Local Onliner

Jan 21

2012

Home Depot Buys RedBeacon

The Home Depot is set to significantly boost its home contractor leads network with today’s acquisition of RedBeacon. No price was announced for the acquisition, which puts Home Depot in the same boat as Sears, which has been quietly developing ServiceLive, its own contractor leads service.

RedBeacon, which takes a 10 percent commission for service jobs, was one of a number of socially driven leads companies that started in the 2008-2009 time frame. Others include Cox’s Kudzu, which has developed an intriguing partnership with Scripps’ HGTV; The Washington Post’s Service Alley; LikeList, HelpHive, and Thumbtack. The latter received $4.5 million in venture funding last week.

Last year, Red Beacon announced $7.4 million in funding from Mayfield and Venrock, but it hasn’t been easy sailing for the company. The service never landed media partnerships that it had been hoping for, and replaced its founder last year with new CEO Anthony Rodio. It has, however, managed to launch services in nine markets. Under Home Depot, one assumes it will take a national approach to contractor leads.

Categories: Money, Sales Channels, Verticals

Tags: Home Depot, RedBeacon

Jan 20

2012

The Super Lineup at ILM East March 26-28 (Boston)

ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of do-ers and innovators that are transforming and re-defining the local space.

Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon Vice Chair/Amex Board Member/Sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and Michael Silberman.

Other highlights of the 2 ½ day event includes a pre-conference rundown on Local search run by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide; a full plate of Top BIA/Kelsey research and forecasts; a special Venture Capital panel; and innovator panels on Social, Mobile, Deals, Video and Hyperlocal (the latter co-moderated with Merrill Brown.)

KEYNOTES/KEYNOTE DISCUSSIONS
• Ted Leonsis: Owner, Monumental Sports (Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards;) The Vice Chair of Groupon;, Board member of Amex, former Vice Chair of AOL; Author, The Business of Happiness
• Jason Calacanis: CEO, Mahalo; Investor. Calacanis’ career has been at the cutting edge of local and social media and reflects all the big trends, from his development of The Silicon Alley Reporter to Weblogs (AOL), Mahalo, and the creation of TechCrunch50 and Launch.
• Leslie Berland, Vice President, Social Strategy, American Express. Berland’s a major deal maker deeply involved in Amex’s mega FourSquare and Facebook deals.
• Jay Herratti, CEO, CityGrid Media. Herratti always gets top rankings at our events. He runs IAC’s super quad of the CityGrid Media Network, Citysearch, UrbanSpoon and InsiderPages.
• Michael Zimbalist, VP, Research Operations, New York Times Co. Zimbalist leads the NYT’s 12 person research unit. He’s deeply immersed in cutting edge social, mobile, tablet and video efforts.
• Michael Silberman, GM, New York Magazine Silberman is the mastermind of NYMag’s development of a super set of verticals catering to the “New York state of mind.”).

FEATURED SPEAKERS
• Bill Bice, CEO, SpaBoom
• Merrill Brown, co-founder. MSNBC.com, Court TV
• Jim Douglass, EVP, Cartera Commerce
• Jere Doyle, CEO, EverSave
• Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
• Adam Japko, CEO, Digital Sherpa
• Maria Kermath, Dir.,, New Tech & Sales Apps, AT&T Advertising Sales
• Mark Josephson, SVP, AOL Local
• Charlie Kim, CEO, Next Jump
• John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
• Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications
• Randy Parker, President, SMB Apps
• Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact
• Andrew Shotland, Publisher, Local SEO Guide
• Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360
• Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave
• Darren Waddell, EVP, Product and Corporate Marketing, Reply.com

Join hundreds of senior level local executives at ILM East for the local community’s best networking and insights. You can register here for earlier bird rates.

Internet Pioneer Ted Leonsis

Categories: Conferences, Deals, HyperLocal, Journalism, Local Search, Mobile, Money, Newspapers, Research, Sales Channels, Shopping/Transactions, Social Media, Technology, TV/Radio, Verticals, Video

Tags: ILM east

Jan 19

2012

Local’s Spreebird Broadening its Approach to Deals

Local Corp. has branched out in several directions in an effort to leverage its local platform. It has recently acquired Krillion (retail and product search) and Rovion (rich media platform and integration). Another major effort is its development of Spreebird, a deals company being built on top of its acquisition of Southern California’s Screamin’ Deals.

