Card Linked Offers (CLOs) represent a potentially rich opportunity for online and mobile promotions and loyalty. But a lot of work needs to be done before the segment gets seriously underway.

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the CardlinX Association April 7 in Las Vegas, Microsoft GM of Local Advertising Erik Jorgensen noted there are significant opportunities to connect the online world with the offline world, closing the loop for online advertising and loyalty.

There is “broad experimentation with integrated consumer and merchant experiences,” said Jorgensen. “The CPA based ad model highly reasonates with merchants.”

During the past 12 months, Microsoft has launched CLO betas of its Bing Offers in Seattle, Boston and Phoenix. The trials take off on Microsoft’s initial deals efforts, but don’t require pre-payment.

Most of Microsoft’s efforts in the space are focused on the Bing portals — both on the Web and on mobile. Card linked efforts are also included in Bing Local, Bing’s Listings Page and the Bing Search Engine Results Page.

There is also a strong “mobile first” component to the effort. Windows Phone, Skype and Windows 8 are all included in the efforts, which are seen as a marketplace differentiator. “There are five or six places on the phone where we surface offers,” said Jorgensen.

The company is also sending out targeted emails. “We are building up our muscles to understand how we target offers,” noted Jorgensen. “The next phase is not just a pull but a push” via intelligent notification.

This post is an excerpt from a full Briefing on The Cardlinx meeting, which is available to BIA/Kelsey clients.

The post Microsoft’s Jorgensen: “We Are Building Our Muscles’ in Card Linked Space appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Card Linked Offers (CLOs) represent a potentially rich opportunity for online and mobile promotions and loyalty. But a lot of work needs to be done before the segment gets seriously underway.

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the CardlinX Association April 7 in Las Vegas, Microsoft GM of Local Advertising Erik Jorgensen noted there are significant opportunities to connect the online world with the offline world, closing the loop for online advertising and loyalty.

There is “broad experimentation with integrated consumer and merchant experiences,” said Jorgensen. “The CPA based ad model highly reasonates with merchants.”

During the past 12 months, Microsoft has launched CLO betas of its Bing Offers in Seattle, Boston and Phoenix. The trials take off on Microsoft’s initial deals efforts, but don’t require pre-payment.

Most of Microsoft’s efforts in the space are focused on the Bing portals — both on the Web and on mobile. Card linked efforts are also included in Bing Local, Bing’s Listings Page and the Bing Search Engine Results Page.

There is also a strong “mobile first” component to the effort. Windows Phone, Skype and Windows 8 are all included in the efforts, which are seen as a marketplace differentiator. “There are five or six places on the phone where we surface offers,” said Jorgensen.

The company is also sending out targeted emails. “We are building up our muscles to understand how we target offers,” noted Jorgensen. “The next phase is not just a pull but a push” via intelligent notification.

This post is an excerpt from a full Briefing on The Cardlinx meeting, which is available to BIA/Kelsey clients.

The post Microsoft's Jorgensen: "We Are Building Our Muscles' in Card Linked Space appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

When a new leader is announced for the giant oceanliners in technology, we tend to sift through the tea leaves to see what kind of insights, perspective and focus they will bring via SMBs and local. Yahoo‘s Marissa Mayer, for instance, ran local for Google. AOL’s Tim Armstrong launched Patch as a private investment. Their predecessors did not have any background in local (and that was unfortunately reflected during their tenure.)

Microsoft‘s announcement that it would bring in Satya Nadella as CEO is a real milestone, as he handles the transition of the company from one that is primarily based on software to one that is cloud based and oriented towards mobile experiences.

Nadella has been a true believer in the importance of enabling SMBs with rich software from the start of his career. As Vice President, Microsoft bCentral Marketing & Business in 2001, we were pleased to have him as a keynote for our Directory Driven Commerce conference in Orlando. (Yes, our conferences tend to be a great scouting ground for industry leaders.)

Nadella’s job at that time was to integrate the company’s acquisition of Great Plains Software into a platform that would give SMBs the same level of services as Microsoft’s enterprise customers. For Microsoft, it proved to be a much smarter way to go than its earlier effort to go hyperlocal with Sidewalk, a consumer-facing hyperlocal portal.

