Now Intuit has gotten into the local search game, creating an InsiderPages/Judy's Book-like directory site. The site Zipingo has been live since August, but generally under the radar. Intuit is trying to leverage its huge QuickBooks' SME user base to…
Shawn Riegsecker, Centro CEO, took me aside today at our conference and helped clarify for me that Centro is not a network but rather a buying service for national advertisers that want to make local/geotargeted online ad buys. Centro will…
An interesting story just appeared on Bloomberg that reports Australian publisher Sensis, a unit of telecom Telstra, will be spared from a massive job-cutting program because it represents a critical component of Telstra's growth plans. Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo has…
Dex Media issued a press release today announcing it has achieved a comfortable lead as the most-used IYP/local search site within Dex's 14-state home region, with a 32 percent share of directional media searches for the period, according to comScore.…
My colleague Michael Boland blogged about Integrent's new geo-targeted network Centro, below. When I spoke, now some time ago, to Integrent CEO Shawn Riegsecker (who's on a newspaper panel at ILM:05) he told me he wanted to build a newspaper-based…
Suddenly everyone wants to offer offline retail information: Google, CNET and now Interchange Corp.'s Local.com. Interchange is providing ShopLocal€™s newspaper circular/FSI data to consumers through Local.com. Local.com is fast and clean, but thin. Interchange recognizes the need to fill out…
A new company called Centro launched today that purports to be a one-stop shop for national advertisers to buy ad space on local Web sites such as newspaper sites. It appears to be a local ad placement service for national…
Ingenio and Marchex, which is building out a proprietary network of local and vertical destination sites, announced that Ingenio PPCall advertisers would appear on Marchex's network of sites. Marchex subsidiary TrafficLeader is a "simplified search" vendor to YellowPages.com (SBC, BellSouth)…
comScore reported that, while Internet use grew 7 percent overall in 2004, online map site traffic increased 33 percent to 51.3 million. Mapquest held a 71 percent share of the market in September, according to comScore, while Yahoo! Maps followed…
Here's another movement in the transformation of TV (from reach to targeting) ... per the WSJ, TiVo is working with Comcast and others to enable users to "search" for ads that are more relevant to them: TiVo users will be…
While Craig Newmark would undoubtedly bristle at that characterization, the network of sites that bears his name is the undisputed king of online classifieds (not counting eBay). According to a report put out by Pew, using comScore data, traffic to…
This approach has some risks, but it is clearly a way for the sales force to gain advertising in a world where the consumer is way ahead of the SMB in adapting the concept of local search. Obviously the name…
The Canadian Finance Minster issued a ruling yesterday on the taxation of income trusts that has left Yellow Pages Group President and CEO Marc Tellier breathing a sigh of relief. The government decided to reduce the tax on dividend income,…
Local search is getting a lot better, but one of the things that most engines and sites cannot now do with accuracy is deliver results consistent with the way people actually search. For example, I live in an area of…
Everyone has been speculating about whether Google Base is Google's entry into online classifieds. I have argued that it's about much more than classifieds. But I can tell you with confidence that MSN is soon to enter the online classifieds…
Matching Yahoo!'s testing of PPCall, Google is testing "Click to Call." No phone numbers are exposed; the service connects advertisers and would-be buyers by clicking an icon. I was unable to find any of the ads live on Google, but…
Recognizing that video search is an increasingly important product feature, Ask has a deal with multi-media search engine (already in process) GoFish.
CNET News has this story about the advent of mobile visual search, a technology that lets consumers with camera phones use snapshots of products to receive various freebies as well as promotions and directional advertising. It is based on image…
I got a release of sorts from Google this a.m. explaining in more detail the offline/local product data that Froogle will be featuring online. As an example, here's "digital camera, San Francisco" -- just in time for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.…
Because I'm working too late: Russell Beattie's harsh AT&T (formerly SBC) logo analysis. AT&T Wireless was acquired by Cingular, which then rebranded the service and will now, ironically, lose its identity in favor of ... at&t. If it weren't true,…
