Continuing a recent string of acquisitions that tie together mobile capabilities, eBay announced it will acquire mobile payments provider Zong for $240 million in cash. Naturally, Zong will join the PayPal unit and strengthen its position in mobile payments. This…
Not long after Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley told me the service has signed up 300,000 businesses (and 10 million users), business development lead Eric Friedman blogged today that it has reached 500,000. To be clear, Foursquare is not yet monetizing…
Research recently reported in Scientific American shows that work by Gregory Berns of Emory University supports the conclusion that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of brain activity while listening to music produce data that can predict subsequent sales. In particular,…
Lately I've been exploring our video archives to pull out hidden gems and relive some of the important takeaways from our past conferences. Appropos to our Deals 3D show coming up in just over two weeks, I spent some time…
In case you missed them, here are a few headlines and links to posts we've written over the past week from the wide world of mobile. -- XAD Ramps Up Direct Sales, Leadership -- Happy Birthday, iPhone -- Yelp Joins…
Mobile Local Ad network xAD has been on a roll. About two months ago, it announced reaching 2 billion ads, just four months after hitting the first million (a feat that originally took 18 months). Now the company has announced…
The Jesus Phone turns 4. What better way to celebrate than an infographic (via Mashable). You're all grown-up now.
A federal judge upheld Seattle's opt-out registry this week for residents who choose not to receive Yellow Pages. U.S. District Court Judge James L. Robart said the city's opt-out ordinance does not violate the Yellow Pages publishers' First Amendment rights.…
As we keep saying, mobile will represent "Act II" of the exploding deal space. We even have an entire segment of our Deals 3D conference next month devoted to it. It kicks off with a session of heavy hitters including…
Readers of the blog know that we believe the deals space is the springboard for the next generation of …dare I say it…Local Online Commerce. Our Deals 3D conference July 18-19 in San Francisco is the one that couldn’t wait…
I'm a day late to this news but better late than never. Mobile local ad network Verve Wireless has released its "Local Mobile Index." This is fresh off the MMA show where I ran into Verve CMO Greg Halinan, who's…
We’ve been focused so much on deal a day that we sometimes forget it is just part of the mix when it comes to successful SMB promotions. Seth Gardenswartz of SpaBoom, a provider of promotion services for spas and restaurants,…
The big destination deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial have developed sites in most of the 150 or so large and medium markets in the U.S. How about markets with populations less than 250,000? There are 84 markets with…
From the Friday Futurist Department, TechCrunch has an in-depth look at Oblong's Mezzanine, a revolutionary new graphical user interface. When futuristic technologies are referenced, the movie "Minority Report" is often invoked. Though it usually refers to personalized ads (the scene…
Today we released our latest forecast that projects spending on U.S. mobile advertising. The highlight of this particular release is the subset of advertising that will be location targeted. We also break down formats (display, search, SMS), but here I'll…
Deal aggregators sort through daily deals and find the best ones for consumers in return for a piece of the action. They are primed to make up a healthy part of the extended family of deals products. But it isn’t…
The title of this post is meant to convey Loopt's longstanding presence in mobile local, as well as the "reverse" nature of the deals product it launched today with ChompOn. Known as U-Deals, it's a sort of reverse group buying…
Local Matter has named a new CEO, Tom Higley, who takes the helm at the local search software company following a months-long search. Higley has a deep background in starting up technology companies. According to his LinkedIn profile, Higley was most…
Soon after launching v2.0 of its mobile app, Shopkick got a little more local today by extending its mobile in-store rewards program to 1,000 SMBs in 10 U.S. cities. Known mostly for working with big-box chains like Target, Best Buy…
The credit card-based, in-flight beverage, food, entertainment and Internet era has a new twist: “Froogll” deals that can be bought online and targeted to users based on destination (i.e., Las Vegas), gender and observable family status (i.e., single/married/family). Froogll is…