Four million babies are born in the U.S. every year. Hence the interest of two e-commerce portals in local baby sites. Just last week, UrbanBaby.com, an e-mail-oriented baby-care tip sheet, was sold to CNET, and LilaGuides, a print-oriented local baby…
Sallie Mae announced that it has signed an agreement to purchase Upromise. Sallie Mae services more than 10 million customers totaling US$130 billion in loans. Upromise launched in 2001 and has grown into one of the largest direct marketing companies…
Monster's deal to partner with the new owners of Philadelphia Media Holdings "would work with other newspapers," but probably makes more sense with papers in smaller markets, Monster CEO Andrew McKelvey told Reuters. McKelvey also said the Philadelphia deal was…
Interchange Corp. and Verizon SuperPages will partner to deliver SuperPages.com customers via Interchange's Local.com search engine. Here is the press release.
Just saw a note from media analyst Ben Mogil of Westwind Partners that takes issue with the conclusions of a recent report from Veritas suggesting that Yellow Pages Group's core print directory business is imploding, citing a sharp reduction in…
College newspapers are often overlooked as part of the local ecosystem. Local newspapers in college towns such as Lawrence, Kansas, and Austin, Texas, vie with college papers (a little) for advertising. And classified vendors such as LiveDeal and Ad2Ad have…
Here is an item from Bloomberg that says buyout firm KKR will saddle up PagesJaunes with a record level of debt for a European LBO, about US$8 billion. This will certainly motivate PagesJaunes managers to optimize cash flow.
This morning I had the chance to talk to Julie Mason, general manager of Kellysearch. The site is a B2B vertical search engine and directory that mostly focuses on industrial products, services and equipment. Basic listings are free with the…
The Kelsey Group is preparing a report scheduled for release in September that evaluates the current field of online directory and local search sites.Part of the process of researching this report involves soliciting the views of the industry on how…
CNET ran a report stating Google ads are running on a Detroit-based radio station. This is part of the strategy revolving around the dMarc acquisition last year. Other portals and ad networks have not been shy in suggesting that they…
Just got off the phone with Olivier Vincent, CEO of Canadian Phone Directories. He told me that his company, a competitive publisher backed by HM Capital (formerly Hicks Muse), has just acquired the search engine Yellow.ca to use as a…
A report issued July 19 by the stock analysis firm Veritas Investment Research has led to a sharp drop in the unit price for the Yellow Pages Income Fund, which owns Canadian publisher Yellow Pages Group. According to this article,…
Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine will join Kelsey Group VP Matt Booth and Small Business Commando Dick Larkin for a Tele-Seminar next Wednesday, Aug. 2, at 2:30 p.m. EDT/11:30 a.m. PDT. The event will look closely at small-business marketing on…
Kate Bowler of Platefood points out that Platefood Performance is a PFP platform and not, as I suggested, a local search platform. It may well be that the Platefood engine will be licensed by World Directories to complement the Local…
Prolific journalist and blogger Mark Glaser takes a detailed look at social media and community-edited news. More specifically, he asks whether the users who do the tagging, reviewing and in some cases editing that fuel some news sites' notable success…
Google announced earlier this week that it will infuse live traffic data in its mapping application that can be accessed from Web-enabled mobile devices. Live traffic data is available on Yahoo! Local and in the newest release of Windows Live…
Apple is now offering Warner Bros.' television content through its popular iTunes store. Television shows like "Friends," "Babylon 5," "The Jetsons" and the never before seen pilot episode of "Aquaman" are now available. (Calls to agent Ari Gold were not…
Two deals were announced to distribute Hollywood studio content this week. The first, reported by MSNBC, involves the sale of the episodic television show "Arrested Development" to Internet portal MSN and cable networks HDNet and G4. (Read: Warner and Apple…
Fast moving classified aggregator LiveDeal announced yesterday that it will partner with classified transaction engine AdStar. The deal will allow LiveDeal to offer its online classified advertisers a print upsell in the 40-plus newspapers AdStar works with, which include the…
Yahoo! announced today that it will partner with BT to bring 120,000 UK business listings to Yahoo! Local UK. The deal also positions Yahoo! to better serve UK local businesses with its YSM paid search platform, which now allows advertisers…
