As expected, the merger of R.H. Donnelley Corp. and Dex Media closed today. Dex Media is no more, and RHD is now the third-largest U.S. directory publisher, with combined revenues of roughly US$2.5 billion. You can read more about the…
EarthLink has apparently finalized its deal with Philadelphia to provide what amounts to wholesale wireless/Wi-Fi access that can then be resold to ISPs (which would then sell to consumers). So this isn't "free" Wi-Fi, but reportedly EarthLink would only be…
To add to Greg's post last week about My Yahoo!, there was an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday about the site's usage and strategy. The Times reports that as of December, there were 30 million Americans that…
It was reported late last week that Verizon has settled the strike by 300 CWA workers in upstate New York. Here is an article with details.
YellowPages.com has launched its long-awaited advertising campaign to generate awareness and organic traffic. The site is jointly owned by AT&T and BellSouth, and the agency handling the campaign, GSD&M in Austin, also does work for AT&T Yellow Pages (formerly SBC).…
News Corp.'s True Local search engine has gone live in Australia. Its purpose is to compete with Sensis and it's "powered" by News Corp.-owned newspapers. This is an interesting thing for U.S.-based newspapers to consider, but perhaps impossible for them…
America Online has decided to make another push into broadband. Built on top of third-party partnerships with BellSouth, Time Warner Cable, Qwest and AT&T, the company will offer high-speed access across the U.S. AOL had limited success with this the…
Google went live tonight with version 4 of its toolbar for IE (Firefox version coming soon, I'm told). You can take a look at the laundry list of features and upgrades here. Worth noting from my point of view are…
Almost everyone is using the term "social search" to describe a rash of "Web 2.0-style" offerings (whether product features or new sites) that try to blend community with another application (e.g., search, shopping, etc.).Here's a post by Danny Sullivan (SEW)…
Having just returned from a Yellow Book "summit" with the national ad community, it is fair to say that the national agencies are viewing the company in a new light. The reason? Yellow Book showed significant strength in the first…
No time to discuss now. Check out a screenshot of the test. More to come later. Precious little additional info in this article.
As Google more and more becomes a "media company," media opportunities cannot be missed. Here's Gary Price speculating about and discussing the seemingly impending Google Music. Music and other potential vertical domains raise the broader question of how Google intends…
Blogger Jennifer Slegg uncovered today that Google is experimenting with rich media ads. The undisclosed plan will, according to Slegg's sources, involve site targeted campaigns (rather than contextual) and have interstitials (those that precede a link's destination), expanding ads and…
Microsoft will be an integral part of the IPTV revolution, running the software that will reside in the set-top boxes of IPTV systems for Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth. As in the PC market, it has made a very smart and…
I've heard it occasionally said about InfoSpace, which owns metasearch engine Dogpile, "what do they want to be when they grow up?" In other words, what's their business model? Here's a very bullish piece, originally published in The Motley Fool,…
MyYahoo! is a powerful strategic asset that has been languishing to some degree. Now Om Malik reports that it may be ready to rise to the level of attention that it deserves internally. It's really a potential personal dashboard for…
As TV audiences fragment, advertisers are clinging to large-scale "live TV" events that still draw large audiences, i.e., the "Oscars" and the Super Bowl. There's something of a paradox going on: even as audiences shrink, TV networks (in certain cases)…
To add to Greg's comments on the strengths and potential of My Yahoo!, see our post earlier this month about Yahoo!'s expressed plans for the personal hub.
The other day I was considering updating my old "candybar" cellphone. I went into the Sprint/Nextel retail store and began playing around with numerous new and advanced smartphones. I was all set to pull the trigger on buying a new…
