Last week the Albany, New York, Common Council passed a law that restricts the delivery of telephone directories to homes and businesses. Among the provisions of the ordinance is a requirement that any phone book delivered to a home must land within 10…
OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation service, has filed an S1 with the SEC to raise $40 million. The company, founded in 1998 by former Citysearch President Thomas Layton, was launched as Easyseats.com. It currently has contracts with 10,000 restaurants in all 50…
Gary Campbell is among the directory publishing executives with the most experience in building a performance-based ad model in the print product. He is now hoping to leverage that experience in a new venture called Cost Per Call Solutions. The…
(The View From the 46th Floor) The bad market for real estate has put a crimp in a lot of real estate marketing (except perhaps for foreclosure sites like Zetabids). The New York Times, on Sunday, found that many real…
I'm at Opus Research's one-day Internet2Go show in San Francisco where there have been lots of good case studies and concrete talk about mobile marketing. Lots of it is local, but there is a fair mix of agency and brand…
IAC’s ServiceMagic, a leader in delivering leads to services, has purchased Bethesda,MD- based Market Hardware, which provides websites and search engine optimization for 2,500 SMBs. Market Hardware, which has 30 people, targets “high online spend verticals” that closely mirror ServiceMagic’s…
The iPhone app store now has 15,000 apps available. So what’s No. 8 (among the free utilities)? RepairPal, an auto site that uses the GPS capabilities of the iPhone to deliver repair auto estimates, a comprehensive repair shop directory and…
Our Marketplaces 2009 conference in L.A. is just around the corner (March 16-18). Some great additions have just been announced: Active Network CEO Dave Alberga (our fourth keynote); Yahoo Local leader Atif Rafiq; and all the ins and outs of…
Video creation platform provider Mixpo today announced partnerships with five local media organizations: NBC Local Media, Tribune, Freedom Communications, TownNews.com and Fisher Communications. The deal will equip each new partner with Mixpo's VideoAd platform, which will let advertisers create and…
The Search Engine Strategies conference series has set up a YouTube channel filled with short interviews that are done before and after sessions. They're typically good snack-sized videos that can give you a general sense of some of the biggest…
AdReady, the Seattle-based media placement firm and builder of display ad templates for SMBs, has long been on our list of “most interesting” local services. And that was before it signed white-label deals with The New York Times, Boston Globe…
FixR, a seven-person Boston-area site that bills itself as an “eBay for local services,” has launched. Developed with private funds, the site provides free listings for services and free bids for consumers, but expects to charge a “success” fee when…
The name of the game in online video is integrating ads in ways that are unobtrusive and contextually relevant. These are simply rules we have to live by, as standards have been set for all online media -- even before…
The New York Times covers a new daily news provider called The Printed Blog that's building a new model based on what it hopes to be the best of online and offline distribution. As its name implies, this will involve…
In a significant move, AT&T Interactive and Idearc Media announced today that they will extend each other's reach by allowing business profiles on one site to be distributed on the other. Here is a quote from the press release: "Cross…
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg posts on the Official Google Blog today about a new partnership between the city and Google to launch a series of local search tools. This will include a City Guide site, NYCgo.com, with mapping…
Placeblogger, a 2007 recipient of $220k from the Knight News Challenge, has recently been revamped by its founders to encourage more personal interaction. Why? Location-based blogging without the context of a person is just kind of stale, says founder Lisa…
The movement to compel Yellow Pages publishers to make it easy for consumers to opt out of receiving telephone books and punish unwelcome distribution gained some momentum last week with legislation introduced in Minnesota and the city of Albany, New…
Google, as part of a series of cutbacks, is eliminating its Print Ads program, which had 800 newspapers and other print sources participating. The program, which began in November 2006 with 50 newspaper partners, stops selling new placement Feb. 28.…
EveryBlock, the six-person Adrian Holovaty “micro-local” project funded to the tune of $1.1 million by the Knight News Challenge, is preparing to go “for profit” when the two-year Knight grant ends in June. The Chicago-based site, always registered as a…
