Group buying platform LivingSocial has taken another important step in differentiating itself as more than just another deal a day, building on its recent acquisition of social adventures company UrbanEscapes to unveil LivingSocial Espcapes. The new travel-focused offering segments getaways into three…
I've been using the EveryScape Eats iPhone app for the past few months. It's one of my favorite mobile local search apps for its ability to let you check out (not to be confused with "check-in") a restaurant before you…
With online search fragmentation and social media emergence driving prodigious growth forecasts for the reputation management sector (BIA/Kelsey projects $3.5 billion in ERPM revenues by 2014), agencies and publishers are both in the market for technology that adds this tool to their client offerings.…
Last week I spoke at the annual gathering of the International Classifieds Media Association (ICMA) in Vienna, Austria. My colleague Peter Krasilovsky and I have had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this function in past years. What I…
India’s auto classifieds marketplace is heating up, as the country’s burgeoning middle class becomes more auto dependent. In August 2009, MotorExchange acquired CarTradeIndia.com, apparently leading to investment in MotorExchange by Canaan Partners. Now, Axel Springer, the German media company, and…
Related to the previous post on battles waging over smartphone OS market share, coupon heavyweight Valpak announced it's joining the Windows Phone ecosystem with a dedicated native app. The free app, available now in the Windows Phone Marketplace, will offer…
Industry reports continue to show the rapid growth of Google's Android mobile OS. After reports last week from Nielsen and comScore (U.S. figures), Gartner is out today with fresh data that show Android still outpaces all other mobile OSs in…
On Friday we released a report about Facebook's midweek launch of its Deals feature -- the monetization backbone of the previously released Facebook Places. It's a big move with big implications for the growing mobile and local deals space. Will…
American Express has recently been leveraging its powerful relationship with SMBs on the Web, including a tie to search engine marketing and lead generation via a deal between American Express Open and Clickable. Now Amex is going deep with social…
Since its origin as an exclusively online newspaper drawing together the work of dozens of community blogs and contributors, The Sacramento Press has since diversified well beyond its pure publisher roots, complementing its core with a local advertising network, a daily…
SB Nation (Sports Blog Nation) presents a fan-centric, highly verticalized (i.e., local) view of sports from dozens of bloggers. The site has completed a new $10.5 million "C" round of funding, pushing it past the $23.5 million mark. The new…
In case you missed them, here are a few headlines and links to recent posts on our Mobile Local Media blog. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here, and the e-mail alert here. -- Mobile Local Evolutions: A Conversation With DexOne…
My latest column at Search Engine Watch examines the emerging area of visual search. This includes things like mobile bar code scanners and augmented reality. We've seen a lot of activity in this area over the past month, covered in…
Judging by the name alone, many would think of Badgeville as just the latest in the swelling line of social gaming and check-in companies (Foursquare, Gowalla, Zynga) that promote shared online experiences through status updates and virtual currency. CEO Kris Duggan…
We've long had an ax to grind about mobile products that simply port over online experiences to a smaller screen. This can be said for apps, as well as advertising. The latter too often inherits the creative, targeting and campaign objectives of…
With the rise of consumer-facing real estate sites such as Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia, it seems only natural that Multiple Listing Services would break out from behind the Realtor and brokerage firewalls, and provide truly local, for-profit real estate sites,…
Ironically, on the same day Facebook sprung a major announcement -- the unveiling of Deals as a natural extension of Places -- that could have thunderous effects on popularizing social location tools, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released…
Today we ran a webinar that was part ILM conference preview, part data presentation and part analyst round table. We even had comScore's Gillian Heltai join the discussion. Among the items discussed were the changing ways people are consuming mobile content,…
Local.com has dramatically upgraded its destination site, with soft colors, an excellent user interface and renewed focus on three core categories -- “business,” “coupons” and “events.” The categories are clearly aimed at driving organic traffic from its intended audience of…
After a packed day of participating in webinars and victory parades, it's time to catch up on a full slate of news items. Chief among them is Facebook's "mobile" press event during which it announced updated apps, a single sign-on…
