TKG Data and Analysis: A Weekly Recap

Here is a quick recap of items from the past week of local search and media, in case you missed them. Click below to read each post in full.

Yellow Pages: More Than Just ‘Get An Idea’
The circulation at the nation’s largest newspapers dropped again over the past six months by an average of 2.6 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. To try to fight the perception that newspapers are of less interest or value to consumers, the industry has decided to revise circulation numbers to include both online and print newspaper readers, rather than just print. (read more…)

Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit
A few of us were invited to attend the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit in Laguna Beach, California, this week. (We decided to tough it out and attend.) Peter ran an interesting panel titled “The Local Opportunity.” The panel included Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media & Advertising; Zorik Gordon, president and CEO of ReachLocal.com; Russell Horowitz, chairman and CEO of Marchex; Jeffrey Stibel, president of Web.com; and David Liu, CEO and founder of the Knot. (read more…)

A Conversation With EZShow
Fresh off a day at NewTeeVee’s excellent online video show — the first of its kind that size — I had the chance to talk to the very interesting EZShow. The company has been around for a little while but is now targeting top-tier Yellow Pages and newspaper publishers in a more concerted way to use its private-label video ad creation platform. As it’s already accomplished with a few smaller publishers, this would position the platform to be put in front of advertisers to create video ads relatively easily and inexpensively. (read more…)

FatDoor Take 2, With Dulski at Helm
FatDoor, the well-funded social network based on the privacy-cringing aspects of crawling neighbor information, is going to remain “social” but is likely to change many of its initial directions, perhaps focusing on more personal features. This is the word from Jennifer Dulski, who has just left as head of Yahoo! Marketplaces to take the company’s helm. Dulski says the company is also likely to change its name. (read more…)

Andrew Day: Publishers Need 30% Online Revenues
Truvo CEO Andrew Day said directory publishers need to generate 30 percent of total revenues from online sources relatively soon in order to have a strong business going forward. “Those who are at 10 percent to 15 percent online will find it more difficult every year,” Day said. (read more…)

B2B Local Search — Canada’s Weak Link
Closing remarks at the Warrillow Conference in Toronto this week confirmed major opportunities for business-to-business platforms in Canada. Major Canadian national brands that target the 2.3 million small businesses in Canada plan on increasing their online media budgets in 2008. (read more…)

Reserve Your Spot Now
There’s an interesting “new” company that’s been launched to deal with one of life’s headaches and frankly an afterthought — parking. ParkingCarma, now in beta, sets out to make sure there’s a parking spot waiting for you at the local BART station. You know the model, couldn’t get out of the house fast enough to pick up that latte and get a space at the BART station. Well now ParkingCarma can manage the pain of driving around the lot waiting desperately for someone to leave a space. (read more…)

NewTeeVee Live Keynote: AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega
Here at GigaOm’s NewTeeVee Live event, it’s a who’s who of players in the small but growing online video space. AT&T’s $6 billion investment in its U-Verse IPTV rollout will get 8 million subscribers by the end of the year and 18 billion by the end of ’08, hopes AT&T group president Ralph de la Vega. Citing numbers from Frost & Sullivan, he also claims there will be 38 billion total IPTV subscribers in the U.S. by 2013. (read more…)

YPG New Zealand’s Yellow Goes Mobile
Joining the ever growing list of publishers striking deals with mobile phone companies, Yellow Pages Group New Zealand announced a deal with Vodefone to carry its content on the Vodefone Live mobile service. The service is expected to begin in early 2008, shortly followed by enhanced mapping and directions. (read more…)

Ripple Adds Borders Books
Yesterday in The New York Times, Borders Books announced that it has partnered with Ripple to put digital monitors in hundreds of its stores across the country. By the end of February, the company expects two monitors for its Borders TV network to be in more than 300 stores. We continue to see rapid development in the digital out-of-home arena with established players like Thomson’s PRN already reaching millions of consumers in the United States (with 6,000 store locations). (read more…)

Zillow Teams With Yahoo!’s Newspaper Consortium – Without Yahoo!
Zillow is set to provide its 4 million users, Zestimate capabilities, and EZ Ads platform and nascent set of national listings to 285 newspapers, including many members of Yahoo!‘s newspaper consortium. It’s very much a two-way street. The newspapers, for their part, will share with Zillow their Open House listings, their own “for sale” listings and their sales channels. (read more…)

Video: Google’s New Mobile Platform in Action
Google’s Software Development Kit for its open source mobile operating system, Android, was released today (see last week’s post for background). Google has also produced a video that demos some of the applications that can be developed for Android. A few interesting mobile local search apps are shown on a prototype device that has an interface very similar to the iPhone but utilizes a much faster 3G connection. (read more…)