Monthly Archives: September 2009

The TC50 has concluded and the winners announced. Best in show went to RedBeacon, a local search start-up that I missed on Monday. More on that in a minute. The start-up competition has only been around for a few years,…

ReachLocal has taken sole control of ReachLocal Australia by buying out the 50 percent of shares held by Netus, an Aussie VC backed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The buyout, at “an attractive multiple of Netus' original investment,” means ReachLocal,…

A company called BreakThrough just launched at the TechCrunch50 event. First appearing to be a sort of Avvo for therapists, it proved to be more than just a search engine. In a nutshell, it offers telephone and video conferencing (via…

Facebook has just announced from the TechCrunch50 stage that it has reached 300 million active users and is cash flow positive. It has reached the latter milestone in advance of its initial goal of first quarter 2010.

I'm at the TechCrunch50 show again this year looking out for interesting mobile and local companies and people. I missed yesterday when Yext, RedBeacon and a few other local startups launched -- more to come when i'm able to dig…

A few weeks back, in an Advisory, we released the following chart of the “Quarterly Revenue Index.” The Advisory was released the day after we got the final Q2 number filings from the different media groups. Our idea was to…

Hordes of vertical sites have been popping up and grabbing the geotargeted ads that could theoretically go to newspapers. In response, design and business consultant Alan Jacobsen -- who last year developed RealPeopleRealStuff, an online video classified site -- is…

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full. When Your Back is Against the Wall You probably remember Victor Kiam's famous commercials for Remington shavers from 1979…

Here is a valuable marketing lesson for Yellow Pages, newspapers and broadcasters. You probably remember Victor Kiam's famous commercials for Remington shavers from 1979 when he said on camera, "I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company." It…

OK, we've got a solid nucleus for our Interactive Local Media event, which is Dec. 9-11 at our favorite hotel, The Century Plaza in L.A. Here's the registration info. The show typically attracts about 500 senior level execs, and is…

At Mobilize ’09, Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha is announcing the latest Google Android Build known as Motoblur. It will enter the U.S. market through a new T-Mobile branded smartphone known as "Cliq" ("Dext" outside the U.S. through Orange and other…

A panel at Mobilize ’09 is discussing what factors govern context in mobile. Online, of course, we have a (somewhat) well-defined set of factors to approximate context -- keywords, page content, IP address, etc. In mobile, the rules are changing…

The next big vertical is ... parking? Parking Data Ventures has been created to tackle all things parking. The five-person, Baltimore-based service has created a database of 10,000 parking locations. It has partnered with six of the largest parking lot…

At GigaOm's Mobilize conference, a panel is currently discussing the ongoing challenge of deciding what platform on which to develop mobile products. Of course, the answer is, "it depends." As we explored in a recent report, this will most often…

Om Malik kicked off today's Mobilize event with a few data points and a nostalgic look at the day when a colleague stepped into his office with a Palm 5, the first smartphone. Even though it wasn't that long ago,…

Venerable mobile news source Fierce Mobile has just released one of its signature top 10 lists. This time the theme is "Top Mobile Applications of 2009," including mobile apps across different platforms. Of the 10, I count six that are…

Clever Commute, which aggregates info from commuters on tardy schedules, is now in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington D.C., per an article in USA Today. The service was launched three years ago by Joshua Crandall, a New…

MerchantCircle is seeking to transform itself from a source of search engine leads for SMBs into more of a destination site that consumers and businesses will use over and over again. The company reports 20 million unique visitors, which if…

AT&T Interactive has launched a new version of its popular YPMobile iPhone app. The new version will allow users to watch  video, and will support pay per call advertising. The video capability will tap into AT&T's growing library of SMB…

Today’s New York Times ran a story about how both The NYT and The Wall Street Journal plan to launch full-fledged regional editions, beginning first in the Bay Area. According to the story, Bay Area residents could see regional editions…