Spreebird has been mostly differentiated in the deals space by its profit share with local schools or charities. Users can designate which school or charity they want to designate 10 percent of the deal’s net proceeds for. To date, $650,000 has been donated, or 10 percent of its net profits.

The site, after roughly six months, has now unveiled a new look that gives it a stronger visual ID that is more feminine (more than 80 percent of its users are female.) The site has also revealed a new tagline: “Shop Smarter. Make a Difference.”

SVP Malcolm Lewis tells us that the site is really focused on providing a better shopping experience, and isn’t limiting itself to typical deals entitles such as restaurant and spa deals. A recent deal, for instance, sold several hundred sets of bath towels and bedding, he noted.

Deals are being highly targeted based on a number of algorithms for location, purchaser history and the popularity of the deals category. The algorithm will recognize buying patterns, he says.

Spreebird is also set to move beyond deals, which is just one of six promotional categories that he envisions (but won’t reveal.) The site is also very mobile-centric, with a “significant percentage” looking up deals via daily alert emails and mobile browser, although the percentage actually buying from mobile is much smaller.

In all, Lewis envisions that Spreebird isn’t trying to be a generic deals site. He thinks the site could compete as a strong premium niche, “like Volvo.”

Categories: Deals

Tags: local.com, Malcolm Lewis, Spreebird

Jan 19

2012

GoLocal 24: Positioning Hyperlocal at the Top of The News Cycle

The decline of newspaper readership opens a door for other media to head the news cycle, with everything else trickling down to the TV and radio stations and Web sites that feed off the original content.

That’s the premise for GoLocal24, a local news and lifestyle content company that started with a website and broadcast partnerships in Providence, R.I., and will add a Worchester, MA site in February. The site has seed funding from Angel Street Capital and 10 people on staff — including a well known local news personality.

Founder Josh Fenton says he lived-and-breathed the news cycle as a Hill staffer in Washington, and later as the owner of an ad and PR agency. The decline of newspaper readership has convinced him that there “is a likelihood that the newspaper that drives the news cycle will cease to exist. Already, newspapers have “no relevance” to most consumers under 45 years old, he says.

Launched last year, GoProv is likely partially responsible for a decline of Belo’s Providence Journal website, which Fenton says is down 30-40 percent since last summer. Local readers “have had a choice for the last 12 months. We’ve broken more news stories” – quite a claim for such a small site, given the large newsroom that The Providence Journal has.

Multi-channel targeting is the key, notes Fenton. Right now, GoProv is acting as the news source for Channnel 10 NBC and four Clear Channel radio stations. “We go on drive time with the big story of the day, and also to their websites, where we are the local news widget,” he says. Some of the stories, in fact, break on the broadcast stations, then push back to the Website. In addition to breaking news, GoProv is producing a five minute clip of daily news, using two anchors.

Video, in fact, is seen as a great asset as the site preps its Worcester, MA site. Living in the shadow of Boston, there is no network TV station affiliate in Worcester, although it is a city of one million people. “You never have Worcester or Worcester county news on the Boston stations, unless something really horrific happens,” says Fenton.

Social media also plays a major role in building the company. Roughly 20 percent of its traffic derives from Facebook, where it has 85,000 social relationships between fan pages, writers, friends and other social assets, notes Fenton. That number may be ramped up more as additional media outlets come on board. The company is currently in discussions with a sports radio group.

Leveraging a social competency is also a vital component for the company’s advertising relationships. More than 30 advertisers buy a broad package that can include display ads, rich media, email promotions, inclusion in deals and social blasts. The site, in fact, has been cash flow positive since it was seven months old.

Categories: HyperLocal, Journalism

Tags: Golocal24, hyperlocal, Josh Fenton

Jan 9

2012

Thumbtack Raises $4.5 Million

Thumbtack, which has set itself to compete against Angie’s List and ServiceMagic in the SMB leads space, has raised $4.5 Million from Javelin Venture Partners, with MHS Capital and Tim Draper participating.

