IAC announced today that SeamlessWeb founder Jason Finger will take over as CEO of its CityGrid Media unit April 12. CityGrid Media includes the CityGrid ad network and Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Insider Pages and BuzzLabs.

Finger was a founder of SeamlessWeb in 1999. The company grew to 21 U.S. cities plus London during his tenure. SeamlessWeb, now known as Seamless, was acquired by food services giant Aramark in 2006, with Finger leading the business while serving on Aramark’s executive leadership council.

He’s served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bessemer Venture Partners since 2010, focusing on SaaS, local businesses and e-commerce. Seamless currently competes for food delivery and restaurant online services with GrubHub and others.

CityGrid Media’s longtime CEO, Jay Herratti, told us he will be helping during the transition. During his eight-year tenure at the company, he proved to be a pivotal figure in the evolution of interactive local media. In addition to acquiring Urbanspoon, which should leverage Finger’s experience at Seamless, Herratti dealt head-on with building enough local user volume to attract merchants — a serious issue in the fragmented local world.

Next week, at ILM East in Boston, Herratti will provide insights into the evolution of local during his tenure at CityGrid. “Wrapping up my time at CityGrid Media with a BIA/Kelsey keynote seems like the perfect opportunity to reflect on the future of local,” he told us.

“During my session, I will share my thoughts on where local is heading,” added Herratti. “There is so much activity in our space right now; the next year should be just as interesting as the last.”

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Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, Google Maps and Zagat ratings and reviews.

Previously announced ILM East keynoters include Groupon Vice Chair +++ Ted Leonsis; American Express SVP of Social Media Leslie Berland; CityGrid Media CEO Jay Herratti; New York Times Research Ops VP Michael Zimbalist; and New York Magazine Digital GM Michael Silberman.

Mangtani joins Google Channel Sales BizDev Head Christine Merritt at ILM East. Merritt will provide Google’s perspective on its emergence in the local ecosystem, and the most effective way to work with Google as a partner.

The next wave of Deals is, in general, a key focus for us at ILM East, along with mobile local media, social local media, video local media, hyperlocal and locally targeted national advertising.

In addition to the keynotes from Google Offers and Groupon, we have a special Day 1 session dedicated to the next wave of deals, featuring EverSave’s Jere Doyle; Find n Save’s Christopher Tippie; Closely’s Perry Evans; and Boomtime’s Bill Bice. That session will be followed by a broader view of deals and ecommerce, which featured NextJump’s Charlie Kim; Cartera’s Jim Douglass; and Bundle.com’s Jaidev Shergill.

Other recent adds to the program include The Boston Globe’s Lisa DeSisto, who joins Boston.com VP of Digital Products Jeff Moriarty as a presenter; and MIT Sloan Associate Professor Catherine Tucker, who gives the low down on the effectiveness of local social media.

Before the show, we’re making a special trip to The Boston Globe’s R&D Lab (Limited Space, RSVP required). Or come to Andrew Shotland’s SEO for the Enterprise session, which also features SEO Expert Will Scott and Advance Digital Media VP John Denny. We’re looking forward to a great show.

Venture Capital
•David Hornik, Principal, August Capital
•Scott Maxwell, Senior Managing Director, OpenView

Mobile Local Media
• Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
• Doug McDonald, Director, dotMobi
• John Valentine, VP, East Coast, SCVNGR/LevelUp

Hyperlocal
• Merrill Brown, Principal, MMB Media
• Josh Fenton, CEO, GoLocal24
• Zohar Yardeni, CEO, Main Street Connect

Social Local Media
• Geoff Cramer, CEO, Social Made Simple
• Adam Japko, President, Digital Sherpa
• Jeff Moriarty, VP, Digital Products, Boston.com
• Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact

Video
• Juan Delgado, Managing Director, Americas, Perform
• John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
• Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications

Deals and Promotional Ecosystem
• Bill Bice, CEO, BoomTime
• Jere Doyle, President and CEO, EverSave
• Perry Evans, CEO, Closely
• Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave

Transactions
• Charlie Kim, CEO, NextJump
• Jim Douglass, EVP, Retail Advertising, Cartera Commerce
• Jaidev Shergill, CEO, Bundle

National/Brands
•Adam Epstein, President, AdMarketplace
•Pete Gombert,CEO, Balihoo
• Steve Sherfy, Local & Mobile Search, GroupMSearch
• Karl Siebrecht, President and CEO, AdReady

Elections 2012
• Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360

SMB Marketing
• Dave Galvan, President, Schedulicity
• Maria Kermath, Director, AT&T Ad Solutions
• Randy Parker, President, SMBApps
• Darren Waddell, EVP, Reply.com

Sign up now (and hint: reserve your room earlier rather than later).

