Spotzer CEO founder Andrew Klein makes no bones about being inspired by SpotRunner, the break-through company that broke out last year by making it easy for small businesses to produce video and place it on local media. Spotzer is pretty…
Local.com has announced a new mobile search product. Though it has been in testing for a while (I received a quick preview at SES in April), it officially launched today. Known as Local Mobile, the ad supported mobile site lets…
It’s nice when a foundation puts itself in the middle of what’s happening, and uses its money to inject a little bit of the consumer’s interest in a commercial world. It’s a win-win. Most foundations, of course, don’t actually do…
Summary An article yesterday on the SeekingAlpha blog examines a recent wave of investment consolidation in the online media space. This signals, among other things, an impending acceleration of advertising shifts from offline to off, and a revenue diversification play…
A new white paper was released today by The Kelsey Group that looks at recent trends in online video use and advertising. This is a trend we've also covered in previous posts, and it was a big theme at the…
You may have noticed we made some enhancements to the blog. These are part of an ongoing process to evolve the blog in various ways. You'll continue to see changes in both form and function over the coming weeks, as…
ShopLocal, the shopping service owned by Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy, often gets overlooked in the glare of Amazon, eBay and the pricing comparison engines. But the service’s three networks are now getting over 200 million page views a month, which…
Superpages.com is getting good reviews from the ad community for new directions it is taking with its redesign (clean), ad serving formats (based on relevancy, performance and bidding) and its overall effort to update itself for a Google-centric marketplace (where…
Following the post on the verticalization of mobile search, I was able to talk to mobile search startup GoUAskMe. Unlike the SMS based local search tools cited in that post, the company is trying to ride the growing wave of…
As my colleague Neal Polachek noted in an earlier post, Local Matters this week launched a new beta version of Localguides.com, the local relocation and travel service originally known as areaguides.com that it purchased a couple of years ago, reportedly…
Centro’s Summit in Chicago this week not only featured a positive outlook on national brands buying local online media, but also dealt with the impact of user-generated content and video on the local ad marketplace, and on the agencies themselves.…
A few notable things have happened around the local search and media worlds so far this week. — As mentioned earlier, Local Matters launched a new local search destination. — Google announced a series of refinements to its search technology…
Local Matters today launched its localguides.com beta. The site will focus on delivering a richer local search experience. It was clear when I saw the site earlier this year that CEO Perry Evans and team spent considerable time and energy…
Agency reps appearing at Centro’s Local Media Publisher Summit in Chicago said they’re ready to work with local media publishers, but they’re looking for non-cookie-cutter approaches. They emphasized that they’re overwhelmed by manpower shortages and that it is generally easier…
Do user reviews for sushi restaurants and promotions for Target and Lowe's really mix? Especially when the user reviews come from a highly defined community like Judy's Book? They may not, but Judy's Book is motivated to try to ride…
GigaOm's NewTeeVee blog has screenshots of YouTube's freshly integrated inline video ads. This is another example of the experimentation happening with online video advertising, to find a better and more seamless ad delivery method than the largely despised pre-roll ad.…
Scads of stories are popping up that say Google is a likely bidder for Yell Group, the U.K.-based publisher that also operates U.S. independent Yellow Book. Here is a story in today's Independent newspaper, which cites sources saying Google is…
A new report from Accenture confirms much of what we already know to be true: that the majority of online product research leads to offline conversions. Specifically, it reported that 67 percent of survey respondents prefer to make purchases in…
This week, I've had the chance to talk to a handful of local search start-ups. It is interesting to get a glimpse of products in development, and telling of the many angles there are to attack this important space. Yesterday,…
They say all politics are local. But that doesn’t seem to include local online political advertising. The political pros at E-Voter Institute meeting held this morning in La Jolla said ad patterns are likely to shift in 2008 due to…
