Business and Marketing News
We’re out with our predictions for 2009. But what’s the final word for 2008? Truly, it was a very stimulating and thoughtful year for our local media and commerce industry. But speaking for myself, it’s hard to say whether it was a good year, especially with fresh layoffs that we are hearing about every day. In fact, … Read more
The large pure-plays are focused on things like Artificial Intelligence and messaging bots to boost and scale their customer interactions. But where are SMBs in all of this? At Street Fight Summit New York City last week, several panelists suggested that SMB bots can be useful, but need to carefully built and managed in a way that … Read more
The arrival of Groupon and Living Social four years ago appeared to be a no money down, fail-safe way to get ahold of small business accounts. But the followup hasn’t been easy, and the race to win SMB accounts is still anybody’s to win. In fact, there is no single “disruptive” door into the marketplace , says Constant Contact Founder Randy … Read more
Google is simultaneously the most open and most shut business I can think of. On one hand, it is amazingly transparent. You walk around the two campuses in Mountain View and you can walk right by Larry and Sergey’s offices. During my short time there, I even spied CEO Eric Schmidt casually ambling by with a … Read more
One big takeaway from The NAA Marketing show last week in Orlando was that newspapers are ready to build up a zillion niche products that allow them to leverage their editorial talents. But not much progress, or even attention, is being paid to local search. It makes you wonder If newspapers are really serious about reaching out … Read more
It is hard for me to comprehend, but we are finally finished with ILM:07. We were grateful to have had 650 interesting and enthusiastic attendees from all over the world; 72 stimulating speakers; a full load of sponsors; and an excellent partnership with SES. Our next conference, April 30-May 2 at the Westin in Seattle, will … Read more
Whenever a new man moves into my neighborhood, one of the mothers down the street immediately searches the Megan’s List database, which is dedicated to ID’ing sex offenders. A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side of having neighbors. The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, church, clubs, blogs) and … Read more
Yellowpages.com unveiled the first screen shots of its IPTV Internet Yellow Pages channel at Local ’07 yesterday. The shots show a colorful video service that enables users to select and browse by popular categories, with details of nearby businesses also provided, along with mapping. The service can also be browsed by name, but isn’t ideally suited … Read more
Retailers are sick of being lost amidst the clutter of newspaper print circulars. They haven’t seen much usage from their online circulars, either. But they’ll look on with interest come January, when Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune begin testing an online circular that allows a banner ad to be “moused over” to provide advertiser specials, … Read more
It’s really the year of video on the Net, and local video plays a big role in that (and we’re talking about more than the big rats that were filmed running amok at the TacoBell/KFC in Greenwich Village). At our Kelsey Group Local ’07 conference, taking place in Santa Clara March 20-21, a high percentage of our … Read more