A few weeks ago, my colleague Michael Taylor sent me a link to a webcast of a panel discussion from last year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. I finally got the chance to watch the session titled The Impact…
Canada's Yellow Pages Group announced today that it will launch enhanced business profiles on Yellowpages.ca this spring, offering video ads and photo galleries. This joins U.S. IYPs Yellowpages.com, Yellowbook, Superpages and a growing set of local search sites that will…
Local search and automated rating site Grayboxx announced a series of upgrades today, meant to enhance and expand the site as well as infuse some personal flavor (read: trust) to its core rating features. As we've written the company's "implicit…
Gannett has named PointRoll chief Chris Saridakis as its new senior vice president-chief digital officer, reporting to longtime vet Jack Williams, who has been named president of the division. PointRoll is a rich media ad agency that Gannett purchased in…
Linkedin has become a valuable resource for connecting business professionals. Recently Linkedin has added a professional services feature that allows members to share their business contacts in specific service categories. The new “Services” tab allows users to find people via…
All right, this isn't directly tied to local search, but it's really cool. This morning, at the Macworld expo, Steve Jobs introduced the newest addition to the Apple family, the MacBook Air. It's small enough to fit into an interoffice…
Small-town newspapers and radio stations sometimes get into businesses that media companies in larger markets rarely do. They publish directories, develop Web sites, provide Internet access -- you name it. Thousands of newspapers are still family-owned. Increasingly, though, more are controlled…
Pagesjaunes France has announced it will take a dramatic pricing approach in its largest urban markets where it will cut print costs by 20 percent while raising online costs on average by 50 percent. The goal of the pricing program…
The Kelsey Group has generated considerable attention (and some confusion) in the media and on the blogosphere from a statement that appeared in an Advisory issued by our Marketplaces program on Jan. 4 offering picks and predictions for 2008 (each…
This morning, I ran across this video on Yahoo! video, submitted by the Bakersfield Californian, which shows thousands of AT&T Yellow Pages books set up like dominoes then tipped off for an underwhelmed audience. I'm not sure exactly what the…
MySpace is moving beyond personal and band profiles, and in fact, already has 3 million businesses, according to coverage by PaidContent of comments by Fox President and COO Peter Chernin at a CitiGroup conference in Phoenix. Chernin said the business…
A year ago, my colleagues Neal Polachek and Charles Laughlin predicted that Internet Yellow Pages as a percentage of total U.S. Yellow Pages revenues would climb from about 6 percent in 2006 to 24 percent in 2011. While the base is higher in most…
Following up on the previous post, Zillow also announced today that it has gotten together with Yahoo! Real Estate, Trulia and a handful of others to establish a standard format for home listings. This is hoped to lower the barrier…
Zillow made a few announcements today including the fact that it has reached the start-up rite of passage (or sometimes-PR stunt) of coming out of beta. But more important than this symbolic move are the reasons behind it. The company…
Urban Mapping, a very interesting company working on making mapping data more accurate, has released its API. This will essentially allow any local search site to better index local listings and improve its search functionality. As we've mentioned in the…
FAST Search and Transfer, whose “enterprise search” makes every element of an organization searchable, is being sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion after the Oslo-based company severely missed sales goals and was forced last year to lay off a large…
One of the quietest but apparently most successful producers in the local search space has been GeoSign, owned by webpreneur Tim Nye. The Canadian company has incubated TrueLocal, which aggregates local online databases, and is also invested in mobile directory…
SEM reseller and campaign management firm ReachLocal today officially brought Google AdWords into its ad product toolbelt. This extends its offering to SMBs interested in search engine marketing or in cross-platform ad bundles. ReachLocal's online offerings to SMBs also include…
Kudzu, the service-oriented rating and review directory from Cox Search, has been under the radar for a while, while similar services (i.e., Judy’s Book, Insider Pages and Backfence) have run into some turbulence. But a recent visit with GM Tom…
The Mexican telecommunications giant Telmex plans to spin off its Yellow Pages and international operations into a new holding company called Telmex Internacional. "Telmex expects that the spin-off will become effective and further expects that the shares of Telmex Internacional will…