The eight person San Francisco company, founded in 2009, claims nearly a quarter million active merchants — up from 150,000 in July — and “hundreds of thousands” of visits. Founder Marco Zappacosta tells us that the company continues to scale well on “both sides of the marketplace” — merchants and consumers. He says the company will use the funds to hire 12 people as soon as possible, and focus on building the user experience. “The money is all about investing in the experience and really develop a marketplace solution,” he says.

Zappacosta notes that the company provides standard features such as quotes and finding the right people, but “there is a lot more we can do.” For instance, Zappacosta hopes to add payment and invoicing capabilities throughout the site, as well as scheduling.

Categories: Money, Verticals

Tags: Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack

Jan 9

2012

Geo-Fencing Update: A Discussion with Maponics CEO Darrin Clement

A few years ago, the location of businesses became a big question mark, as well as a strategic issue, as people wanted to shop or dine nearby. These “geo-fencing” issues were especially important for Yellow Pages companies.

Since then, search has become more the norm, along with GPS-based phones, which have location baked into them. What hasn’t changed is that you still need the geo-fencing data tied with other meta data for local discovery. You still need to know what subway line is near, where the nearest parking garages are, or what your choices are for dining when you are visiting your friend in Chelsea.

Companies such as Maponics, Urban Mapping, Zillow and others are still licensing or providing their geo-fencing results. And now, the customer base is more universal among companies in the local space, along with key verticals related to schools, real estate and other verticals. Other companies, such as Yahoo, have used such data to introduce Proximity Search.

The result can be a seamless paradigm that integrates local mapping information with coupons, deals and other merchant information. But not everyone gets it.

“Some publishers still don’t get how to have cross platforms,” suggests Maponics CEO Darrin Clement. “They’re still looking for leads in the social world; still bolting on coupons to their results. They’re too intent on protecting the existing paradigm.”

Clement says mobile users, especially, need seamless roaming of information. He notes that some local services will just use the Zillow API. And it works well for startups. But Zillow only has 7,000 neighborhoods,” he notes. “We have 160,000. Zillow has 100 cities. We have 2,300 cities.”

Categories: Mapping, Mobile, Verticals

Jan 6

2012

Hyperlocal Lives? GoLocal24 Preps Second Site

No one talks much about certain topics after public crashes – even when the opportunity remains clear. Hyperlocal is one of these. TBD.com in Washington DC crashed last February, and there is a lot of speculation that Patch.com has become a cash drain on AOL.com and is not sustainable (although CEO Tim Armstrong asserts that several of the largest Patch sites will be in the black in 2013 and that the site remains a definite “go.”)

Meanwhile, the dream lives on, and lots of independent and regional hyperlocal initiatives, in addition to Patch, are still going at it — and should go at it. Main Street Connect, a northeast site, has raised $7 million of new funding and added a new CEO. Many newspapers have launched various hyperlocal sections. The Boston Globe’s YourTown, for instance, has 50 town sites.

Local Thunder, ShopCity and American Towns also have hyperlocal products that emphasize hyperlocal commerce as much as hyperlocal journalism (arguably, an equally important part of a community buzz). A new venture is GoLocal 24, which launched GoLocalProv in Providence in 2010 and is launching GoLocal Worcester.

As an article in today’s Boston Globe points out, GoLocalProv was founded by Josh Fenton, a former advertising executive who grew up in Providence. His cofounder was Paul Krasinski, a Newton native and executive with Arbitron (and brother of The Office’s John Krasinski.) The website employs 10 reporters, including a well known local TV personality.

The article notes that the Providence site became profitable after seven months, and closed a second round of financing in December from Angel Street Capital and local investors.

Categories: HyperLocal, Journalism

Tags: GoLocal 24, hyperlcoal, The Boston Globe

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

Home Depot Buys RedBeacon

Local’s Spreebird Broadening its Approach to Deals

GoLocal 24: Positioning Hyperlocal at the Top of The News Cycle

Thumbtack Raises $4.5 Million

Geo-Fencing Update: A Discussion with Maponics CEO Darrin Clement

Hyperlocal Lives? GoLocal24 Preps Second Site

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