Product launches in mobile LBS are reaching ridiculous levels. Without exaggeration, there are many per day, prompting what I've started to call NAGS (Not Another GeoLocation Service). Many are good, but most are opportunistic bolt-ons to a hot segment with…
The Local Search Association filed suit today against the City and County of San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Edwin Lee asking the U.S. District Court to overturn the city's recently passed opt-in ordinance. The suit claims that the…
Just Dial, a local search engine company in India, raised approximately $10 million from SAP Ventures and Sequoia Capital Global Equities. The Mumbai-based firm was founded by VSS Mani in 1996 to connect potential buyers of products and services with small businesses.…
Yellowbook announced the launch of its new Android tablet app today. The new app features map-based business listing results. This feature allows users to find a business by searching the business name, popular categories, nearby businesses or by browsing their…
YPG Canada announced today that it will join Foursquare's venues project. This will provide Foursquare with the 1.5 million business listings in YPG's YellowAPI. Existing YellowAPI developers will conversely have one-stop access to Foursquare's API. The venues project is meant…
So, do we buy shares in Groupon? We don’t provide investment advice, of course, but as we consider its prospects from a non-investment angle, we’ll be watching for answers to the following eight questions – none of which, unsurprisingly, is…
I was surprised this week when Google Offers didn't get more of a media blitz. It did get some coverage, and to be fair the news had leaked weeks ago so the thunder was effectively stolen. But what coverage there…
Today we held a webinar to preview our upcoming Deals 3D conference and to touch on the biggest issues facing the emerging sector. This drilled downs on a few areas where deals are taking form in different ways, such as…
NBC’s local websites for its 10 owned and operated stations have effectively lowered the average age of users from 44 to 33, boosted the average time spent on site to 12 minutes, and grown its user base to 10 million…
The purchase funnel that takes consumers from awareness to transaction and retention has been an article of faith among marketers for many years. TV advertising, for instance, is “upper funnel.” Yellow Pages, at the point of sales consideration, has been…
AOL's Patch.com, which is now in 813 markets, is meeting internal goals and poised for success, according to President Warren Webster, who addressed San Diego Interactive Day yesterday. Webster said Patch is now reaching 6.9 million unique visitors and has…
Sensis, in association with the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA), commissioned research into how Australian people and businesses are using social media. The Sensis Social Media Report contains survey results from 803 Australian consumers and 1,944 businesses. Sweeney Research…
A few weeks ago, Peter Krasilovsky and I were pre-briefed by Meporter, a mobile local UGC news app that just launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. Led by 7Mainstreet founders Andy and Ron Leff (father/son team), the app lets users read or…
People tend to want to hear the good news first, but let’s start with the opposite. As we near the halfway point of the year, reports from the local radio industry reveal that growth has slowed more than expected. BIA/Kelsey…
We just learned that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has signed into law the San Francisco opt-in ordinance. Lee's signature was anticipated since the ordinance passed the city's Board of Supervisors by an overwhelming margin. The Yellow Pages industry has…
No, this post is not about a server crash in the cloud nor about a tragic plane crash with Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens aboard. This is about a fast-breaking social trend that's crossing the workplace/personal barrier and…
Reply has acquired MerchantCircle for $60 million in cash and stock in a deal that makes a big bet on SMB, vertical and social marketing. The deal, which should be completed in Q3, brings MerchantCircle’s list of 1.6 million SMBs…
As reported in the previous post (and everywhere else in the universe), Google just announced its mobile payment system, Google Wallet. The long expected product will bring together NFC and payment processing to let mobile users transact by swiping their…
As expected, Google just announced its mobile payment system called Google Wallet at a press event in NYC. This was accompanied by the wider rollout of the parallel mobile offers program, Google Offers (previously only live in Portland, Oregon). Wallet will bring…
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC, Google's Marissa Mayer revealed that 20 percent of searches across Google properties are local. What's more (literally), that number bumps up to 40 percent when we're talking about mobile searches. Of course numbers like…