As if the landline business hadn’t suffered enough with wireless carriers taking share for domestic usage and VoIP taking share for international calling, now comes a slew of cheap international long distance calling plans from the cellular operators. Verizon and Sprint are offering plans at $4.00 per month for highly discounted international long-distance rates.
Cheap …

Two brief items caught my interest from opposite ends of the online spectrum, but both reflect consumer sentiment. First, there were some reports about a "grassroots" resistance among Flickrphiles to registering as Yahoo! users. Wired News has a fairly extensive story.
What seems to be at issue is the "top-down," compulsory nature of the registration …

So here's a bit of compulsive behavior from me — coming out of the baby zone to post. I read this piece tonight on Om Malik's blog and thought it was a very interesting and bold set of predictions about Google's strategy and future.
Ultimately, it makes a set of assumptions about the company's planning and …

After an almost unprecendented frenzy of speculation Google Talk is live. What is it?

It's an IM client that has VoIP (good transmission quality).
You have to have a gmail account to participate. (This may help drive gmail adoption.)
It's simple and easy to use (add contacts, invite and initiate calls).
The VoIP is not Vonage (only PC to …

According to MediaPost:

Google and Yahoo! are attempting to purchase Amsterdam-based Trader Classified Media, which publishes 578 print guides and runs 56 Web sites with classified ads in 22 countries, according to published reports in Reuters and the London Sunday Times.
It's a kind of "double hearsay," but if true it would be a big deal …

I got an opportunity to preview Google's version 2 of its desktop client (GD2) late last week. It's very interesting and, in the few days I've been testing it out, pretty useful.
It offers much improved desktop search, indexing an expanded range of documents. It also offers the ability to sort those files by type …

I'm trying to get a bunch of things done and only have time for bullets right now:

Print growth was sluggish but there was significant Q2 online newspaper revenue growth (28.6% to $500.7 million) vs. one year ago, according to the NAA.
Many are speculating or trafficking in rumors re a Google announcement about an IM client. …

Specifically, DCCI is focusing on “the ROI data our Call Measurement Services provides to marketer and business owners,â€� and how their “Call Measurement Programs deliver real-time information about high-value customers.â€� They have placed the ads next to a YPA print ad with a headline, “Guess Who Leads the Way in ROI?â€� And so the two …

SMARTpages has relaunched with a new look and feel, preparing for the eventual merger of the site with RealPages.com under the unified YellowPages.com brand. The new site is a significant improvement over the user experience previously offered.
FAST Search & Transfer is the vendor behind search on the site and there's a product roadmap that …

Google took investors by surprise in announcing that it would sell additional shares expected to generate US$4 billion. GOOG consequently took a bit of a hit. And now many in blogland are buzzing with speculation about what it means and why the company is doing it.
It's pretty clear there will be many more acquisitions …

According to a press release this a.m. classifieds aggregator Oodle has now grown to 20 U.S. metro areas. It's still a site in search of a business model, but it's obvious value to consumers will probably bring a (perhaps newspaper) buyer at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Just a few miles away, LiveDeal is …

I think this has been around since late June, but A9/Amazon is making a formal announcement about A9 Maps. A combination of "Block View" and MapQuest, the site is so far unique in offering street-level photographs of storefronts along with graphical maps.
As I said at the time, if Google Earth and A9 started dating that …

Following the latest wave of job "meta-search" sites (Indeed.com, SimplyHired, etc.), Business.com is launching Work.com after several months in beta.
Calling itself a "premium" jobs site, Work.com's twist is that employers pay only for those leads (recruits/applicants) that click through to their sites (applicants are sent directly to employer sites to apply). It changes the …

The “Internet portal,â€� as the Daily Camera calls it, enables users to access customized community news, dished up via RSS feeds, as well as publish their own news. “You'll be able to send in news from your clubs and organizations, schools, youth sports teams, softball leagues or even a photo of your child's first haircut,â€� …

In case you haven’t noticed, another round of consolidation in the U.S. telecom space is well underway. In one sense, it means less this time around to the directory business than it did the last. When SBC buys AT&T, or when Verizon buys MCI, there are no directory organizations to bolt together â€" one party …

I finally caught up with Jeremy Stoppelman, one of the founders of Yelp, a social networking + YP site. The site has had a much lower profile than competitors with very similar models, i.e., InsiderPages and JudysBook . Like those sites, Yelp also uses PPCall business model.
The site is national (major U.S. metros), but …

Lots and lots of stories were written about MSN's promised PPC platform launch. Danny Sullivan's written a comprehensive overview at SEW.
The most innovative dimension of the new product (beyond adding a major competitor to the marketplace) is the demographic reporting: gender, age group, geographic location, lifestyle segment, etc.
We're interested in all of …

Toronto-based DCCI has partnered with Ingenio to give online publishers the option to offer local phone numbers to advertisers seeking to adopt Pay per Call. Right now, the option is targeted pretty much exclusively to IYP publishers in North America.
It will be interesting to see how much demand exists for a local number …

I cut out on SES early to head to Denver to observe a focus group conducted by our research partner ConStat, Inc. The point was to find out anecdotal information about consumer behavior, the purchase cycle for both products and local service businesses and the relationship between online research and offline buying.
Behind …

Though still in beta, Google last night put Local on the Google.com home page. No longer will users need to go to the somewhat buried Local.Google.com, nor will local results come up irregularly and, from a user point of view, serendipitously when geographic modifiers are input as part of a search on Google.com. This should …