After some time passed since we last covered Fanminder, we caught up with CEO Paul Rosenfeld last week in advance of yesterday's announcement of new funding and its 2.0 release. First, for those unfamiliar, Fanminder is a "freemium" SMB marketing…
We've long looked at the online-offline gap. This comes down to the challenge in connecting the dots between increasing levels of online research and the sheer volume of offline spending (95 percent of U.S. retail). This is ROBO: research online…
In an effort to get "back in the game" for briefings with interesting mobile start-ups, this week I had the chance to catch up with Trover cofounder and CEO Jason Karas about some new features. If you haven't heard of…
As part of the information overload that is Facebook's long awaited S-1 filing, the company announced it is up to 845 million active global users (defined as monthly users). That's a 39 percent year-over-year jump. That total has slowly been…
In the immediate wake of our report on Google mobile ad revenues, TechCrunch reports today that the search giant saw a 2x year-over-year increase in mobile search ad requests (the largest source of its mobile ad revenues) in 2011. Our…
Throughout 2012, we're beefing up our editorial pipeline to get more reports out, on a more frequent basis. This is especially true in mobile, where there is such a great deal of activity and data coming out of the quickly…
As you probably heard, Apple today announced first-quarter earnings (its first fiscal quarter is Sept.-Dec.). And you probably also heard that it was a blowout quarter -- beating even the most aggressive analyst estimates. Here are the main bullets. More…
I just heard from our friends at WillowTree Apps about their most recent iPhone app, "Likes." Utilizing the growing number of Facebook Likes out there, it will look at your friends' and friends of friends' activity and make local recommendations…
Following Peter's post about the developing lineup for our upcoming ILM East conference, we recently shot some video to give a little more color on what we're in the process of building. Below are the first two. We'll shoot more…
Foursquare announced today that it has partnered with SinglePlatform to add Menus to its Explore tab. The Explore tab, as many of you know, allows users to discover places around them -- as governed by check-in history, social behavior and…
Millennial Media has become the latest to join the recent resurgence of tech IPOs. Or at least it has taken its first big step in that direction by filing its S-1 with the SEC, according to an email I just…
During a late morning panel on Day 2 of ILM West, local video providers batted around the opportunity in bringing video advertising to the "other 99 percent" of small merchants. "We know it's evolving," said moderator Steve Passwaiter of this…
In the midst of ILM West happenings, call measurement ad provider Telmetrics announced today that it's bringing its m.Call platform to iOS. M.Call gives local search publishers and app developers the ability to capture data around the phone calls they're…
Day 1 at ILM West came to a close with a session on how SMBs are using Facebook and social media. This most notably culminated with "3 big ideas" for driving social commerce, from Oodle CEO Craig Donato. These are derived from…
Today at BIA/Kelsey's ILM West conference, prolific Wall Street Journal tech blogger Kara Swisher acknowledged many of the challenges for local media, but was quick to point out that none of these is new. Some of the sleeping giants moving…
In the run-up to any given BIA/Kelsey conference, I'm continually asked about the makeup of our typical audience. This is a good question from both attendees and speakers trying to devise the proper tone for their presentations or prepared panel…
There's a growing crop of mobile ad networks specializing in local ad inventory and location-based ad placements. This is a subcategory of larger, more broadly defined ad networks like AdMob and Millennial. The idea is that this targeting provides better…
As we do every year across BIA/Kelsey's coverage areas, our analysts put their heads together in cross-disciplinary fashion to handicap the 2012 local media space. It's a solid exercise and great preparation for our ILM West conference less than two…
Amazon has just debuted an iPad and Kindle Fire app that lets kids create holiday wish lists. Known as Amazon Santa, it has intuitive functionality and a fun design to create lists and share them with parents, relatives and of…
We're less than two weeks from our big ILM West conference in San Francisco, and the agenda continues to get stronger. On day 3 of the conferfence, we'll be doing things slightly different by devoting the day to discussions about…
