The Kelsey Group's overly simplistic model of the electronic world looks like this. Content can be information, advertising, video, etc.; the delivery of that content might be cable, DSL or wireless; and the device which is used for access could…
The classifieds aggregator Oodle announced the integration of Google Maps into its housing category listings. Here are two bedroom Santa Cruz, CA vacation rentals, for example. One of the nice things you can do is drag the map and see…
Seattle-based Marchex, which is the parent of TrafficLeader, the SEM/SEO firm behind several YP (and newspaper) simplified search marketing programs, has announced the roughly $30 million acquisition of IndustryBrains, which operates a vertical/contextual ad network. At the end of April,…
The folks at PEW have come out with another report that has some generally intuitive but important information for those who are eager to see online trends slow or reverse (read: some in traditional media). Not going to happen. The…
I've believed for a while that My Yahoo! was a powerful model for personalization. To varying degrees the other major portals/search engines are now pursuing a similar strategy. Google recently added more feeds to its personalized home page. Here's MSN's…
Yahoo! is moving agressively beyond the browser and the desktop as part of an apparent strategy to be the most useful information and lifestyle management service around: "Yahoo! seeks to provide online products and services essential to users€™ lives, and…
In my ongoing fantasy of buying a new Mac, I periodically visit the Apple site. Today I was checking out the widgets page and saw that the Google Maps Widget was the top download. That says two things to me:…
In the first half of 2005, eBayers sold approximately US$10.6 billion worth of goods through the online auction service. Check out the eBay press release here. Some things to consider: - The average sales per eBayer (all 1.5 million) in…
The Swedish publisher Eniro AB has pledged to reduce the decline of its Swedish print business at a faster pace than earlier promised. The publisher saw its print directory revenues in its flagship Swedish market decline by almost 11 percent…
The would-be meta-social networking tool, GoingOn, was covered last week by a few folks (mostly the Mercury News and blogs). Advocates said nobody wants to fill out more profiles; skeptics questioned whether the existing social networks would want to play.…
As widely reported, Yahoo! bought desktop software maker Konfabulator (what a great company name!). Local search and local apps (weather, maps, etc.), among other things, can be taken beyond the browser onto the desktop. Nothing new there conceptually. But unlike…
MSN's Answer to Google and Yahoo!'s dynamic Web-based mapping tools, Virtual Earth, went live this morning. Needless to say it works better with IE than Firefox (the browser I typically use). It doesn't have the "wow factor" of Google Earth,…
I don't buy either of these two arguments. Marketing works and dollars spent are additive. In 1979, AT&T decided that long-distance advertising should no longer be handled by each of the 21 individual operating companies. In a wildly unpopular move…
According to a widely reported new survey by PEW, Americans don't know the technology terms "RSS," "Podcasting" and others. So what's the take-away? Use the technology; don't use the terms. Awhile ago, before the launch of Backfence, I spoke to…
Very briefly: Here are the NY Times' earnings release and Dow Jones/WSJ's. Online products (including the About and MarketWatch acquisitions) gave a boost to these newspaper titans, while the traditional pubs struggled. This is consistent with the bump that Scripps…
Let's put aside Yahoo!'s FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand) strategy for the moment and look at what the company is doing with vertical and horizontal search (horizontal search being, well, search). Yahoo! recently launched a specialized Travel site to…
An article that has received a good deal of attention, from yesterday's NY Times, is "How Effective Is This Ad, in Real Numbers? Beats Me." The piece cites marketers' inability to determine which of their ads/campaigns are actually effective and…
Here's the press release. Here's the after-hours performance. Even though Google beat estimates, expectations were really really high. Maybe everyone will take a deep breath now.
According to Amy Healy of the YPA, the public policy committee covered this topic in its Las Vegas meeting. She said that there are towns that have "do not deliver" proposals pending, but they stemmed from an effort to reduce…
"In the three short days that we owned [Shopzilla], the business contributed about a million dollars in revenue and about $350,000 in segment profits," said Scripps CEO Ken Lowe (quoted in MediaPost). Scripps bought Shopzilla for US$500+ million in June.…
