Kelsey Local Media Blog
Backfence may be the biggest laboratory out there for community networks. It reads like a newspaper written by citizens, and its hyper-local coverage features community-by-community Yellow Pages, special sections, business reviews, event calendars, classifieds, blogs and user-generated photos. The company…
I'm down in San Jose at the Consumer Technology Ventures conference, which has featured some engaging panel discussions. The highlight so far for me has been the luncheon keynote yesterday by prolific Wall Street Journal personal tech columnist Walt Mossberg…
Last night I had the chance to attend Microsoft's launch event for Virtual Earth 3-D in San Francisco. It was a well-organized event that included introductory remarks by Microsoft GM of Search and Mapping Erik Jorgensen and the GM of…
Zvents, a Web 2.0 app that enables local sites to manage events, including events inputted by users, announced today that it has received $7 million from several VC firms, including Vantage Point Venture Partners (a funder of ReachLocal). It also…
Google's announcement that its self-serve system will be enabled for print newspapers gives newspapers an easier way to reach small businesses. Newspapers, of course, are famously challenged to apply their relatively limited sales forces to anything smaller than a car…
Geosign, a privately owned publisher of dozens of local and vertical services, including TrueLocal, has teamed with Go2 to get a foot in the door of the nascent mobile directory marketplace. Go2, founded in 1999, was a pioneer in mobile…
In an exciting development from Microsoft, the company just announced it will provide 3-D models of 15 U.S. cities in its Live Search results. Starting tomorrow, users who click on the "maps" tab after entering a search term in Live…
Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper publisher with 110 titles, is rolling out "information center" guidelines that it calls "the newsroom of the future." In its essence, the Information Center downplays hard news in favor of more community touch points. It…
Google is said to be considering a major deal to either partner with Clear Channel's radio stations or buy the stations outright, according to RBC Capital Markets (as reported by Jeffrey Yorke in Radio & Records, a radio trade pub).…
Every now and then you meet someone in business that makes you think it is not just about business; someone you imagine you will have the joy of working with for the rest of your career. For me, Greg Parker…
AT&T has launched its Homezone service in the Bay Area, which will be one of the products in its bundling strategy (explored in the recent TKG Advisory "Triple and Quad Play: Who Will Win the Bundled Services Battle"). A forebearer…
I've been out for some of this week, only to return to a flurry of events in the Googleverse. (What else is new?) In case you missed it too, here are some of the more notable items. Continuing its hot…
The "big daddy" publisher of free online classified ads in the U.K., Loot.com, announced last week that it has gone live with the AdMission rich-media platform. This implementation comes on the heels of a deal with Microsoft, announced in mid-September,…
I am in the process of moving and somehow AT&T knew about it. A packet came in last week's mail branded as "AT&T Mover's One Source." I'm still not sure how the company knew I was moving. As a current…
Yesterday I had the chance to talk to Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler. Part LinkedIn, part Wikipedia and part Hoovers, Jigsaw compiles user-generated contact information for business professionals. These data are invaluable to salespeople and recruiters who wish to bypass the…
In the past, financial analysts covering the newspaper industry haven't paid much attention to online results. They're more focused on quarterly results, which don't have much to do with online. Indeed, despite several years of strong growth from online services,…
Since there have only been 13 unassisted triple plays in the history of major league baseball, it's highly unlikely that we will see one in this World Series. Nevertheless, a lot of the talk recently has been about a different…
Next time you refer to your cellphone, pause and ask yourself, "Is this a Sprint phone or a Nokia phone?" Seems a bit trivial, but how wireless phone subscribes think of their phones will become an increasingly material matter in…
This isn't officially confirmed, but Yahoo! is apparently close to finalizing a major deal that would pair its lagging HotJobs recruitment site with a consortium of "non-CareerBuilder" newspapers. The deal has been in the works since at least July. Apparently,…
In the online shopping space, the only differences between the players are on the surface, in their branding and marketing. Typically, shopping engines list retail feeds in search results on a pay-per-click basis, which means consumers find the same results…
