Not long after completing its acquisition of Phone Directories' Canadian operations, U.S. buyout firm Hicks Muse is pushing an aggressive expansion into bigger Canadian markets. Next week, Canadian Phone Directories, the Hicks-backed company led by industry veteran Olivier Vincent, will…
In the current issue of Local Media Journal, we break down the Q4 earnings announcements of major U.S. newspaper publishers. You probably know the story; circulation and revenues are in decline, while online assets continue to show growth. To add…
News Corp. announced fourth-quarter earnings yesterday. During the earnings call Rupert Murdoch stressed the value of its Internet properties, which has yet to be shown in reported financials. To read into this, the value of MySpace's 50 million dedicated users…
This USA Today article by Jefferson Graham pushes the privacy angle: "will/should consumers be fearful of the privacy issues" associated with the new "search across computers" feature of Google Desktop?I spoke to Graham about this late yesterday and told him…
Yell Group just posted solid numbers for the first nine months of its financial year, which ends on March 31. Its U.S. unit, Yellow Book, continues to post double digit gains, even when acquisitions are taken out of the picture.…
eBay-owned Skype today launched "SkypeWeb": Skype, the global Internet communications company, today announced SkypeWeb, a Web presence feature that is already integrated into more than 50 Web sites in 20 countries around the world. SkypeWeb allows people to see Skype…
I was invited by SimplyHired's Dave McClure to moderate the SDForum's Search SIG event last night on classifieds and search. Panelists were: Bindu Reddy, Product Manager Google Base, GoogleCraig Donato, Founder/CEO, OodleKeith Teare, Founder/CEO, EdgeioThe discussion was very candid and…
Google launched an upgrade to desktop search/Sidebar. There were a number of feature enhancements (remote PC/file access, "undocking" of plugp-ins and sharing functionality). That's a very "quick and dirty" summary. The most interesting feature of the new enhancements from my…
Thanks again to John Battelle for pointing out that Google has gone "public" with its program to allow advertisers to buy access (via auction) to print advertising in some very high-profile magazines: As you may know, as part of Google's…
Yellow Book announced today that it has acquired Click Forward, a Coral Gables, Florida-based search engine marketing company. Terms were not disclosed. Yellow Book plans to use the assets gained through the acquisition to develop a local search product to…
I had heard a rumor earlier in the week that Yellow Book was buying Click Forward. Before I saw the release Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal confirmed it.Click Forward was started by alumni of WebVisible, formerly SME Global Solutions.…
According to a piece in MediaPost (reg. req'd), PPCall provider Jambo has announced that it will enable PPCall for LA Weekly:The first slate of ads will be in the Feb. 9 issue, and will focus on Valentine's Day services, including…
The DEMO conference, which has been described as a dating service for funders and start-ups, is under way in Phoenix. There's nothing inherently local about the show, but some companies that may in one way or another have an impact…
Also in the "real estate file" is a new partnership between Spot Runner and Cendant Corp. Cendant is the parent of many familiar travel and real estate brands. For example, Cendant is the world's largest franchisor of real estate brokerage…
Seattle-based Zillow, which apparently stands for "zillions of pillows" (or that's the genesis of the name/URL), launched today. The site is a very polished and sophisticated new entrant in the increasingly competitive online real estate market. Its primary — and…
A9's CEO (and last year's Drilling Down keynoter), Udi Manber, who famously told me "local search is not a solved problem," is apparently leaving for Google, according to John Battelle. This is obviously a blow to A9 and raises a…
A new forecast adds further fuel to the local shopping fire (sorry). According to this article, Jupiter says: The amount of money consumers spend online is expected to increase 75 percent by 2010, with the Internet influencing nearly half of…
Advertising in video games has been on our long-term radar screen. It will take a while before it has relevance to local, but it's an interesting area where a lot of development is happening, and where an ad revenue stream…
Here's a long eWeek piece raising the question, "When o when will users take to the mobile Web in earnest?" Indeed, until they do there can be no effective mass mobile marketing. My belief is that the user experiences that…
As user reviews and other forms of user-generated content become a bigger phenomenon online so does the prospect of what might be called "review fraud." Word of Mouth guru Pete Blackshaw of the newly formed Nielsen BuzzMetrics points me to…