Thanks to Marty Himmelstein for alerting me about Ning, a social-media tool that covers a bunch of topics but has a local content area. Here's a fairly extensive discussion from SiliconBeat. It's time to throw away skepticism about user-generated content…
Yahoo! announced that it had acquired upcoming.org (a Flickr-like events calendar that is user-driven). This is going to bolster Yahoo!'s already very strong Local product by adding more user-generated content in the events area. The events RSS feed in Yahoo!…
WhitePages.com announced a deal with SuperPages.com to feature WhitePages.com's residential listings on its site. WhitePages.com already has similar deals with MSN, SMARTPages (SBC) and RealPages.com (BellSouth). The latter two will merge in the next several months into the single YellowPages.com…
This just in, R.H. Donnelley has acquired Dex Media for equity of $4.2 billion and debt assumption of $5.3 billion, for a total value of $9.5 billion, a multiple of roughly 10 times Dex's 2004 EBITDA. Current RHD CEO Dave…
As indicated by my colleague, Charles Laughlin, R.H. Donnelley (RHD) announced that it will acquire Dex Media for approximately $9 billion in debt assumption and equity. See the release below and Charles' post for more details. RHD has a substantial…
First the rumor, then the Wi-Fi VPN, now confirmation of a bid to provide free Wi-Fi across the city of San Francisco (per Reuters): "Google has submitted a proposal to offer free, wireless Internet access (Wi-Fi) to the entire city…
We just completed DDC2005 in Denver, and while I may be a little close to the subject, I feel it was one of the better DDC events in recent memory. I don't credit TKG for this as much as the…
Silicon Beat points to a site that exactly duplicates Craigslist's look and feel and listings presentation (it actually uses Craigslist's listings). If you can't think of a better model, why not just steal one? This speaks to the power that…
According to Technorati (per the BBC), "the number of blogs is doubling every five months." I met last week with the folks (Stu MacFarlane and Andrew Shotland) at Insider Pages who told me that it took the company less than…
In a provocative article in today's iMedia Connection newsletter Carat's Ron Belanger (with whom I shared a long table at the iMedia Summit in January) suggests that some paid-search networks adopt a cost-per-acquistion/cost-per-action model to combat click fraud. Regardless of…
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a digital library effort that seems to have been set up to rival Google Print. According to the site: The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology,…
The extension of Yahoo!'s content network, combined with Ask's new direct pay-per-click service (and the ramping of pay-per-call) reflects the emergence of multiple online advertising silos. (Let's not forget MSN.) The whole online advertising proposition is becoming more complex, even…
After writing about GoogleNet and San Francisco, I wanted to chime in on this story of the $100 laptop (the other side of the equation). The story has received a ton of coverage. But if this can be brought to…
There are lots of broadband data -- seemingly contradictory -- now running around in the market. Pew says: Growth has slowed and will be flat. Nielsen says it's up and continuing to grow: "Two out of every five Americans has…
The Swedish publisher Eniro AB is buying its Norwegian rival Findexa A/S for a combination of cash and new shares worth roughly 7.9 billion Swedish kroner (about US$1.01 billion). The deal will further strengthen Eniro's position in the Nordic market,…
The DEMO conference is happening in SoCal this week (not there, trying to get some writing done) and there are some interesting developments that concern local: Local Matters announced its next-generation local search platform. I saw a very early version…
There are lots of things happening and announcements in the local space. However, I'm in the thick of conference schmoozing so I'm just stealing a few moments to mention something that Peter Zollman reported to me about Google launching classifieds…
It was a very interesting day yesterday at DDC2005, which saw keynote speeches from Dex Media's George Burnett and YellowBook's Joe Walsh (both of which seemed to elicit strong reactions) and videotaped interviews of SME advertiser interviews about their advertising…
Almost everyone from The Kelsey Group is in Denver for most of this week for our annual directories/Yellow Pages conference, DDC2005. I'm still working furiously to get some things accomplished before I join them tomorrow. So, for now, here are…
Google wi-fi broadband network? -- Om Malik hypothesizes. This would be potentially very appealing for both for consumers and advertisers (creates more reliable geotargeting). "Appealing?" Perhaps that's too tepid -- more like boom chaka laka!If it was free (Google might…
