TKG Data and Analysis: Weekly Recap
In case you missed any posts this week, here is the TKG blog highlight reel. Click below to read each post in full.
Newspapers and Home Pages: Getting Personal
Business 2.0’s Erick Shoenfeld writes an exclusive on his blog on the next version of the Pageflakes personalized home page. It looks to be a compelling and elegant product that should meet the rising demand for personalized features online. It also has a nice set of widgets that can be personalized and planted on other Web sites blogs or social networks to gain stickiness and viral marketing. This is in line with (or inverse to) Facebook’s astute strategy to break down its walls to the widgetization and third-party application development that will add value to its network. (read more…)Free DA to Improve Video Search?
The NewTeeVee blog has some interesting thoughts following comments made by Google’s Marissa Meyer at the Searchonomics conference going on today. Google’s free directory assistance product Goog-411 (past commentary here), will assist in helping Google develop speech to text ability, which will in turn help it sharpen its ax when it comes to video search. (read more…)First Impressions of AT&T U-Verse
After a five-hour installation job – apparently, many are longer – I am now among the first in San Diego County to have AT&T U-Verse, a new fiber-based service with a node down the street. They are definitely not calling it “IPTV.” The service provides cable modem-like speeds for Internet, a wireless router and 400 channels of video, including 25 HD channels. A free Digital Video Recorder is also thrown in. After one day, I can report that the picture looks great on my new HDTV, and the Internet speeds are good, too. (read more…)iPhone: The Reviews Are In
A handful of official iPhone reviews from professional product reviewers came out today. The verdict: It lives up to the hype. There are still lots of possible flaws such as slow speeds on AT&T’s EDGE data network, but the overall picture is that this device does things that no other device before it could do. (read more…)Marchex Officially Launches 100,000 Local Search Sites
Local and vertical online search company Marchex today announced the rather bold move of launching 100,000 local search sites. Yes, that’s right, 100,000. The move represents the culmination of years of work in assembling a portfolio of URLs and companies that will come together to enable the ongoing content population and generation of such a massive base of sites. These URLs consist of locally and vertically oriented sites such as bayareahotels.com or newyorkdoctors.com. They also, importantly, include ZIP code sites (i.e., 94123.com) that cover 96 percent of U.S. ZIP codes. (read more…)Ingenio Releases Mobile Data
Pay-per-call provider Ingenio and market research firm Harris Interactive released results of a survey (n=4,123) today that includes interesting data about consumer preferences for mobile devices and advertising. These are important data, as any embryonic area requires knowledge of consumer preferences as a leading indicator of product development. Nowhere is this more appropriate than mobile search, where we are very much in a wild west phase of experimentation, speculation and product development. (read more…)Blinkx Releases AdHoc, Forms New Partnerships
As reported last week, Blinkx today officially unveiled its new contextual ad matching technology for video content, known as AdHoc. The company has also partnered with both Lycos and InfoSpace to provide its video search technology as an additional feature to these sites’ search interfaces. (read more…)Watch Out! Local.com Patent Covers Local Crawling
We can argue somewhere else whether the U.S. Patent Office is helping to foster innovation in 2007, or hinder it. But the bottom line is that yet another wide ranging, fairly obvious patent has been issued – this time to Local.com – and local media and local search companies can ignore it only at their own peril. Local.com’s patent basically covers all crawling of local businesses on the Web It was written by Xiagwu Xia in January 2005. Xiagwu now runs Local.com’s R&D. (read more…)The Future of Local Search in Europe
The Kelsey Group and AMR International joined forces to hold a summit in London on the Future of Local Search in Europe. It was an invitation-only affair, which is why you probably didn’t hear about it. Not surprisingly, most of the attendees were from Europe and the event was co-sponsored by AgendiZe, Call Genie and Macquarie. This was the first time that TKG has strayed away from its natural venue of Hyatt or Marriott, and the Natural History Museum was a wonderful backdrop for an outstanding half-day conference that ended up going well into the evening. (read more…)
