OpenTable, the secretive eight-year-old restaurant reservation service, was slow to take off, with some of its local media and directory affiliates reporting little traffic in its early days (and a competing service, Foodline, basically dropping off the map). But in…
WCAU-TV, NBC's owned and operated station in Philadelphia, is launching DigPhilly, a city site, reports today's Wall Street Journal. The site isn't yet up and running, but a teaser features buttons for "learn," "do," "share," "find" and "shop." The Journal…
This morning I attended an interesting session on advertising on social networks at SES New York. Much of the subject matter here has implicit ties to local, and some explicit. The conversation around social networking in this session was, correspondingly,…
The leading evangelists for online TV station advertising WorldNow, IBS, Broadcast Interactive Media, Media Span, the station groups themselves have their work cut out for them. Some TV stations are now registering in the mid-six figures for online sales,…
Saw an interesting announcement from Idearc Media that shows the publisher is trying to keep pace with the shifts occurring in consumer priorities. Idearc is introducing a Green Business Guide in its Madison, Wisconsin, book, which hits the streets in…
Apparently, those who were worried about AT&T Advertising & Publishing leaving its St. Louis headquarters digs can rest easy. This story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests the decision was big news in St. Louis, since it affected more than…
I had an interesting discussion this week with Amy Healy of the Yellow Pages Association. You may recall a few weeks back we blogged about a movement in Norway to give consumers the ability to opt out of print directory…
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with the leadership team at BuzzLogic, which has developed a platform for tracking buzz around any topic or company. The primary venue for this buzz is the blogosphere, where there has been a…
Google has officially launched its free 411 product. The number, 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), makes business name and category search accessible from any U.S. telephone. This is a product we originally uncovered in our report Wireless Voice Search: The Multi-Modal Revolution. At…
Google today launched MyMaps, something appropriately coined by Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land as "mashups for the masses." Google Maps, like most other mapping engines has long made its API available to third-party developers, best documented by the Google…
Today I had the chance to speak with Nagaraju Bandaru, Cofounder and CTO of "meta reviews" site BooRah. The site has developed some clever algorithms that scrape, aggregate, structure and serve up third-party reviews for local search. It currently focuses…
A lingering idea from Al Gore's Information Superhighway is using grant money to jumpstart online (and wireless) community services and involvement. One year, as a judge for the U.S. Department of Commerce, I even helped dole out some of the…
Last week, my colleague Peter Krasilovsky wrote a blog about 1-800-Free411 launching category search and took the opportunity to update how Jingle is doing. According to SVP Lyn Oakes, Jingle is receiving 16 million calls per month, with 60 percent…
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with Erron Silverstein, CEO of Solfo, the company behind recently launched (beta) local search site YellowBot. The site is built on many social features and will target the same young and tech-savvy demographic…
It seems to me that precious little has been written about the fact that, according to the March 19 issue of eMarketer, four national portals Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have seen their share of total Internet advertising…
Following closely behind the social media trend in local search, Microsoft Live Search Maps launched a feature that will allow users to read and contribute ratings and reviews of local businesses. This is part of a new feature set it…
I was recently stunned by a conversation with a group of newspaper execs mulling over which U.S. city would be the first to rely on an online-only newspaper. The switch might be faster in one of the handful of surviving…
Every once in a while, I’ll allow myself to post something on the lighter side. Just a warning that this is one of those posts only tangentially related to local search, but having a semantic coincidence that I couldn’t…
How is one to consider Sam Zell's "purchase" of the Tribune Co.? We can be fairly certain that Zell, a "grave dancer" investor who is putting in $315 million and relying on an ESOP for the rest, didn't win the…
After its founding in 2002, Topix was definitely an "A List" Silicon Valley company, leading the way for crawling news in a million interesting and valuable ways. Its founders were extremely dedicated and smart, and the company looked like it…
