Latest News on Upcoming ILM:08 Conference
We’re just about ready to go with Interactive Local Media 2008, which is Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It should be a very important, game-defining event — and the first one for The Kelsey Group in the new BIA Advisory Services era (BIA Financial Network acquired Kelsey last week, adding resources and smarts to the team).
Previously, we announced a lot of the lineup, with hand-picked execs from Google, Yahoo, Angie’s List, ServiceMagic, Comcast, NBC, TurnHere, Adify, Centro, PointRoll, IAC, Citysearch, Outside.in, Sensis, Topix, Praized, PegasusNews, VoodooVox, comScore, Yodle, Done Right, Metrix4Media, LiveDeal, MerchantCircle, CityVoter and Institute for the Future.
Here are some new highlights. Our opening keynoter is local search innovator Mark Canon, the ex-Switchboard/AOL Search/Autobytel exec who now runs Yell.com. Mark will share his authoritative insights on local, vertical and directory/search, and the differences between the U.S. and international markets.
We have also developed a great “pre-conference” session with Andrew Shotland, the former NBC and Insider Pages exec who has become “Mr. Local SEO Guide.” Andrew will provide his insider tips on search engine marketing.
From Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium, we’re adding former Tribune Interactive exec Mike Silver, who represents the newspapers in all this. He joins Yahoo’s Lem Lloyd on the podium to talk about what we’ve learned so far.
On the SMB SuperForum, we’ve added Jeff Stibel from Web.com, who will be keynoting the mega-session. We’ve also added John Keister from Marchex, Travis Fore from Network Solutions and Matt Howard from SMBLive (an especially interesting broadband service).
On the Video SuperForum, we’ve landed Brian McCarthy from Citysearch, Peter Bowen from SeeSaw Networks, Glenn Pingul from Mixpo, Diaz Nesamoney from Jivox and Steve Espinosa from eLocal Listing. And we’ve added an out-of-home twist — out of home is a huge growth area in local advertising — via John McMenamin of Ripple.
We’re also pleased to have lured Pieter Grasdijk from the Netherlands to talk about iLocal, and Josh Herman from Acxiom‘s InfoBase to discuss local audience segmentation. Wrapping things up with “all thoughts local” are three of our smartest friends: Ethan Stock from Zvents, Jennifer Dulski from Center’d and Craig Hagopian from V-Enable.
Throughout the whole thing, we’re running state-of-the-art and really fun iPhone and video demos and even some contests, with the audience voting via laser pen (yours to keep). See you in Santa Clara? Here’s the link to register.