Trulia, which provides real estate Web and mobile leads, display advertising and real estate-oriented social media services, has followed in the footsteps of its rival, Zillow, and issued an S1 in preparation for going public and raising $75 Million. Zillow's…
A major feature of the current crop of loyalty and rewards programs is that they link to credit card or debit card accounts. This gives them the ability to process transactions and provide deeper analytics. But a number of players…
Google is adding Wildfire to its social-oriented suite of business services, paying "about $250 Million," according to a source cited by The Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco-based company provides social media analytics for 16,000 customers, ranging from large SMBs…
Facebook investor and press events have become spectacles unto themselves, where distilling signal from noise is a tricky task. But that's what we'll flesh out here in the aftermath of the company's first earnings call post-IPO...a call that featured an…
What happened to the theory that Facebook Credits would become a universal virtual currency, competing against the likes of PayPal and others? Facebook very quietly closed the program down a few weeks ago, reverting to a more standard model that…
Though BIA/Kelsey's LCM 15 survey suggests that SMBs are still sluggish to adopt mobile websites (fewer than 10 percent) or other forms of mobile marketing, we believe mobile momentum will finally accelerate as business owners' personal comfort with the device…
Two schools of thought have broken out about loyalty programs. The first is to build a collective currency for points or other loyalty incentives that can be used anywhere in the network. This is the approach taken by players such…
MerchantCircle.com released findings today from a survey that revealed 50 percent of small-business owners follow political candidates or related organizations on Facebook. Fourteen percent of respondents follow these groups on Twitter. The survey comprised more than 6,000 U.S. small-business owners.…
Vocus, a cloud marketing and public relations software provider, is focused on helping SMBs grow their online business with its new marketing dashboard. Business Development Manager Christine Mulquin shared with us that the company is targeting its marketing suite to…
Back in 2008, Trevor Nadeau went to the board of the company he was running, Yellow Medya, and told them that no one was buying the product they were selling, an online Yellow Pages directory. Nadeau had to come up…
Zillow's consumer-first approach, which took housing listings out of the hands of the brokerage by posting them on the Web, has since been applied in several local segments: mortgage, home and trade, insurance, recruitment, etc. Now along comes CarWoo, which…
Before there were Meetups, Great Courses, TakeLessons.com and online dating services, The Learning Annex held sway. Launched 30 years ago in New York City, The Learning Annex provided classes on everything under the sun, and a way to meet people.…
Constant Contact has made a really big bet on presence management with the acquisition today of SinglePlatform, a provider of a one-stop "write once, read everywhere" presence management network that provides parsed searching capabilities and services for 600,000 SMBs, including…
So where should a European local media company place its bets when looking across the spectrum of opportunities in social media, mobile and local online commerce? BIA/Kelsey announced today that it has joined forces with the European Association of Search…
Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee -- friend of Bono's, the lead in the failed resurrection of Palm and a winner in the Facebook IPO to the tune of $1.5 billion -- is known as a contrarian thinker. He did not disappoint…
Are deals still being driven by shares, posts, likes and other social media features in an era of Groupon and LivingSocial Super Bowl ads? Yes, definitely, according to Second Street Media, which held a webinar with The Washington Post last…
In the run-up to Facebook's ballyhooed IPO, BIA/Kelsey has released Wave III of its U.S. Social Media Advertising Forecast, which reveals overall market acceleration in 2012 and 2013, and steady growth in locally targeted social spend. From 2011 to 2016,…
With more than 1 million registered users and 87 million company profiles, Manta has established itself as a hub where small businesses can be found…and find each other. Now, having raised a fresh round of $44 million in funding from…
via CNN If anybody wonders whether the considerable “legs” of Facebook justify a valuation now set for $83 billion, have a listen to a terrific BIA/Kelsey webinar on Facebook’s IPO, featuring Trada CEO Niel Robertson Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom and…
NBC Universal announced the launch of the Universal Games Network (UGN), a new platform that integrates NBCU's gaming efforts across its television networks and online properties this week. UGN is a white-label solution that will aggregate NBCU's most popular online,…
