Marchex continues to expand its local advertising and content capabilities with its acquisition of VoiceStar, the pay-per-call and call tracking company. The VoiceStar acquisition adds more than 100 local advertiser aggregators, including Comcast, The Cobalt Group, R.H. Donnelley/Dex and Yellow…
Yellow Pages Group CEO Marc Tellier offered some more color on his company's plans to roll out value-based pricing (VBP). According to Tellier, the company should roll out the new pricing approach by 2009 or 2010. One key to value-based…
Idearc Media and Yellow Pages Group announced their earnings today, and like R.H. Donnelley maintained their 2007 guidance estimates. As The Kelsey Group had estimated earlier in the year, print revenues are basically flat with growth coming from electronic, vertical…
Lawyers will be offered a chance to sign up for pay-per-call advertising via a new relationship formed between Ingenio, the pay-per-call company, and LexisNexis, the legal publisher. Advertisers on the newly created LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Attorney Match service will be offered…
In my post yesterday on Facebook, I took a few shots at MySpace. Now my account seems to have been frozen. I haven't been able to get in for almost 24 hours, with the message that it has been "temporarily…
Idearc Media released its first-half financial results this morning. The company emphasized that "multi-product" sales, combining print, online and other, were about flat. Idearc is maintaining full-year guidance for 2007 – revenues will come in “close to flat” with slight…
Coupon giant Valpak has overhauled its Web site using Ajax and other features to make its online coupons download faster and searchable by distance, maps and category. The overhaul is the 15-person division’s sixth since 1998. Valpak, "the blue envelope…
There is no question about it: Facebook is on a roll. Since it made the astute move to release its API for Web developers to create various widgets that will work on its network, scores have already been developed to…
We just posted a Client Inquiry Brief summarizing the French publisher PagesJaunes’ first-half results. In reviewing the document, one thing jumps out. The publisher's otherwise solid first half was diminished by a decline in print revenues, this for a company…
It would be a stretch to think that Rupert Murdoch was pining for more local services when he bid $5 billion for Dow Jones. Mostly, he wanted The Wall Street Journal (and will take MarketWatch). Nevertheless, Dow Jones comes complete with…
Following up on Michael Taylor's excellent post this morning on Google's new quasi-sales force, I've been thinking more about what it could mean and how it fits into similar Google initiatives. First, it seems that it would tie together nicely…
As mentioned in last week's post Here Comes the Gphone, one of the worries (among many) causing U.S. wireless carriers to exert so much control over the devices that run on their networks is the development of Wi-Fi-enabled phones. This…
The Utility Belt blog reported that Google recently announced a plan to pay a commission to people who are willing to photograph local businesses and gather information about the company to post on Google Maps. The idea is that self-appointed…
YP.com’s shareholders overwhelmingly approved the decision to adopt the LiveDeal name. According to the recent press release, “YP Corp.'s interest in a name change is a reflection of the company's continuing commitment to building a first-of-its-kind hyper-local, Web 2.0 marketing…
Yahoo! last week said it is adding 700,000 listings to its real estate classifieds from Realogy, the real estate industry’s largest franchisor with brands such Century 21 (my wife's brokerage), Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty. Realogy adds Yahoo!…
IAC is pushing extremely hard on real estate, where it sees synergistic developments from owning LendingTree (mortgage referrals), The Home Loan Center and RealEstate.com (Web lead generated brokerage services). Speaking at Inman’s Real Estate Connect conference last week in San…
John L. Scott, a leading broker in the Pacific Northwest, has carved out a niche for itself as a major implementator of technology, even as it sticks to a full-service model. Speaking at Inman’s Real Estate Connect last week, Chairman…
Speaking at Inman’s Real Estate Connect last week in San Francisco, Craigslist namesake Craig Newmark says the service is now getting 8 billion page views a month from 450 cities in 50 countries. He also noted that the service is up…
Here is a sampling of posts from the TKG blog this week, in case you missed them: VFlyer Taps Into Online Real Estate Classified widget provider vFlyer has launched a low-cost Web site development and hosting product for real estate…
Classified widget provider vFlyer has launched a low-cost Web site development and hosting product for real estate agents to post individual listings online. Like the rest of vFlyer's product line (explored here), this is a seller-centric tool that aims to…
