AOL may have trouble on several fronts, but it still gets millions of users and it intends to fully leverage them at the local level, per Chris Spanos, Director of Search Verticals, who was speaking at Kelsey Seattle. “Given its…
Google is a collaborative partner with all verticals, and generally speaking, has no interest in competing with them, per Adrian Madland, Google’s head of automotive strategic partnerships, who was speaking at Drilling Down on Local '08 (a session also covered…
Admission Corp. has sold its Spotlight Ads division to Cobalt Group, which provides services to over 40 percent of U.S. auto dealers. The company retains control over its intellectual property and Marketplaces businesses, which account for a small piece of…
If you believe at all in the “marketplace” vision of next generation commerce, it is hard to dispute that Yahoo! remains front –and- center as a verticals factory. This core strength of Yahoo!’s is especially important to note in the…
The first day of the Kelsey Drilling Down on Local conference included a somewhat unusual panel with four entrepreneurs in verticals. They talked about the nuts and bolts of building truly local verticals. These vertical pioneers shared their war stories…
During yesterday’s afternoon session focused on Auto at Drilling Down on Local ’08, the panelists nearly universally said U.S. automaker giant General Motors was the furthest along in figuring out how to leverage the Web. Mitch Golub, president of Cars.com,…
The winners in online real estate will be those that partner with brokers and agents to be part of their businesses, said Jamie Glenn, Trulia VP of product development, during a real estate panel at DDL. Selling clicks and leads…
A leading auto vertical and Google sat on stage together this morning and provided some insight into how they might coexist. Cars.com President Mitch Golub made clear that sales and customer service will serve as an effective firewall that will…
Zillow.com's founder Rich Barton used the analogy of the explosion of verticals to the storming of the Bastille and the strong desire for consumers to take control of the decisions in their lives, especially those with big financial implications. The visionary…
MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper publisher with titles such as The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News, has teamed up with TauMed to launch a video-centric health vertical. The vertical launches this month at four of MNG’s…
Trulia, the real estate portal, has added a new “Street View” feature that enables home buyers to not only check out a house, but also navigate up and down the street and neighborhood. The feature was built on the API…
We thought there must be a reason why VoiceStar, Marchex's pay-per-call unit, had such a prominent presence at the North American Dealer Association show in February. Now we know: The company has just formed a reseller partnership with The Cobalt…
Zillow continues its march up the real estate value chain with a new feature that allows house buyers to apply for mortgages. The mortgage service, like everything else on Zillow, is ad-supported and free to both buyers and lenders. It…
Spas have always been a leading advertising category for city guides and other local sites. In many cases, they are virtually the only breakthrough for “services.” The rest may be dominated by restaurants and bars. But the spas themselves have…
If Facebook is really the next marketing platform, the guys at Loladex will have guessed right. The new rating and review company, formed by two alumni of AOL Search and Yellow Pages, had initially been incubated as a destination site…
More and more, people are looking at what Google can’t (or won’t) do. One thing Google isn’t doing is selling a lot of ads on a hyperlocal basis. If you look for a plumber in Tribeca, you are likely to…
Do you really need to have raised millions of dollars to succeed in selling search solutions to small businesses? It is a question that I often ask myself. Dan Hobin’s G5 Search Marketing in Bend, Ore., is profitable without having…
The CBS-TV owned and operated stations are making a pitch to local bloggers and hyperlocal sites to add value to their sites with various news headline and video widgets, and take a share of ad revenues. The CBS effort to…
The small-business advertising arms race has gotten hotter in recent weeks, as companies eye a chance to add Google and Yahoo! search solutions, and other services to small-business marketing budgets once totally contained by Yellow Pages. First we had ReachLocal’s…
Last week, we wrote about The Seattle Times Co. and its new “Network search,” which is powered with FAST. This week, we are covering The Boston Globe’s Boston.com and its new “Federated” search solution, powered by Google. Federated and Network…