TurnHere Seeks Distribution Growth Under New CEO

Today, TurnHere announced the appointment of Bud Rosenthal as CEO. Rosenthal previously held VP positions at Yahoo! Small Business Services and Real Networks’ Rhapsody music division. He also founded BigStep and was most recently CEO of Bessemer Ventures-backed job board WorkMetro, which was sold to Jobing.com in February.

TurnHere hopes Rosenthal’s rap sheet and experience with SMB services will help the company continue to develop partnerships to gain better access to advertisers as local video demand grows. An equally important goal is broadening its product suite and ability to not only produce video at the local level (its strong point), but also distribute it more widely.

Both these fronts have seen development through TurnHere’s Yellow Pages partnerships, but there is still a great deal of growth to be had on the distribution end, including the possibility of landing pages and search engine distribution (an opportune area, given universal search).

TurnHere has also had success in selling into verticals like hotels, restaurants and real estate, signaling an opportunity to develop distribution with more vertical search players or city guides (like its first big deal with Citysearch). Rosenthal’s direction will likely involve developing more channels like this.

A number of other personnel moves came with today’s announcement, including a promotion for (employee #1) John McWeeny to the position of COO. The rest are listed in the press release.