals with local powerhouses such as AOL, Comcast, Cox, Media General, Freedom and Wal-Mart. Now, it is set to make the hype more…
Cablevision bet big on synergy (and ignored the CW about the newspaper industry) when it bought Newsday from Tribune Co. last summer for $650 million. Today, less than eight months later, it concedes that it has written off $402 million…
Sears will try to leverage its identity with home improvement and repair with ServiceLive, a new leads provider for service pros that is being pitted against ServiceMagic, Angie’s List, DoneRight and others. The tagline for the service, which begins a…
Cazoodle, a new listings-based service, has launched from the incubator at The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (yes, Marc Andreeson’s former territory). The site currently crawls for apartment listings and shopping. Additional vertical categories such as events are anticipated, notes…