Business and Marketing News
MojoPages, a 12 person local search/directory player based in the San Diego beach town of Solana Beach , has landed $5 Million in Series A funding from Austin Ventures. Mojo has settled on $5 million as the amount it needs to get to breakeven on a cash flow basis, says CEO Jon Carder, who founded the … Read more
Clear Channel Entertainment CEO Bob Pittman, speaking today at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, said that radio has been able to leverage its undiminshed strength with digital providing a new channel and new listeners for the medium. Pittman, a legenday industry figure who was one of the early leaders at MTV and then a leader at … Read more
We’ve long known that coupons provide real traction for SMB advertising. Nothing beats a customer walking through the door with a coupon in hand. But a lot of SMB website publishers haven’t really focused on them. DataSphere, on the other hand,,has had a coupons product for some time. But it only recently has really zeroed … Read more
Cablevision bet big on synergy (and ignored the CW about the newspaper industry) when it bought Newsday from Tribune Co. last summer for $650 million. Today, less than eight months later, it concedes that it has written off $402 million of that investment (a significantly worse investment than Stephen Marbury of Cablevision’s Knicks). Whether the economics of the … Read more
Starting this fall, Idearc’s SuperPages may be accessed via Instant Messaging as a result of a new relationship with Multiplied Media, the Calgary-based provider of “Poynt,” a local search service that operates over IM. Multiplied Media was formerly known as “IllumiCell.” The “Poynt” platform currently hosts YPG’s Internet Yellow Pages and classifieds in Canada. “It is all about driving … Read more
Last week, we wrote about The Seattle Times Co. and its new “Network search,” which is powered with FAST. This week, we are covering The Boston Globe’s Boston.com and its new “Federated” search solution, powered by Google. Federated and Network search are different names for pretty much the same thing. But even as the respective newspapers try to tackle the issues … Read more
Some industry bloggers like to throw “Google” in the title to get some attention. For me, it is “Hyperlocal.” And somewhere in the middle of any discussion of hyperlocal is Rob Curley. The hyperlocal maestro has taken his Web 2.0 experimentations (videos, maps, databases, photo galleries, blogs, citizen journalism, pictures of local girls) in rapid … Read more
NBC-U,along with Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group, have agreed to acquire The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications for a figure reported to be $3.5 billion. The deal is the first of several sell-offs for Landmark, which also hopes to sell Dominion Enterprises, a classifieds giant, and The Virginian Pilot newspaper. Landmark had apparently been hoping to get $6 billion for The Weather Channel, which … Read more
In disappointing-but-not-unexpected news, Deutsche Bank has discontinued its coverage of local media (i.e. newspapers and television stations). Most of the companies in the space have lost 70-90 percent of their equity value over the past three months. Concurrent with the news was the layoff of a wave of analysts. The first-rate reports from DB analysts like Paul … Read more
Angie Hicks, the co-founder and namesake of Angie’s List, said she thinks of her company as a direct marketing machine. Speaking at ClickZ’s Online Marketing Summit in San Diego this morning, Hicks noted that “we’re direct marketers at heart. If it doesn’t perform, it’s out. We’re constantly measuring effectiveness, and overall lift.” Hicks noted that the 250 city company … Read more