When StepUp launched a couple of years ago with the intention of delivering real-time inventory information and product availability to the Internet it was met with considerable skepticism, along the lines of "yeah, how are they gonna do that?" and…
A couple of days ago I met with Simply Hired. Beyond some interesting things that they were telling me about their roadmap, I was fascinated by the "vertical"' vs. "horizontal" search discussion we had. My personal belief is that the…
Speaking of "click-to-call," here's a Mercury News piece on Google's "click-to-call" initiative. According to the article, the company is working with Florida-based VoIP Inc.Click-to-call is not PPCall. There are many companies using click-to-call, which is about connecting calls between individuals…
Amid gloomy reports (WSJ sub. req'd) about the health of print newspapers, there's some very good news in online revenues and traffic growth for newspaper sites. According to Nielsen and the NAA:Both the overall number and percentage of Internet users…
Search Engine Journal covers the recent GeoVector/Mapion announcement about "point and search" mobile local technology in Japan. From the GeoVector announcement:With Mapion Local Search, users can now walk down the street anywhere in Japan and point at over 700,000 objects…
My colleague Charles Laughlin posted about the YellowPages.com "Need Something" ad campaign when it officially launched earlier this week. Here's more on the size and reach of the campaign from ClickZ. You can view the online ads here and the…
OK, not exactly. But yesterday's financial results showed the company was subject to the same pressures, market trends and unreasonable expectations that have confronted other Internet bellwethers such as Yahoo! and eBay. I had expected Google to beat expectations. But…
I saw this article this morning but was racing out to a meeting at StepUp.com and so I didn't have time to do a post earlier. From Reuters:The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper…
EarthLink has apparently finalized its deal with Philadelphia to provide what amounts to wholesale wireless/Wi-Fi access that can then be resold to ISPs (which would then sell to consumers). So this isn't "free" Wi-Fi, but reportedly EarthLink would only be…
America Online has decided to make another push into broadband. Built on top of third-party partnerships with BellSouth, Time Warner Cable, Qwest and AT&T, the company will offer high-speed access across the U.S. AOL had limited success with this the…
Google went live tonight with version 4 of its toolbar for IE (Firefox version coming soon, I'm told). You can take a look at the laundry list of features and upgrades here. Worth noting from my point of view are…
News Corp.'s True Local search engine has gone live in Australia. Its purpose is to compete with Sensis and it's "powered" by News Corp.-owned newspapers. This is an interesting thing for U.S.-based newspapers to consider, but perhaps impossible for them…
Almost everyone is using the term "social search" to describe a rash of "Web 2.0-style" offerings (whether product features or new sites) that try to blend community with another application (e.g., search, shopping, etc.).Here's a post by Danny Sullivan (SEW)…
No time to discuss now. Check out a screenshot of the test. More to come later. Precious little additional info in this article.
As Google more and more becomes a "media company," media opportunities cannot be missed. Here's Gary Price speculating about and discussing the seemingly impending Google Music. Music and other potential vertical domains raise the broader question of how Google intends…
MyYahoo! is a powerful strategic asset that has been languishing to some degree. Now Om Malik reports that it may be ready to rise to the level of attention that it deserves internally. It's really a potential personal dashboard for…
I've heard it occasionally said about InfoSpace, which owns metasearch engine Dogpile, "what do they want to be when they grow up?" In other words, what's their business model? Here's a very bullish piece, originally published in The Motley Fool,…
As TV audiences fragment, advertisers are clinging to large-scale "live TV" events that still draw large audiences, i.e., the "Oscars" and the Super Bowl. There's something of a paradox going on: even as audiences shrink, TV networks (in certain cases)…
A new report from the good folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that the Internet (and e-mail) are increasingly relied up to manage "offlline" social relations/networks and that, in addition, more and more people are relying…