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Yelp is IPOing today at $15 a share, allowing it to raise $123 million on a valuation of $900 million — $400 million more than it was apparently offered by Google a couple of years ago.

We know from the S-1 that Yelp earned $58.4 million in net revenues in the first nine months of 2011, representing 80 percent growth over the first nine months of 2010. It also has 22 million reviews, and sees 61 million monthly users.

During the first nine months of 2011, the company claimed 19,000 paid accounts — up 75 percent from the same period in 2010, And 529,000 claimed pages — up 114 percent. Its ability to convert claimed pages into paid accounts is going to be where the action is.

It must also continue to penetrate deeper into restaurants, amid tough competition from Google/Zagat and others. At the same time, it must continue to expand beyond restaurants deeper into shopping and services.

Restaurants and dining now make up 23 percent. Other major segments include shopping (23 percent), home and local services (10 percent), beauty and fitness (9 percent), arts and entertainment (8 percent), health (5 percent), night life (4 percent), and travel and hotel (4 percent). It also has a broad demographic, with 42 percent between the ages of 18 and 34, and 33 percent between the ages of 35 and 49.

The post Milestone: Yelp’s IPO Is Today appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and Michael Silberman.

Other highlights of the two-day event includes a preconference rundown on local search run by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide; a full plate of top BIA/Kelsey research and forecasts; a special venture capital panel; and innovator panels on social, mobile, deals, video and hyperlocal (the latter co-moderated by Merrill Brown).

KEYNOTES/KEYNOTE DISCUSSIONS
� Ted Leonsis: Owner, Monumental Sports (Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards); Vice Chair of Groupon; board member of AmEx, former vice chair of AOL; author, “The Business of Happiness”
� Jason Calacanis: CEO, Mahalo; investor. Calacanis’ career has been at the cutting edge of local and social media and reflects all the big trends, from his development of The Silicon Alley Reporter to Weblogs (AOL), Mahalo and the creation of TechCrunch50 and Launch.
� Leslie Berland, vice president, social strategy, American Express. Berland’s a major deal maker deeply involved in AmEx’ss mega Foursquare and Facebook deals.
� Jay Herratti, CEO, CityGrid Media. Herratti always gets top rankings at our events. He runs IAC’s super quad of the CityGrid Media Network, Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Insider Pages.
� Michael Zimbalist, VP, research operations, New York Times Co. Zimbalist leads the NYT’s 12 person-research unit. He’s deeply immersed in cutting-edge social, mobile, tablet and video efforts.
� Michael Silberman, GM, New York Magazine Silberman is the mastermind of NYMag’s development of a super set of verticals catering to the “New York state of mind.”

FEATURED SPEAKERS
� Bill Bice, CEO, SpaBoom
� Merrill Brown, Cofounder, MSNBC.com, Court TV
� Jim Douglass, EVP, Cartera Commerce
� Jere Doyle, CEO, EverSave
� Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
� Adam Japko, CEO, Digital Sherpa
� Maria Kermath, Director, New Tech & Sales Apps, AT&T Advertising Sales
� Mark Josephson, SVP, AOL Local
� Charlie Kim, CEO, Next Jump
� John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
� Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications
� Randy Parker, President, SMB Apps
� Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact
� Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360
� Andrew Shotland, Publisher, Local SEO Guide
� Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave
� Darren Waddell, EVP, Product and Corporate Marketing, Reply.com

Join hundreds of senior level local executives at ILM East for the local community’s best networking and insights. You can register here for earlier bird rates.

Internet Pioneer Ted Leonsis

The post The Super Lineup at ILM East March 26-28 (Boston) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

CBS plans to build deeper local online content by commissioning specific local topics for articles from thousands of writers at Examiner.com. Both parties were mum about whether revenue sharing is involved but did note that writers will receive a payment plan different from the one they get on Examiner.com.

Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital, which is Examiner’s parent company, told BIA/Kelsey the economics of the deal will make it profitable for both companies. Examiner has been approached by many media companies to lend its editorial resources. While such loaners of editorial resources aren’t likely to become a dominant revenue stream, “you may see us do a few more of these,” he says. CBS, for its part, is free to also work with other content aggregators and developers.

CBS brings to the table a network of 15+ city sites, such as CBS Denver, CBS Los Angeles, etc. Some sites have had customized Examiner.com content since Dec. 5. “It is a great showcase, and brings great reach for content. It also provides strong credibility via the CBS brand,” says Brody.

While Examiner’s content for CBS will have some branding elements on it, the intent is not to bring people to Examiner.com, Brody emphasizes. It is CBS’ audience. CBS Local Media President Ezra Kucharz adds that the deal with Examiner is “a great way to augment our great content in local markets.”

