Here's a very interesting post, based on an eDiets' earnings call. Basically it says that prices are going up in the world of paid search/online advertising and that may drive the company to do more traditional media buying. For some…
Three technology firms serving different segments of the online directory and local search space have merged in the interest of broadening their collective base of customers and extending the range of services offered. Aptas, recognized for its work in extracting…
The new Google Maps mashups are coming now by the day . . . Here's PremierGuide's (local search platform provider) customer list plotted on a Google Map. Here's a site -- ApartmentRatings.com -- that has integrated Google Maps and apartment…
First there was Live 8 and now the Space Shuttle: "Nearly 433,000 people simultaneously watched NASA's webcast of this week's space shuttle launch."The significant difference between watching this type of event on conventional TV and online is that online you…
Britain€™s Office of Fair Trading issued a statement on April 5 that it would request that the nation€™s Competition Commission begin an investigation into the UK classified directories market. The OFT made the recommendation based on its conclusion that the…
The Kelsey Group's overly simplistic model of the electronic world looks like this. Content can be information, advertising, video, etc.; the delivery of that content might be cable, DSL or wireless; and the device which is used for access could…
The classifieds aggregator Oodle announced the integration of Google Maps into its housing category listings. Here are two bedroom Santa Cruz, CA vacation rentals, for example. One of the nice things you can do is drag the map and see…
Seattle-based Marchex, which is the parent of TrafficLeader, the SEM/SEO firm behind several YP (and newspaper) simplified search marketing programs, has announced the roughly $30 million acquisition of IndustryBrains, which operates a vertical/contextual ad network. At the end of April,…
The folks at PEW have come out with another report that has some generally intuitive but important information for those who are eager to see online trends slow or reverse (read: some in traditional media). Not going to happen. The…
I've believed for a while that My Yahoo! was a powerful model for personalization. To varying degrees the other major portals/search engines are now pursuing a similar strategy. Google recently added more feeds to its personalized home page. Here's MSN's…
Yahoo! is moving agressively beyond the browser and the desktop as part of an apparent strategy to be the most useful information and lifestyle management service around: "Yahoo! seeks to provide online products and services essential to users€™ lives, and…
In my ongoing fantasy of buying a new Mac, I periodically visit the Apple site. Today I was checking out the widgets page and saw that the Google Maps Widget was the top download. That says two things to me:…
In the first half of 2005, eBayers sold approximately US$10.6 billion worth of goods through the online auction service. Check out the eBay press release here. Some things to consider: - The average sales per eBayer (all 1.5 million) in…
The Swedish publisher Eniro AB has pledged to reduce the decline of its Swedish print business at a faster pace than earlier promised. The publisher saw its print directory revenues in its flagship Swedish market decline by almost 11 percent…
The would-be meta-social networking tool, GoingOn, was covered last week by a few folks (mostly the Mercury News and blogs). Advocates said nobody wants to fill out more profiles; skeptics questioned whether the existing social networks would want to play.…
As widely reported, Yahoo! bought desktop software maker Konfabulator (what a great company name!). Local search and local apps (weather, maps, etc.), among other things, can be taken beyond the browser onto the desktop. Nothing new there conceptually. But unlike…
MSN's Answer to Google and Yahoo!'s dynamic Web-based mapping tools, Virtual Earth, went live this morning. Needless to say it works better with IE than Firefox (the browser I typically use). It doesn't have the "wow factor" of Google Earth,…
I don't buy either of these two arguments. Marketing works and dollars spent are additive. In 1979, AT&T decided that long-distance advertising should no longer be handled by each of the 21 individual operating companies. In a wildly unpopular move…
According to a widely reported new survey by PEW, Americans don't know the technology terms "RSS," "Podcasting" and others. So what's the take-away? Use the technology; don't use the terms. Awhile ago, before the launch of Backfence, I spoke to…
Very briefly: Here are the NY Times' earnings release and Dow Jones/WSJ's. Online products (including the About and MarketWatch acquisitions) gave a boost to these newspaper titans, while the traditional pubs struggled. This is consistent with the bump that Scripps…
