One of the principal questions in the local marketplace heading into 2011 is how location-based services (check-ins, barcode scanning) and deals will continue to synergize to create an integrated user experience? Just as important, what role will Google play? An early…
The ILM:10 conference in Santa Clara ended with what is arguably the most important topic of the conference. How can businesses take all of the incredible users experiences emerging in local and social media and convert them into SMB sales?…
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, in his opening keynote at ILM:10, noted a general frustration with Google's apparent de-emphasis of Yelp's content, but said he sees major opportunity in mobile app access as a workaround of Google. Stoppelman showed an example…
Fresh in the wake of reports that Google will spend at least $5.3 billion on Groupon, LivingSocial -- the Avis of deal a day -- has announced a $175 million investment from Amazon. It simultaneously announced an additional $8 million…
Google is reportedly set to pay $5.3 billion for Groupon, a spectacular investment that would give The Big G a compelling way to get close to local businesses, leverage Gmail and really rev up a social media paradigm (as opposed…
Google’s $700 million acquisition of ITA, a search leader in online flight reservations, doesn’t have a direct impact on local advertising and services. Its immediate impact is on rival metasearch-based travel solutions, especially Orbitz, which gets 40 percent of its…
Local consumers are presumably in buying mode when they are researching where to have dinner, attend an event or go to the movies. How about when they are researching directions to get there? In fact, mass transit directions in themselves…
The local and community news “aggregator” space is poised to become increasingly important. Local news staffs, obviously, are being whittled away with the declining economics of local news. But there is more local content than ever, via blogs, pro/amateur content,…
Trulia, which is ranked a Top 7 real estate site by comScore, has followed the lead of Realtor.com and Zillow and added rentals to its site. The rentals section features all Trulia’s functionality, such as neighborhood information, mapping and ratings…
Clickable has announced that it will add support for Facebook advertising that allows its Pro users to directly compare social and search results. The effort follows initiatives by rival “search resellers” like ReachLocal, Yodle and Orange Soda to broaden their…
The Berry Co., the SMB sales giant with 260,000 SMB clients, has partnered with Yodle for Web site creation and search engine marketing and optimization. The deal gives Yodle access to Berry’s 42-state reach and 885 print publications. Yodle, which…
Centro, the local and regional media service company, has branched off into Web-based support for ad management. The company today announced the launch of Transis, a new division dedicated to automating the “other 80 percent” of the display industry not…
Google VP of ad products Susan Wojcicki told IAB’s Leadership Meeting yesterday that “the display industry is one of the most innovative parts of the Web right now,” and “will be one of the largest ad markets, if not the…
The default strategy for many start-ups is to plan to be acquired by Google or Microsoft. But the M&A scene is much more complex than that. Jordan, Edmiston Group Co-President Tolman Geffs, speaking today at IAB's Annual Leadership Meeting in…
It's been made clear here and other places that mobile devices enable advertising that's much more granular and targeted than the PC. We've also argued that the ad formats and campaign objectives should therefore be de-coupled from online equivalents. But there…
What if consumers could personalize the ads and content they see when they open utility sites such as Google, or portal sites such as Yahoo? That’s the idea behind Optini, a new 12-person company based in Utah that has developed…
The new breed of content aggregators is among the biggest bets in online media. These companies are assembling content from hundreds of thousands of contributors, optimizing it on the search engines so it is easily found and syndicating it. Demand…
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,…
Digital media is more cannibalistic than complementary and is seriously eating into the demand for traditional news sources such as newspapers, TV and news magazines, according to the third annual survey of news users done by Outsell Inc. The survey…
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…