At our DDC conference, Nadella emphatically stressed the importance of SMBs to the future of Microsoft. Now, as CEO, Nadella must treat SMBs as just one channel for the company’s growth. But one can expect Nadella to be as aware as anyone of the rich potential in this essential but underserved market.

New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

The post Satya Nadella: Our ‘SMB’ Ringer at Microsoft appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

When a new leader is announced for the giant oceanliners in technology, we tend to sift through the tea leaves to see what kind of insights, perspective and focus they will bring via SMBs and local. Yahoo‘s Marissa Mayer, for instance, ran local for Google. AOL’s Tim Armstrong launched Patch as a private investment. Their predecessors did not have any background in local (and that was unfortunately reflected during their tenure.)

Microsoft‘s announcement that it would bring in Satya Nadella as CEO is a real milestone, as he handles the transition of the company from one that is primarily based on software to one that is cloud based and oriented towards mobile experiences.

Nadella has been a true believer in the importance of enabling SMBs with rich software from the start of his career. As Vice President, Microsoft bCentral Marketing & Business in 2001, we were pleased to have him as a keynote for our Directory Driven Commerce conference in Orlando. (Yes, our conferences tend to be a great scouting ground for industry leaders.)

Nadella’s job at that time was to integrate the company’s acquisition of Great Plains Software into a platform that would give SMBs the same level of services as Microsoft’s enterprise customers. For Microsoft, it proved to be a much smarter way to go than its earlier effort to go hyperlocal with Sidewalk, a consumer-facing hyperlocal portal.

At our DDC conference, Nadella emphatically stressed the importance of SMBs to the future of Microsoft. Now, as CEO, Nadella must treat SMBs as just one channel for the company’s growth. But one can expect Nadella to be as aware as anyone of the rich potential in this essential but underserved market.

New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

The post Satya Nadella: Our 'SMB' Ringer at Microsoft appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Yelp reviews are susceptible to a lot of noise — relatives and friends of a business, mischief makers, people without any perspective (or taste). In fact, most review sites — Trip Advisor, Zagat, etc. — are affected by these factors.

Some sites have tried to get around this problem by using proxies for reviews. A few years ago, for instance, Grayboxx used “mentions” of a location as a proxy for reviews, assuming that the majority of mentions would be positive ones. That method, however, proved to be inaccurate and especially dicey in smaller markets. Other sites are experimenting with the use of check-ins and tweets as review/rating substitutes.

Now comes Bundle, a new service with seed funding from Citibank, Microsoft and Morningstar. Bundle, which is based in New York City, has built the algorithms to clean and sort “mentions” from 20 million-plus Citibank credit cards. While other services work with credit card companies for loyalty programs and recommendations, we haven’t seen companies that can actually apply algorithms to aggregated, anonymized credit card data.

Bundle scores are based on the popularity of a restaurant (i.e., number of visits); the number of repeat visits by customers to a restaurant; and the amount people are willing to pay when they eat at the restaurant. One assumes scoring can easily be applied to other categories as well.

CEO Jaidev Shergill tells us that the company started two-and-a-half years ago as a money management site that would analyze statements for better budgeting practices, etc. But the company changed its business model to “solve problems for people using our differentiated data asset.”

“Local search and discovery have become bigger and the importance of accurate, relevant reviews is increasingly important. However, there is no way to tell whether the review is relevant to you,” says Shergill. Credit card data, coupled with aggregated demographic and behavioral data, clears the hurdle.

The service launched last December in New York and San Francisco, and nationwide on Jan. 1. “We have 2 million merchants ‘rated,’ ” said Shergill. “That’s as many as Yelp. It will get richer as the months go by.” He also notes that unlike review sites, Bundle doesn’t need to go market by market for reviews.

Shergill acknowledges some limitations to Bundle’s methodology. If there is no data, there are no ratings. So that rules out cash-only places. The data also can’t distinguish how many diners are on the check, although individual prices can be estimated based on pattern analysis. But a quick look at my ZIP code (“92009”) showed fairly robust, accurate results.

Bundle CEO Jaidev Shergill is speaking at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston along with Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim and Cartera Senior VP Jim Douglass. Register here.

Bundle CEO and Founder Jaidev Shergill

The post Citibank/Microsoft-Backed Bundle ‘Rates’ Restaurants, Others Via Credit Card Data appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

“From where I sit, I am at the intersection of cool maps, our growing search share and local commerce,” said Sampson. “It is a great place to be at Microsoft.” What is quickly evolving are the troika of “context, time and location.” Each is enfranchised by the rising use of mobile devices, and “really change[s] the state of advertising,” he said.

