Yahoo! Maps unveiled a host of new features today. Unlike the novel and graphically rich Microsoft Visual Earth 3-D announced last week, Yahoo!'s improvements are solely functional (although Visual Earth 3-D has a hefty balance of form and function, the…
InfoSpace-owned Dogpile announced today that it will partner with video search site Blinkx. Blinkx will bring enhanced video search capabilities to Dogpile and other InfoSpace metasearch properties, including WebCrawler and Webfetch. Blinkx has indexed more than 6 million hours of…
The Washington Post, following Gannett's "Information Center" approach toward the newsroom, says it will beef up several vertical sections in print and for the Web, including Health, Food and Home. A staff memo from Executive Editor Len Downie Jr., republished…
InfoSpace today launched Zoo.com, a search engine for kids that filters out sexually explicit content. It does this by filtering out search results that contain any of a list of 50,000 adult words or phrases. It also prioritizes search results…
Modern Mom, a Los Angeles-based pioneer in the increasingly crowded "online moms" space, is launching 12 city guides on Wednesday (Nov. 15). Previews of L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., are already up. These…
There is clearly a lot of activity in the online video space, but there are still many question marks about how to effectively monetize the experience, and how local advertising could eventually come into the picture. Both of these are…
First we had Topix aggregating local news and events from thousands of sites. Now we have Outside.in trying to pull off the same idea using hyper-local blogs as a primary source. Steven Johnson co-created the site with John Geraci. He…
Backfence may be the biggest laboratory out there for community networks. It reads like a newspaper written by citizens, and its hyper-local coverage features community-by-community Yellow Pages, special sections, business reviews, event calendars, classifieds, blogs and user-generated photos. The company…
Very few people are as compelling as Morgan Stanely's Mary Meeker in arguing that the transition of media and commerce dollars to the Internet is under way. For sure, she understands, and anticipates, the macro. At the Web 2.0 conference…
I'm down in San Jose at the Consumer Technology Ventures conference, which has featured some engaging panel discussions. The highlight so far for me has been the luncheon keynote yesterday by prolific Wall Street Journal personal tech columnist Walt Mossberg…
Zvents, a Web 2.0 app that enables local sites to manage events, including events inputted by users, announced today that it has received $7 million from several VC firms, including Vantage Point Venture Partners (a funder of ReachLocal). It also…
The person who headed up the 1.1 million-employee BellSystem when it was broken up is a Virginia gentleman by the name of Charles Lee Brown. He retired to Princeton, NJ, and I once asked him why he gave up the…
Last night I had the chance to attend Microsoft's launch event for Virtual Earth 3-D in San Francisco. It was a well-organized event that included introductory remarks by Microsoft GM of Search and Mapping Erik Jorgensen and the GM of…
Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper publisher with 110 titles, is rolling out "information center" guidelines that it calls "the newsroom of the future." In its essence, the Information Center downplays hard news in favor of more community touch points. It…
In an exciting development from Microsoft, the company just announced it will provide 3-D models of 15 U.S. cities in its Live Search results. Starting tomorrow, users who click on the "maps" tab after entering a search term in Live…
Geosign, a privately owned publisher of dozens of local and vertical services, including TrueLocal, has teamed with Go2 to get a foot in the door of the nascent mobile directory marketplace. Go2, founded in 1999, was a pioneer in mobile…
Google's announcement that its self-serve system will be enabled for print newspapers gives newspapers an easier way to reach small businesses. Newspapers, of course, are famously challenged to apply their relatively limited sales forces to anything smaller than a car…
Google is said to be considering a major deal to either partner with Clear Channel's radio stations or buy the stations outright, according to RBC Capital Markets (as reported by Jeffrey Yorke in Radio & Records, a radio trade pub).…
I've been out for some of this week, only to return to a flurry of events in the Googleverse. (What else is new?) In case you missed it too, here are some of the more notable items. Continuing its hot…
The story about Idearc (formerly Verizon Information Services) successfully raising $2.85 billion in high-yield bonds and $6.5 billion of bank debt takes place in an unknown ladies' room. The point of The New York Times column is that big Wall…
