With online search fragmentation and social media emergence driving prodigious growth forecasts for the reputation management sector (BIA/Kelsey projects $3.5 billion in ERPM revenues by 2014), agencies and publishers are both in the market for technology that adds this tool to their client offerings.…
Last week I spoke at the annual gathering of the International Classifieds Media Association (ICMA) in Vienna, Austria. My colleague Peter Krasilovsky and I have had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this function in past years. What I…
India’s auto classifieds marketplace is heating up, as the country’s burgeoning middle class becomes more auto dependent. In August 2009, MotorExchange acquired CarTradeIndia.com, apparently leading to investment in MotorExchange by Canaan Partners. Now, Axel Springer, the German media company, and…
Related to the previous post on battles waging over smartphone OS market share, coupon heavyweight Valpak announced it's joining the Windows Phone ecosystem with a dedicated native app. The free app, available now in the Windows Phone Marketplace, will offer…
American Express has recently been leveraging its powerful relationship with SMBs on the Web, including a tie to search engine marketing and lead generation via a deal between American Express Open and Clickable. Now Amex is going deep with social…
Since its origin as an exclusively online newspaper drawing together the work of dozens of community blogs and contributors, The Sacramento Press has since diversified well beyond its pure publisher roots, complementing its core with a local advertising network, a daily…
SB Nation (Sports Blog Nation) presents a fan-centric, highly verticalized (i.e., local) view of sports from dozens of bloggers. The site has completed a new $10.5 million "C" round of funding, pushing it past the $23.5 million mark. The new…
With the rise of consumer-facing real estate sites such as Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia, it seems only natural that Multiple Listing Services would break out from behind the Realtor and brokerage firewalls, and provide truly local, for-profit real estate sites,…
Ironically, on the same day Facebook sprung a major announcement -- the unveiling of Deals as a natural extension of Places -- that could have thunderous effects on popularizing social location tools, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released…
Today we ran a webinar that was part ILM conference preview, part data presentation and part analyst round table. We even had comScore's Gillian Heltai join the discussion. Among the items discussed were the changing ways people are consuming mobile content,…
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…
If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise ... and to understand the drivers behind each activity. "Bridging the online-offline gap" is…
If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise ... and to understand the drivers behind each activity. "Bridging the online-offline gap" is…
Back in April, I talked to 4Info CEO Zaw Thet about a number of mobile themes and the directions in which he's taking the company. One of those directions was diversification beyond its flagship SMS content and ad serving. 4Info…
Google announced today that it will add trackable numbers to AdWords campaigns. Known as AdWords Call Metrics, this will offer advertisers analytics on call activity such as total calls per campaign, origin, time of day and duration. The underlying technology…
The competition among white-label “deal a day” providers is increasingly intense. At the same time, local media companies are beginning to verticalize their deal a days to differentiate themselves. Case in point is The Washington Post, which has rolled out…
ZipLocal, the U.S. independent directory publisher, has launched a new "hyper local" leads-based advertising model called Local Leads that taps into a distribution network featuring 18 properties and 80 billion monthly impressions, according to ZipLocal execs who briefed us last week.…
Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head…
Millennial Media is out with its monthly SMART report for September. Along with the standard data points of its ad network activity (i.e., platform breakdowns), a few other angles are included. Specifically it reveals interesting nuggets about the types of…
CityVoter, the provider of a “best of” platform for broadcasters, is now in 25 cities, working with key TV station groups such as Belo, McGraw-Hill and Tribune. The five-year-old, 12-person service, which is backed by Allen & Co., has gone…
