LookSmart Back from the Brink

I had a very informative meeting with LookSmart CEO David Hills (formerly of 24/7, About, Cox Enterprises and elsewhere). He acknowledged some of LookSmart's past strategic missteps and gave me an overview of the company's new three-pronged strategy. (Impressively he…

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Announcements Aplenty

Not enough time to cover everything that's going on: NYTimes acquires a minority stake in meta-vertical job search engine Indeed Noika introduces a mobile local search app w/a collection of partners AOL boosts investment in wireless with Wildseed Google reportedly…

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Verizon Launches PPCall

This article spills the beans before the official announcement (today). The system is Verizon's own, for which it is reportedly seeking a patent. Other IYPs will likely follow. Here's the release. The most recent Local Commerce Monitor (SME) data to…

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Dueling Directory Visions

In one corner is Yellow Pages Association president Neg Norton, who writes about the profile of consumer-users of IYP products (based on the assn's earlier study with comScore). Norton extolls the advertiser benefits of IYPs vs. search engines (more qualified…

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Dogpile Adds MSN to Metasearch

As others have already reported, InfoSpace's Dogpile metasearch engine added MSN Search to its layered results. Here's a visual tool where users can compare the uniqueness of search results across the major engines. Dogpile, with its ability to segregate results…

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Danger Ahead Rupert Murdoch

News Corp.'s purchase of social networking and music promotion site MySpace could only have been motivated by a desire to acquire social networking/community tools and the teen/young adult demographic that frequents the site. This AP article suggests that Murdoch may…

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More Maps Mashups

The new Google Maps mashups are coming now by the day . . . Here's PremierGuide's (local search platform provider) customer list plotted on a Google Map. Here's a site -- ApartmentRatings.com -- that has integrated Google Maps and apartment…

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Mainstreaming Online Video

First there was Live 8 and now the Space Shuttle: "Nearly 433,000 people simultaneously watched NASA's webcast of this week's space shuttle launch."The significant difference between watching this type of event on conventional TV and online is that online you…

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