Sprint has formed a “4 G Local Content Group” that will handle "local news, weather, sports, traffic, directories, user reviews and other User Generated Content.” All this from a recruitment ad it placed for “an innovative and creative Product Manager…
I love to see examples of grassroots innovation in local online marketing. One of my favorites is an e-newsletter from Sprocket Entertainment, the producers of a local comedy night in my hometown of Carlsbad, CA. Sprocket is a start-up by…
Local.com is in a different “local” category. It aggregates a ton of local content and features, but it doesn’t necessarily vie with local Yellow Pages or search sites for everyday local traffic. Maybe it would if it could. It has…
Today’s news is that Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel is stepping down from his position, which will be filled by founder Jerry Yang. Meanwhile, CFO Sue Decker will become president. It should be anticipated that Yahoo!'s executive change, which isn’t particularly…
Some people in the user-generated content community are very Wiki-centric, but there really haven’t been local applications – until now. Our forward looking friends at The San Diego Union Tribune’s SignOn San Diego site have launched a local Wiki to…
Some interesting details about LiveDeal's operations have been released as the result of its $11.8 million sale to YP.com, which had previously been written about by my colleague Mike Boland. During a June 7 investor call announcing the sale, LiveDeal,…
A new report, written by me and called “The Newspaper Online Shopping Report: Online Relationships with Retailers,” is out today. It is a fairly comprehensive work that gives readers a 360-degree view of what newspapers are doing (and should be…
Consumers increasingly use the Web to search for services. But it is tough to complete the loop and actually order service. In many cases, businesses are either unresponsive to phone calls and e-mails, or their information is inaccurate. All this…
Zvents, the localized, personalized online event calendar, says it is driving a lot of page views and traffic to its newspaper partners. The growing list of partners now includes The Orange County Register and other Freedom newspapers; several MediaNews Group…
My former colleagues at Borrell Associates have carved out a unique role in the local online advertising space with their annual survey of local media revenues. This year is the survey’s fifth, and was conducted with 2,885 properties in the…
WashingtonPost.com has soft-launched “Local Explorer,” which allows users to map crime, home sales and school information by ZIP code. It is a great model for “mapped journalism.” The tag line for Local Explorer says it allows you to explore “Police and…
1. Maps are the height of the data pyramid. Once they’re populated, everything else (i.e. local search) gets easier. 2. 3D CityScapes are a big part of the future, and will drive new types of ecommerce. This is the expensive…
The success of American Idol’s TXT messaging voting has gotten women shoppers thinking of it as a major media guide, or so claims NearByNow Founder Scott Dunlap, who is pushing hard to provide TXT promotions to malls around the U.S.…
Here at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, an annual event for 800+ mashup developers, there’s no perspective yet on the importance of maps to the local ecosphere. But a picture is developing of a “3D Data arms race,”…
Amidst all the whiz bang mapping apps showed off at Where 2.0, MapQuest Gm James Greiner brought everything back to Earth with a survey showing that just 42 percent of Internet users use mapping sites, and relatively light penetration of…
We’re all guilty of feature creep. A lot of the stuff isn’t especially useful. Now comes Palore. When it comes to directory listings, Palore believes hardly any of the info is useful. In fact, consumers want to know just one…
Spotzer CEO founder Andrew Klein makes no bones about being inspired by SpotRunner, the break-through company that broke out last year by making it easy for small businesses to produce video and place it on local media. Spotzer is pretty…
It’s nice when a foundation puts itself in the middle of what’s happening, and uses its money to inject a little bit of the consumer’s interest in a commercial world. It’s a win-win. Most foundations, of course, don’t actually do…
ShopLocal, the shopping service owned by Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy, often gets overlooked in the glare of Amazon, eBay and the pricing comparison engines. But the service’s three networks are now getting over 200 million page views a month, which…
Superpages.com is getting good reviews from the ad community for new directions it is taking with its redesign (clean), ad serving formats (based on relevancy, performance and bidding) and its overall effort to update itself for a Google-centric marketplace (where…
