In the past, we've talked about the effect smartphone use has on mobile local search adoption. Many third-party mobile local search applications such as Earthcomber only work on smartphones. Similarly, designing a robust and compelling enough mobile search platform is…
Following up on yesterday's mobile news roundup, we had the chance to catch up with AdStar CEO Leslie Bernhard and others during a call yesterday afternoon. The company earlier in the day had announced a partnership with Nokia to integrate…
Local is very, very hot right now. There are so many things going on, not only with Google and Yahoo!, but also with all the hundreds of companies feasting in their wake via direct and vertical and niche channels; in…
The newspaper consortium ("the amigos") that teamed up with Yahoo! for Hot Jobs is planning to invade used autos next, according to a post by newspaper insider Ken Doctor. If it pans out, such an alliance would probably signal that…
Local name sites, whether they are geo-domain (city name) sites or local verticals, have been the low-class players of Internet advertising. People stumble on them, they see ads and maybe click on them, and have no reason to ever come…
Tellme Networks hasn't exactly lived up to its 1999 vision of becoming the "Yahoo! of voice portals." Using the portal has been a clunky experience, and ad revenues have never really developed. But Tellme has stuck it out by providing…
The long-awaited launch of local business search functionality for Google Maps Australia happened earlier this week, as reported by The Australian. According to the article: "The latest competitor to the established players, to be known as Google Maps, will directly…
A few interesting pieces of news came out of the Yellow Pages world today: Telstra has bailed out of the bidding for Telecom New Zealand's Yellow Pages Group. This comes as no surprise, as intense bidding has pushed the…
FAST put on its own kind of MacWorld this week in San Diego, evangelizing the way to its "enterprise search" solutions for every kind of customer, including major local players such as MediaNews Group, The Washington Post, InfoSpace, Scandinavian publishing…
In a move that resembles MySpace's partnership with SimplyHired (to create MySpace Jobs), fast moving social network Facebook has partnered with career site Jobster. CareerBuilder and Monster were in the running for this deal, according to GigaOm, but Jobster won…
New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was quoted in Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying he wouldn't care if The Times ceased print publishing in five years. More specifically, when asked at the World Economic Forum whether he foresees The…
I'm a few days late to this, but FAST earlier in the week announced the launch of AdMomentum, a new contextual ad system meant to compete with Google's AdSense. AdMomentum will let Web site publishers sidestep Google and other online…
A handful of articles came out today that together triangulate some interesting points on the future of IPTV and local. The New York Times examines a few automated ad platforms and services that are following the trail blazed by Spot…
Idearc held its coming-out party today. President and CEO Kathy Harless sounded positively giddy: "This is an exciting day for us. We're off to a strong start as a publicly traded company. We have an established, value-generating portfolio, a resilient…
In the wake of the hard knocks reported by community journalism sites such as Backfence, and social review sites such as Judy's Book and Insider Pages, it seems to be a good time to reassess the category, starting with a…
AT&T's triple-play product bundle, U-verse, is currently available in 11 U.S. markets and is largely in testing phases. It has a long way to go before it can compete with cable offerings in many markets, but once it clears content…
The online video space continues to see a lot of action. This is not to be confused with the IPTV space, talked about in the previous post, which involves telco-delivered video service packages (akin to cable). Online video is rather…
There is no better guide to how to avoid the potholes in hyper-local than Judy's Book cofounder Andy Sack, who has been writing a series of "don't do this at home" posts about Judy's Book's failed efforts building an online…
Social media has been gaining steam over the past three years with advertisers large and small trying to find ways to harness and use popular social media sites to their advantage. Noticeably absent from the gathering has been the Yellow…
Krillion, a start-up with deep pockets from Hummer Winblad, launched the first iteration of its "localized search engine" today. The highly attractive, ad-supported service is kicking off with a dedicated appliance search. The next wave of localized searches will include…
