U.S. directory and local search player The Berry Company has scooped up defunct search marketing firm Webvisible’s Geneva platform from a liquidator in the wake of that company’s collapse.

“This acquisition will dramatically enhance our presence and capabilities in the digital local search space,” said John Fischer, Interim President and Chief Executive Officer of TBC Holdings and Berry. “We plan to take the best of the Geneva technology and create a new platform and leads optimization engine that meets the ever-changing needs of advertisers across a range of digital products. We are delighted with the exceptional range of software development and product management talent represented by the employees of the new company.”

Berry has set up a separate business, based in Playa Vista, California, to operate the platform. One of the main reasons for the arm’s length relationship is that the Webvisible business was based on reseller relationships, some of which Berry will maintain, while longer term Berry has ambitions to develop the technology further and possibly seek additional customers for the platform. This would be difficult if the operation were nested within the Berry organization. Essentially, Berry will become a customer of the new entity.

In addition to the technology, Berry has taken on 14 engineers and a few product specialists to help operate the platform.

Eric Owen, Berry’s VP of Digital Strategy and Partnerships, told BIA/Kelsey that the Webvisible platform had several attributes that Berry found compelling, among them its dashboard capability, call tracking network and an order entry and ad insertion system with billing functionality. That latter is critical to helping Berry provision more digital products.

And moving more digital products through the pipeline is key to Berry’s longer term strategy, which involves provisioning multiple lead generating products and tracking the performance for the customer.

The focus for vertical sites is likely to shift in coming months. In addition to regular features, such as listings, many vertical sites will also begin to blend personalized or on demand “maintenance” information with various social media features such as scheduling and reviews.

We’ve seen it with garden and health sites, and also, increasingly, with car maintenance sites. DriverSide and RepairPal, both launched in 2008, have pioneered the personalized garage approach, which links car owners with auto diagnosis and leads to service providers.

A new site, CarCareKiosk, aims at DIYs — Do It Yourselfers. Founder Hans Angermeier, a former investment banker, has developed the site to provide car owners with “how to” videos that are specific to their car make. AT&T/Compete research shows that “How to” videos are major drivers for vertical sites. The site now has 8,000 car repair videos in its library.

Based in Milwaukee, CarCareKiosk has a team of seven who work with new and used car dealers to contribute videos on everything from how to check your own oil to changing the cabin air filter. “Every car is quite different – the cabin air filter on one car might be behind the glove box on one model, but in a completely different place on another car,” says Angermeier.

CarCareKiosk currently has a PayPal “donate” button for support the site, but Angermeier says he expects to sell some search-based advertising. There is also a directory for finding local mechanics, a la RepairPal and DriverSide, but that is just at a starting phase.he real target are used parts manufacturers. Sites such as eBay Motors are stores onto themselves.

He cites research showing that used parts will account for $43 billion in sales in 2012 and $47 billion in 2013. The poor economy might be contributing to people keeping older cars and maintaining them, and also doing their own work, he suggests.

As you probably heard, Apple today announced first quarter earnings (it’s first fiscal quarter is Sept-Dec.). And you probably also heard that it was a blowout quarter — beating even the most aggressive analyst estimates.

Here are the main bullets, but more importantly I’ve included below a few factoids put together by MG Seigler at TechCrunch which put these numbers into perspective. Some of them are simply mind blowing.

The main points:

– Revenue: $46.3 billion
– Profit: $13.06 billion
– Gross margin: 44.7%
– Cash or cash equivalents on hand: $97 billion
– Revenue from Retail Stores: $6.1 billion
– iPhones sold: 37 million
– iPads sold: 15.4 million
– iPods sold: 15.4 million
– Macs sold: 5.2 million
– Total iOS devices sold to date: 315 million

Now for some context, a few notes of comparison to other companies, industries and historical earnings announcements:

– Apple added $38 billion in cash to its reserves just in the past year alone. Apple’s cash hoard alone is worth more than all but 52 companies on Earth

– Apple earned more money last quarter than the entire company was worth (in terms of market cap) just eight years ago

– Walmart has more than double the revenues of Apple, but Apple has more than four times the profits of Walmart.

– Apple’s profits place them on this exclusive list of the most profitable quarters among corporations. You’ll note that Apple is the only company on the list that’s not an oil and gas company.

– Microsoft’s most recent quarter saw record revenue of $20.9 billion. Again, Apple came in at $46.33 billion. Microsoft’s net income was $6.62 billion. Apple’s was $13.06 billion.

– The iTunes Store alone generated 50 percent more revenue than all of Yahoo did last quarter

– The amount Apple paid to third-party developers via the App Store last quarter ($700 million) is more than double Yahoo’s overall profits.

– Apple’s profits for the last quarter exceed Google’s entire revenue for the last quarter. Apple’s profit for the entire year now beats Google’s revenue for the entire year.

