TKG Data and Analysis: A Weekly Recap

Here are the highlights from the TKG blog last week, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.

Old Online Services Never Die, They Just Fade Away

France Telecom is finally pulling the plug on the 26-year-old Minitel service, which it launched in France in 1982. (Actually, Minitel is really 15 years older than that according to SEC filings: “Under an advertising sales agreement entered into in 1967, France Telecom granted PagesJaunes exclusive rights to canvas and collate the advertising to be incorporated within the telephone directory and the alphabetically classified Minitel service.”) Minitel was to replace the White Pages, but not the Yellow Pages. (read more…)

IPhone Mobile Local Apps: Have We ‘Jumped the Shark’?

Sebastien Provencher takes an interesting look at UrbanSpoon’s iPhone application and also poses the question, have we already jumped the shark with mobile local search on the iPhone? This question relates more to the volume of apps vs. early adoption use, than it does to the quality of usefulness of UrbanSpoon’s app. The application has meanwhile gotten lots of attention I’ve noticed; both anecdotal and in media coverage from the New York Times, Information Week and others. (read more…)

Tellier: Volt Deal About Technology not Footprint

On Thursday’s second-quarter and first-half earnings call, Yellow Pages Group CEO Marc Tellier made it abundantly clear that his company’s acquisition of Volt Information Sciences was driven by the need to secure strategic technologies and not to gain a toehold in the U.S. Yellow Pages market. The fact that the U.S. independent publisher DataNational came with the Volt deal was secondary, Tellier told analysts on the earnings call. YPG is the largest directory publisher in Canada, and it also is a leader in verticals through its Trader division. (read more…)

Hotel Decision to Eliminate Yellow Pages More About Dollars Than Sense

As many of us have read over the past week, some major hotel chains — Hyatt and Hyatt Place Hotels, Omni and some Starwood properties – have made the decision to remove Yellow Pages directories from their hotel rooms. (Although a call to our September conference hotel, Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency, revealed it has yet to receive notice from its headquarters regarding this decision.) According to The Charlotte Observer, “The chain has dumped in-room phone books ‘primarily due to the convenience the Internet provides.’ ” (read more…)

WellcomeMat Takes Network Approach to Real Estate

WellcomeMat isn’t the latest player to enter the SMB video space, but it is starting to get more attention as the medium itself picks up. As TurnHere, Mixpo and a few others do to varying degrees, the three-year-old company focuses mostly on the real estate vertical. High-ticket items, pressure for leads and a subject that is conducive to video have made real estate a focal point for some early movers in the space. (read more…)

Comcast Satisfies Sweet Tooth

Cable video, voice and broadband provider Comcast is set to buy Daily Candy for a reported $125 million. Daily Candy specializes in daily electronic newsletters catered to affluent women in urban areas. The focus is mostly on fashion, food and arts & entertainment. The company currently has 2.5 million viewers who sign up for the newsletters, which are unique to London and 11 U.S. cities. (read more…)

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. (read more…)

MerchantCircle Offers Web Site Creation, Hosting

MerchantCircle announced today that it will offer a Web site hosting service on top of its existing set of local listing products. Known as Instant Website, it will offer the 550,000 companies that have MC listings, Web site creation and hosting for $14.99 per month (75 percent of these companies don’t have Web sites). (read more…)

Local.com Reports 3,500 Direct Advertisers

Local.com said during an earnings call today that it now has 3,500 direct advertisers, largely sold by a team of 100 outside sales personnel. It has also reached a plateau of more than 18 million monthly unique visitors from organic search on the Local.com site and network (but won’t disclose the split between them). (read more…)

TheFind Shows iPhone Users ‘Where to Shop’

Today, TheFind launched its anticipated iPhone application, called “Where to Shop.” The biggest selling points of the application involve the product search that combines location awareness with inventory feeds from Krillion and NearbyNow. As we’ve written, the iPhone and its local search apps will bring mobile local search closer to the mainstream and create new standards, sets of expectations and overall comfort levels with searching for things locally on a mobile device. (read more…)