The winners in online real estate will be those that partner with brokers and agents to be part of their businesses, said Jamie Glenn, Trulia VP of product development, during a real estate panel at DDL. Selling clicks and leads…
A leading auto vertical and Google sat on stage together this morning and provided some insight into how they might coexist. Cars.com President Mitch Golub made clear that sales and customer service will serve as an effective firewall that will…
Zillow.com's founder Rich Barton used the analogy of the explosion of verticals to the storming of the Bastille and the strong desire for consumers to take control of the decisions in their lives, especially those with big financial implications. The visionary…
MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper publisher with titles such as The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News, has teamed up with TauMed to launch a video-centric health vertical. The vertical launches this month at four of MNG’s…
Trulia, the real estate portal, has added a new “Street View” feature that enables home buyers to not only check out a house, but also navigate up and down the street and neighborhood. The feature was built on the API…
We thought there must be a reason why VoiceStar, Marchex's pay-per-call unit, had such a prominent presence at the North American Dealer Association show in February. Now we know: The company has just formed a reseller partnership with The Cobalt…
Zillow continues its march up the real estate value chain with a new feature that allows house buyers to apply for mortgages. The mortgage service, like everything else on Zillow, is ad-supported and free to both buyers and lenders. It…
Spas have always been a leading advertising category for city guides and other local sites. In many cases, they are virtually the only breakthrough for “services.” The rest may be dominated by restaurants and bars. But the spas themselves have…
If Facebook is really the next marketing platform, the guys at Loladex will have guessed right. The new rating and review company, formed by two alumni of AOL Search and Yellow Pages, had initially been incubated as a destination site…
More and more, people are looking at what Google can’t (or won’t) do. One thing Google isn’t doing is selling a lot of ads on a hyperlocal basis. If you look for a plumber in Tribeca, you are likely to…
Do you really need to have raised millions of dollars to succeed in selling search solutions to small businesses? It is a question that I often ask myself. Dan Hobin’s G5 Search Marketing in Bend, Ore., is profitable without having…
The CBS-TV owned and operated stations are making a pitch to local bloggers and hyperlocal sites to add value to their sites with various news headline and video widgets, and take a share of ad revenues. The CBS effort to…
The small-business advertising arms race has gotten hotter in recent weeks, as companies eye a chance to add Google and Yahoo! search solutions, and other services to small-business marketing budgets once totally contained by Yellow Pages. First we had ReachLocal’s…
Last week, we wrote about The Seattle Times Co. and its new “Network search,” which is powered with FAST. This week, we are covering The Boston Globe’s Boston.com and its new “Federated” search solution, powered by Google. Federated and Network…
The future of real estate agents is a special cause of mine, since my wife is with Century 21. So whenever I hear someone has bought or sold a house, I always ask them: “How was the agent experience? What…
It’s been a lot of fun putting this together -- a “who’s who” lineup for Kelsey's Drilling Down on Local: Marketplaces, which takes places April 30-May 2 in Seattle (a favorite city). This show, entirely inspired by the in-depth analysis…
One big takeaway from the NAA Marketing show last week in Orlando was that newspapers are ready to build up a zillion niche products that allow them to leverage their editorial talents. But not much progress, or even attention, is…
The smart “post Web” money is looking at health care (and green solutions), right? But based on Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare, a conference that took place March 2-4 in San Diego, the subject may no longer be search engines or…
Yelp! has announced that it got $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by DAG and existing investors. The company also sent some growth metrics: October '07 -- 5M Unique Visitors December '07 -- 6M UVs January '08…
I liked the 2003-2007 concept of a “local info hub.” The idea was to think beyond the original business boundaries of newspapers (and Yellow Pages). Now that concept has been fancifully enlarged to a “local info and connection utility." The…