The post CBS Goes Deeper With Local Content Via Examiner.com Deal appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Some cities have unique professional communities that make them a company town with its own media. Washington D.C., of course, is a government town, well served by Bonneville’s WFED-AM. Similarly Huntsville, Alabama, is a space town; Los Angeles is a movie town; New York is a finance town. Each has its own media.

The medical community, of course, has lots of company towns that are centers of research, investment and specialization. Tapping into that is MedCity Media, which is headquartered in Cleveland (i.e., The Cleveland Clinic).

Among its products are MedCityNews, a local, business-oriented medical news/citizens journalism feed that is available for syndication by local media, and MedCity Life, a local city guide that “targets business travelers, the local medical industry and anyone who wants to be around the medical industry, including potential employees and future medical students.”

The company has set up local sites in a number of medical hubs, including Cleveland, Research Triangle Park, the Twin Cities, Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Madison and Pittsburgh. It is being advised by interactive news pioneer Merrill Brown, among others.

Local medical news is correctly driven by the medical business — there isn’t much that is local about local medical health beyond allergies. But the city guide especially intrigues us. Each city guide has an editor who researches the local venues, events and culture. MedCity Life’s basic concept is that “stakeholders know the business reputation of our medical cities, (but) they are less informed on the work-play-life aspects of these markets.

“They don’t know which bars and events naturally attract their peers,” notes the collateral. “That’s why Akron’s Doc’s Who Rock event is in there; and why we mention one of Minnesota’s main med-tech eateries, The Good Day Cafe; and why we pay tribute to Leonard Medical School in Raleigh, the first black medical school in the Deep South.”

The post MedCity Goes After Medical Hubs; Focus on News, City Guide appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Groupon gets much of the credit for “making coupons cool again.” But it’s the smartphone, with its inherent social, geo and touch capabilities, that may make them cooler than ever. By “cooler,” we mean discoverable and relevant.

The St. Petersburg Times believes there is no better way to unlock the city than through the mobile device. As a result, it has jumped into the space with “Things-To-Do,” an iPhone coupon application built around a deep database of local shops, venues and events.

Digital Sales Manager Maryann Balbo presented the app at NAA mediaXchange and underscored that ad-as-content is a difference-maker in enabling effective, pure-play advertising platforms to layer on top. For St. Pete, the database “populated with local content” provides the foundation on which the app operates.

From there, users can search by neighborhood, ZIP code or through a “near me” button that leverages the phone’s GPS. They can subsequently earmark favorites to create personalized lists and can click-to-call for reservations.

The most compelling value is found in user opt-ins that trigger push coupon notifications for timely, geotargeted deals. Once a user chooses a local outlet as a favorite, permission is granted for the business to send marketing offers. These can be leveraged by the merchant to promote a special, deplete an item or motivate other desired consumer actions.

For these businesses, the double hook is a low price point coupled with a simple interface. The Times uses a fixed-price model without bidding or keywords. The platform is self serve, allowing merchants to “send out their own messages in real time from any device.”

Balbo has already seen rapid acceptance of the app, with 18,000 downloads in the first 60 days. She points to marketing. The news organization is utilizing all of its products and outlets to promote “Things-To-Do,” including point-of-purchase materials, window decals, bill stuffers and event marketing. Businesses reap the benefits of this holistic approach, which not only prompts downloads, but motivates users to use the “favorite” functionality to truly make the app their own.

The post NAA mediaXchange: Local Shopping Apps, Part II — Mobile Couponing Moves Forward appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Citysearch is getting into the deals space, offering a mix of curated daily deals, coupons and other offers from providers such as Groupon, The Dealmap, Restaurant.com as well as from its own base of thousands of advertisers. CityGrid advertisers may also participate.

The service, similar to The Dealmap and 8coupons, is mobile-oriented. It is launching with iPhone and Android versions. It will also be available on the Web, leveraging Citysearch’s 15 million monthly unique visitors.

“Deals by Citysearch” de-emphasizes the Citysearch brand, which is in small type. The idea is to avoid confusion with the core brand and its city guide and review offerings, says JP Bedoya, senior director, product, Citysearch. He notes that the service has been in development for several months and is built on top of the CityGrid API, which is soon receiving a major upgrade.

Users can personalize the menu for up to 15 favorite categories, and also set deals by proximity. Deals can be printed from the website, shown to merchants on phones, or printed out from iPhones using AirPrint — something that Bedoya says is much improved in its upcoming release.

Deals and offers from other providers are initially emphasized, with Citysearch receiving a piece of a piece of any action. But Bedoya anticipates that Citysearch will do very well when it begins to add offers to its ad offerings. Homegrown advertisers can simply add the deals and offers to other advertising that they typically buy from the company on a flat fee, cost-per-click basis. “We are making it very simple, “ says Bedoya. He emphasizes that the company is putting deal quality above immediate revenue concerns.

