Local food festivals (“Taste of Seattle,” “Taste of Hillcrest,” et al) are a great way to taste samples from many restaurants at one time. Usually, they require a single ticket, with proceeds often going to charity. A more recent phenomenon…
A new consortium of mobile carriers has announced it will launch a mobile payments platform known as ISIS. With the tagline "Wallet ... meet Phone," it plans to launch in the next 18 months (really?). The press release and Web…
A few weeks ago, we wrote about a briefing with Shopkick's product director Evan Tana. The upcoming ILM:10 conference speaker explained the strategy to build a shopping utility around check-ins and customer engagement for retail partners like Best Buy. Another thing…
Today, Mary Meeker gave her annual data dump of key Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. As always it was fairly rich, including lots of mobile usage data as leading indicators for opportunities in content and ad delivery. One…
Over on our Local Media blog, we cover Google's new "Hotpot" product. It essentially adds a social layer to local search, allowing users to connect to friends (Gmail contacts). Merchant ratings from you and your friends then govern personalized recommendations in…
Many of you have heard by now that Google has launched a social "layer" onto local search with the new Hotpot feature. -- Rate and review local businesses. -- Add friends from Google contacts (based on Gmail contacts). -- Both…
CityGrid Media (formerly Citysearch) will extend its paid base of 800,000 advertisers across thousands of neighborhood news pages, courtesy of a display advertising deal with Outside.in. The two companies have been quietly conducting pilot tests of custom ads in “a…
In case you missed them, here are a few headlines and links to recent posts on our Mobile Local Media blog. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here, and the e-mail alert here. -- Google Product Search Bridges Online-to-Offline Shopping --…
During the run up to passage of the strict Yellow Pages opt-in ordinance in Seattle last month, the Yellow Pages industry made it clear that it felt it had a strong argument that the legislation was unconstitutional. Yesterday the industry followed through on…
One of the big hopes for local this year is ... national. As local targeting tools get more granular, there has been an upsurge in national/local advertisers, especially as they focus on touching consumers on the local purchase level. Gannett…
After all of the speculation over the past week about a new Facebook e-mail client, the company today announced a more broadly defined "Modern Messaging System." Explicitly positioned by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "not an e-mail killer," this will include…
The tech media, blogosphere and Twittersphere are abuzz over what Facebook will launch during its announced press event tomorrow in San Francisco. Few doubt that it will be a new mail client. We speculated at our DMS conference and more…
We've been busy putting together a solid lineup of speakers at our upcoming Interactive Local Media conference (Dec 7-9). Spotlighted will be two SuperForums on hot topics in the local media space: Mobile, and Daily Deals/Group buying. The SuperForum format,…
From the Friday cool stuff dept., the folks at prolific design house Frog Design have built a real time heat map of geotagged tweet activity across the globe. Twitter was first to geotag "status" but hasn't done a lot with…
(Image is of Zinio Newsstand for iPad, but you get the idea ... ) The release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab will give the iPad some competition. It reminds us that the rise of tablets has been positioned as a…
I've been using the EveryScape Eats iPhone app for the past few months. It's one of my favorite mobile local search apps for its ability to let you check out (not to be confused with "check-in") a restaurant before you…
Last week I spoke at the annual gathering of the International Classifieds Media Association (ICMA) in Vienna, Austria. My colleague Peter Krasilovsky and I have had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this function in past years. What I…
India’s auto classifieds marketplace is heating up, as the country’s burgeoning middle class becomes more auto dependent. In August 2009, MotorExchange acquired CarTradeIndia.com, apparently leading to investment in MotorExchange by Canaan Partners. Now, Axel Springer, the German media company, and…
Related to the previous post on battles waging over smartphone OS market share, coupon heavyweight Valpak announced it's joining the Windows Phone ecosystem with a dedicated native app. The free app, available now in the Windows Phone Marketplace, will offer…
Industry reports continue to show the rapid growth of Google's Android mobile OS. After reports last week from Nielsen and comScore (U.S. figures), Gartner is out today with fresh data that show Android still outpaces all other mobile OSs in…