Business and Marketing News
When Microsoft quit its Sidewalk city guide in 2001, it promised to keep its foot in the door of local services. At that time, it was probably thinking “small business,” since it was bent on remaking the small business marketplace around the Great Plains software company that it had recently purchased. But small business services … Read more
Merchants that take out enhanced listings on Yahoo! tend to improve their impressions and clicks by 2X, and increase their all-important ranking on the page, said Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine, in a Small Business Commando Tele-Seminar that also featured Kelsey Group’s Matt Booth (yes, I helped). Levine said there is nothing mysterious about the … Read more
The newspaper recruitment deal with Yahoo first disclosed here in an Oct. 24 post has finally been confirmed, with some interesting twists. The deal puts in place a recruitment network of seven companies with 176 newspapers in 13 of the Top 15 markets. Additional activities that go beyond the scope of recruitment are to be “filled in … Read more
Building the perfect template for hyper-local media has been the endgame for a number of companies – BackFence, American Town Networks, Pegasus News, and Citysquares, to name a few. HyperLocal Media has been working at it as well, focusing on the synergies of a print/offline model to effectively sell advertising to the community. Since I profiled the company last June, it has … Read more
We can argue somewhere else whether the U.S. Patent Office is helping to foster innovation in 2007, or hinder it. But the bottom line is that yet another wide ranging, fairly obvious patent has been issued – this time to Local.com – and local media and local search companies can ignore it only at their own peril. … Read more
Digital media is more cannibalistic than complementary, and seriously eating into the demand for traditional news sources such as newspapers, TV and news magazines, according to the third annual survey of news users done by Outsell, Inc. The survey findings, based on almost 3,000 consumers and fully detailed in Outsell’s “News Users 2009” report, written by … Read more
It doesn’t make much sense on the surface and is something of a head scratcher. But Adobe has agreed to acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion. The acquisition is described as an effort to jumpstart Adobe’s website development and service efforts by linking it with Omniture’s analytics. Adobe’s Creative Suite includes Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. From a local media perspective, … Read more
Conjuring up Twitter’s business model takes a lot of imagination. But founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s D conference in Carlsbad, CA, says the name of the game will be “enhanced capabilities” aimed at small business and professional users – something supported by a WSJ poll showing that 24 percent of Twitter users … Read more
A lot of us were glued to our screens today to watch or catch the feeds on the Apple announcements re iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch. What will the new announcements mean to our local ecosystem? To date, Apple’s focus on local has mostly been geared to Apple Maps. But … Read more
Marketplaces 2010 takes place just 7 weeks from now in San Diego (March 22-24). We are putting the finishing touches on the program, and have added MANY exciting new speakers in just the past few weeks. The event is totally dedicated to the higher value/conversion/engagement ethos of vertical media. For sure, this isn’t one size fits … Read more