CItysearch’s JP Bedoya is being featured on the SuperForum on Deals and Offers at ILM East, which takes place in Boston March 21-23.

The post ‘Deals by Citysearch’ Launches appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Local.com has dramatically upgraded its destination site, with soft colors, an excellent user interface and renewed focus on three core categories — “business,” “coupons” and “events.” The categories are clearly aimed at driving organic traffic from its intended audience of women and mothers.

The site is geotargeted to automatically provide local listings and features. Listings can also be easily featured on users’ Facebook pages. Business Listings, meanwhile, include dropdown subcategories on top of core sections (restaurants, health & wellness, home services, pro services, activities, pets).

“It is a 180-degree turn around” from the prior site, says CEO Heath Clarke. He noted that the effort was very resource intensive in terms of people and money.

The destination site accounts for half of Local.com’s revenues. It is strategic to the company for a number of reasons. The new version is intended to bring in more advertising based on its “abundant fresh content to enrich your life” commissioned via Octane Expert, a division within Octane 360, Local.com’s recently acquired SMB services company.

Octane, setting off on a similar path as Demand Media and MerchantCircle Content Studios, can develop articles (i.e., “How to Prepare Italian Food”) for $8 to $15, and sell an array of advertising related to it.

Local.com’s new coupons section comes from The Dealmap on the local level, as well as (largely) retail ads from ShopLocal and national ads from Savings.com and Coupons.com. Events come from a partnership with Eventful.

The post Local.com Overhauls Web Site; Targets Women appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In a discussion with paidContent, Patch President Warren Webster discussed Patch’s check list of 59 variables that the site uses to determine which new towns it enters, including a first cut that consists of town population between 15,000 and 75,000; having better than average school scores; and better than average household incomes and voting penetration. A second cut includes qualitative characteristics such as civic “walkability” and the presence of an active business community.

While the site hasn’t focused on revenues to date, Webster told paidContent that it has had some experimental advertising, including banners ads and business listings that can be upgraded into advertising. It also has had some geotargeted national advertising for campaigns such as Pepsi Refresh. The site also plans to syndicate the data it is collecting on local communities to marketers.

There has, of course, been a blind assumption that if AOL is investing, then hyperlocal is finally ready for prime time. It is too early to come to that conclusion — witness The New York Times’ pullback a few weeks back from The Local, its aborted hyperlocal effort.

But AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s consistent and vocal support for Patch, which he founded in 2007 as a side project when he was at Google, is definitely seen as validation for multimillion-dollar investments by others. These include other news-centric town site nets such as Main Street Connect; content creator sites such as Examiner.com; and city sites that break out neighborhood info via ZIP codes such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in Washington, D.C., Citysquares and various newspaper efforts.

Hyperlocal commerce sites such as MerchantCircle, DataSphere, Matchbin and ShopCity should also be seen as part of the mix. So should sites that have hired human writers to supplement local news feeds, such as HelloMetro and Yahoo Local. Event sites such as Zvents and Eventful are also part of the mix, as are sites that have a lot of events and local in them, such as Center’d and AmericanTowns.

City guides that are more metro-oriented, such as Citysearch and Yelp, should also be part of the mix, as should social directory sites such as YP.com, Local.com and MojoPages.

So, what’s the prognosis? We certainly like what we see at Patch. The town sites are attractive; they invite interaction and have a good “human” feel — some more than others, often based on how long the town site has been open. The longer, the better.

The aggregation of events is good and so is their mapping. There is also some intriguing video that draws people in. I especially enjoyed the contentious town meeting in my hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. A lot of the infrastructure is more economically produced by central resources.

But in truth, Patch’s success or failure won’t ride so much on content and feature differentiation. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. But it represents the scope of the project, not the individual sites. You wouldn’t go to a Patch community such as Westport, Connecticut, and say it stands head and shoulders above other local alternatives, such as Hearst’s Westport News, Main Street Connect’s The Daily Westport or Westport Now. Patch’s young and enthusiastic reporters are sometimes better (or not better) than their young and enthusiastic reporters.

What Patch’s ultimate success really rides on is changing local user behavior so that people feel compelled to check out the local patch at least a couple of times a week. It has to be a bigger swath than the older home owners who make up the primary audience of community weeklies — it’s got to be everybody. And then they’ve got to sell SMBs from the directory level on up — much of the effort probably riding on self-serve. And then they’ve got to get the geotargeted national advertising going.

Patch hopes to get over the hump by having enough of a footprint in its communities to begin marketing in a major way, perhaps, I speculate, on TV and radio and online. For sure, it is an exciting effort, and no one should dismiss it out of hand. In fact, AOL is spending the money and making the effort that could, in theory, save local journalism and hyperlocal commerce for everyone.

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