A new consortium of mobile carriers has announced it will launch a mobile payments platform known as ISIS. With the tagline "Wallet ... meet Phone," it plans to launch in the next 18 months (really?). The press release and Web…
A few weeks ago, we wrote about a briefing with Shopkick's product director Evan Tana. The upcoming ILM:10 conference speaker explained the strategy to build a shopping utility around check-ins and customer engagement for retail partners like Best Buy. Another thing…
Today, Mary Meeker gave her annual data dump of key Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. As always it was fairly rich, including lots of mobile usage data as leading indicators for opportunities in content and ad delivery. One…
Over on our Local Media blog, we cover Google's new "Hotpot" product. It essentially adds a social layer to local search, allowing users to connect to friends (Gmail contacts). Merchant ratings from you and your friends then govern personalized recommendations in…
Many of you have heard by now that Google has launched a social "layer" onto local search with the new Hotpot feature. -- Rate and review local businesses. -- Add friends from Google contacts (based on Gmail contacts). -- Both…
CityGrid Media (formerly Citysearch) will extend its paid base of 800,000 advertisers across thousands of neighborhood news pages, courtesy of a display advertising deal with Outside.in. The two companies have been quietly conducting pilot tests of custom ads in “a…
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. -- Google Product Search Bridges Online-to-Offline Shopping --…
During the run up to passage of the strict Yellow Pages opt-in ordinance in Seattle last month, the Yellow Pages industry made it clear that it felt it had a strong argument that the legislation was unconstitutional. Yesterday the industry followed through on…
One of the big hopes for local this year is ... national. As local targeting tools get more granular, there has been an upsurge in national/local advertisers, especially as they focus on touching consumers on the local purchase level. Gannett…
October U.S. online video rankings from comScore reaffirm an established trend: Watching video online is a social exercise. Fueled by YouTube's stranglehold on unique viewers, viewing sessions and minutes per viewer, Google posted dominant numbers, besting its closest competitor --…
Google has been telling anyone that will listen just how bullish it is on local/mobile commerce, and it has backed the bombast with a series of initiatives (Places, Place Search and Tags just to name three recent, relevant examples) to aggressively court…
After all of the speculation over the past week about a new Facebook e-mail client, the company today announced a more broadly defined "Modern Messaging System." Explicitly positioned by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "not an e-mail killer," this will include…
The tech media, blogosphere and Twittersphere are abuzz over what Facebook will launch during its announced press event tomorrow in San Francisco. Few doubt that it will be a new mail client. We speculated at our DMS conference and more…
We've been busy putting together a solid lineup of speakers at our upcoming Interactive Local Media conference (Dec 7-9). Spotlighted will be two SuperForums on hot topics in the local media space: Mobile, and Daily Deals/Group buying. The SuperForum format,…
From the Friday cool stuff dept., the folks at prolific design house Frog Design have built a real time heat map of geotagged tweet activity across the globe. Twitter was first to geotag "status" but hasn't done a lot with…
(Image is of Zinio Newsstand for iPad, but you get the idea ... ) The release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab will give the iPad some competition. It reminds us that the rise of tablets has been positioned as a…
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…