Local is especially important, and 20 percent of all searches are now location-based — something that has been pushed up by the improving technology capabilities and open APIs for maps and other features. Windows phones, for instance, allow users to turn location on and off based on what time it is and where they are. Deals are being geoparsed as well.

The post DMS ’11: Microsoft, at the Intersection of Cool Maps, Search and Local Commerce appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Following on its announcement yesterday that it had acquired the U.S.-based e-commerce firm Znode, Yell Group has unveiled a new alliance with Microsoft to sell the software giant’s cloud-based services to its U.K. customers. The services Yell will offer will include Office 365, a cloud-based version of the popular suite of software programs.

The move appears to be part of Yell’s strategy to expand its product portfolio well beyond its branded print and online Yellow Pages products. Yell did see a modest boost in its stock price today following the announcement.

From today’s announcement:

According to a recent study by Booz & Company, the global digital services market for SMBs will be $235 billion in 2011 and is expected to grow by over 45% to $350 billion by 2015. Mike Pocock, Yell Group CEO, indicated that “small and medium sized businesses are looking for digital solutions to help them grow their businesses, transact with customers, and be more efficient. Our plans to form a global strategic alliance with Microsoft will help us launch our local, cloud-based marketplace, serving the growing needs of our customers by providing comprehensive digital advertising, productivity and business solutions at scale, bringing small and medium sized businesses ever closer to consumers and bringing reduced costs and competitive capabilities to SMBs that have, to date, only been available to larger enterprises.”

The post Yell Goes in Deep With Microsoft appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The 360-degree views of real estate listings were remarkable for their time, but are giving way to new technology that lets users look at many things at once, says Microsoft Live Labs Technical Fellow Gary Flake, who was speaking last week at Inman’s Real Estate Connect in San Francisco.

“We’re used to Web navigating from one image to another,” especially with video games, said Flake. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth technology lets users zoom in and out of backyards to bedrooms, etc. It is the same technology used by CNN for the Obama inauguration, he notes.

Indeed, Photo Synth, combined with Pivot, a program for collecting information, creates new experiences and allows you to embed them within your own Web site. “It will make you want to change the ways you take photos to take into how you stitch together hundreds of things,” said Flake.

The post Microsoft on Real Estate: 360-Degree Panorama Gives Way to ‘Photo Synth’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Microsoft’s struggles with mobile are no secret. Worldwide smartphone marketshare for its Windows Mobile OS is estimated to be about 2 percent (Admob, May 2010), and MSFT just discontinued the Kin phone, weeks after launch. It would be easy to think of the company as a smartphone also-ran in a world dominated by Apple, RIM and Google.

That may change in 2010. Microsoft has very uncharacteristically scrapped its entire Windows Mobile operating system and is relaunching with Windows Phone 7. Get used to that term, because as we get toward launch in early Q4, you’ll be hearing it everywhere.

Read the rest of this post.

The post Is the Windows Mobile 7 Hype for Real? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Some speculation (and new details) about Apple’s pending and well-expected reboot of Apple TV found its way last week into The New York Times just before the holiday break. My guess is that the new and obvious name will be iTV and the functionality will mimic other Apple devices running its OS — iPod Touch, iPhone, iBook and iPad.

The time is certainly right for someone to make sense of the TV, which is perhaps the most important information and entertainment device. Just imagine if the next version of Apple TV (a.k.a. the first version of iTV) offered the consumer a user interface as simple and elegant as the iPhone. The iPhone would function as the remote, and we’d do away with the current morass of clickers and remotes that dot the living room landscape.

Of course, Google is not going to sit idle and watch this happen. It is pushing its own Android-like model to counter the much anticipated reboot of Apple TV working with Sony and Intel — two of the most important names in consumer electronics.

And then there’s Microsoft. It would probably like to forget its 1997 acquisition of WebTV for several hundred million dollars. That was 13 years ago — and to date consumers have seen little evidence of the potential of IPTV. Rather, most of us just sit and hope and pray that someone will come along and make the process of watching TV as intuitive and pleasurable as it is to buy and listen to music on iTunes.

The post Apple Zeroes In on iTV appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.