– Apple’s stock popped nearly 10 percent from where it closed at the end of the day. Since then, it has settled back into the $450-a-share range. That surge also pushes Apple well beyond the $400 billion market cap — and once again past Exxon as the most valuable public company in the world.

– At over $400 billion, Apple is now worth more than Greece.

– Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year.

– With 37 million iPhones sold last quarter, Apple is now the largest smartphone marker, besting Samsung’s (guesstimated) 35 million.

Simply remarkable

Shopkick, the location-based shopping app, announced today that it has over 3 million active users since it launched over a year ago and that over a billion of its in-app deals and offers have been viewed. Shopkick’s app communicates with a patent-pending device in stores, letting customers earn rewards just by strolling into a store with the app open and looking at products.

Shopkick’s new location technology, ’shopkick Signal’ enables the app to verify location within feet. Since detection occurs on the user’s mobile device, privacy of presence information remains in the users’ control. As we noted in our cross media predictions, check-ins are becoming more automatic and algorithmic.

Notable stats:

– More than 4000 individual stores across multiple retailers and 250 malls have deployed Shopkick’s technology
– Five million users walked in to Shopkick partner stores in December 2011, twice the amount of walk-ins from four months prior
– 64 percent of all Shopkick users are women, more than half have children
– Over 150 million interactions with retailers since it added Old Navy as a new partner in November.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Shopkick has raised a total of $20 million from Kleiner, Greylock, Hoffman (investing as an individual before he became a partner at Greylock), Citi Growth Ventures & Innovation Group, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel. The free Shopkick app is available on iPhone and Android.

I just heard from our friends at WillowTree Apps about their most recent iPhone app, “Likes”. Utilizing the growing number of Facebook Likes out there, it will look at your friends’ and friends of freinds’ activity and make local recommendations accordingly.

It’s an interesting idea, and well within the growing trend of social sharing that we discussed in our 2012 predictions. But it does so in a more passive or automatic way, scanning and using all of those past likes to discern what might be most relevant to you.

WillowTree CEO Tobias Dengel tells me that there are enough likes out there among first level and second level (friends of friends) networks, that the data are very useful. Among 400 test users, in fact, they were able to scan more than 20 million likes.

“The concept is basically do turn Facebook Likes into your personal directory,” Dengel told me. “As Yelp and other sites get more and more gamed and over-run, we feel there is a strong need to restrict recommendations to your direct relations — among whom you know exactly [and] whom to trust.”

There have been different versions of this concept for the past 5 years, but many were before their time (i.e. Grayboxx). By that I mean that the time is likely right now that social sharing is kicking into high gear with check-ins, likes, etc..

Add the new open graph verbs (watched, bought, ate, etc.) and this could get really interesting. This could really unfold as correlations are drawn from a “big data” approach to all of this sentiment data. It won’t just be local info, of course but all kinds of potential applications.

Meanwhile, Likes looks to be a solid local discovery app that should get some traction. Full test trive to come, and you can find out more about the app here and download it from iTunes here.

Gilt Groupe confirmed today that it is eliminating off 10 percent of its staff, including Gilt City chief Nathan Richardson and Park and Bond CEO John Auerbach.

The layoffs at the luxury-but-discounted goods provider includes closures of several Gilt Groupe offices, including Atlanta, Seattle and Dallas, and several Gilt City offices inherited from last fall’s BuyWithMe acquisition, including San Diego, Houston and Philadelphia — a purchase that occurred after BuyWithMe ran out of money.

Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan implied in an interview with AllThingsD that Richardson and Auerbach were more oriented towards “start up” modes, suggesting that development will continue. We would expect the separate companies to consolidate under one roof. 

Speaking at ILM East last year in Boston, Richardson said the site had strongly differentiated itself from other deals providers, leveraging Gilt Groupe’s upscale list of five million members. He also noted that Gilt City’s flash sales approach — which put items on sales until inventory was depleted — provided higher average dollar values and better email open rates.

Verizon, the global broadband and telecommunications company, invested $370 million to develop a streaming video content delivery system and video ad platform designed to reach web and mobile users. Verizon Unicast Content Delivery Services will use a variety of content suppliers to pair video streams with advertising via the Internet. It’s a Verizon-powered content delivery network aimed at its enterprise customer base.

Features for Unicast Content Delivery Services include:

• High-capacity, high-quality, real-time individualized video streaming
• Intelligent edge asset management
• Contextual ad and content insertion
• Virtually any network, any device, any time delivery
• Managed quality of service from content to consumer
• Robust and agnostic digital rights management

Verizon Digital Media Services has 30 data centers and an internal backbone that operates on multiple connections at 40 to 100 Gbps. The offering is scheduled for availability this spring.

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.