I had a great time playing with a friend’s iPhone this weekend. The thing is really nice – even more beautiful in person than in pictures and sturdy beyond expectations. And fun, too. But maybe I won’t buy one for…
The National Hockey League and its 30 teams, unable to score exposure on major media networks, are going local and on demand, with extensive game, team and community programming being launched next season. The service, produced by NeuLion, a technology integrator…
Local.com will get wide distribution among small newspapers via its $2 million acquisition of PremierGuide, which provides local search services to 350 sites, including the twin powers of CNHI and Gatehouse. It also gets into The Washington Post and a…
Jitter Fingers, a social network for teen and “tween” girls looking for a secure and focused environment (i.e., away from the predators who lurk in MySpace), has launched a local beta version in Los Angeles. It expects to eventually launch…
Backfence cofounder Mark Potts has done a “final word” on Backfence. The post is a good catch-all, but contains no revelations. Don’t look for much second-guessing of the company’s strategy, either – although he clearly wishes he could have ridden…
If you are looking for a great read, pick up “The Ghost Map" from Outside.in cofounder Steven Johnson. The book, published in November, poignantly tells the story of how an amateur scientist and a clergyman use their knowledge of a local…
Krillion, the retail search engine optimizer whose motto is “find national brands, locally,” is now getting 65,000 unique visitors per month and more than 200,000 page views to its appliances, the first of many planned verticals. A second vertical, still…
Tribune Interactive has added Los Angeles to its list of Metromix city guides, which also include Chicago, Orlando and Baltimore. Next week, it will add New York City as well. Eventually, Tribune aims to have the Metromix brand in all…
Constant Contact, the leader among e-mail marketing services for small businesses with 120,000 customers mailing out 500 million e-mails a year, has filed for an IPO. In the S1, the company says it is looking to expand its services beyond…
Starting this fall, Idearc Media’s Superpages may be accessed via instant messaging as a result of a new relationship with Multiplied Media, the Calgary-based provider of Poynt, a local search service that operates over IM. Multiplied Media was formerly known…
Backfence announced June 29 that it is shuttering its 13 community sites, which were in the D.C. area, Illinois and Northern California. The ambitious site raised an initial round of $3 million but never had high penetration in its communities…
eBay has quietly launched a U.S. version of Kijiji, a free classifieds service that began in February 2005 and is now serving 17 million users in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, Taiwan, Austria, Switzerland, and India. Kijiji, which means…
Merchant Circle threw itself a party last week at Nola’s in Palo Alto to celebrate a year in business and registration by 140,000 small businesses. I’m on their Evite list, so I knew about it. It is probably a good…
For the past couple of years, Quigo's contextual network product, AdSonar, has been a steady alternative to Google and Yahoo! for local media companies (as have competitors such as ContextWeb and FAST AdMomentum). The company currently has more than 200…
New West is a different concept from other community sites. Started two years ago by Jonathan Weber, the former editor of The Industry Standard (the dot-com era trade bible), the seven-person site covers all of the Rocky Mountain region from…
After a five-hour installation job – apparently, many are longer – I am now among the first in San Diego County to have AT&T U-Verse, a new fiber-based service with a node down the street. They are definitely not calling…
We can argue somewhere else whether the U.S. Patent Office is helping to foster innovation in 2007 or hinder it. But the bottom line is that yet another wide-ranging, fairly obvious patent has been issued – this time to Local.com…
They're cool, but unless you want to torture yourself, you’ll probably want to use a 3D Virtual Cityscape for less than 15 percent of your local lookups. Watching the innovation in the space, however, is thrilling. The applications are already…
Following in the footsteps of Jingle Nets’ 1-800-Free411 (and failed services, like inFreeDA), Verizon LiveSource has launched a trial of a free DA service in Boston and Denver. The ad-supported service boasts the catchy number: 800-THE-INFO. It uses Call Genie's…
You learn a lot from talking to local advertisers. Occasionally, I get to leave my ivory tower and give a speech or appear on a panel in front of local advertisers. Generally, I'm talking “Local Local.” A couple of weeks…
