Google announced it has integrated real-time traffic reports on Google Maps. Yahoo! has had traffic reports since late 2004, and Microsoft rolled out a traffic feature (care of Traffic.com) in the May 2006 relaunch of Windows Live Local.

Maps, like search, has been a highly competitive area for which capturing users with new features has been the name of the game (see Advisory “Maps: Where are We Now, Where are We Going?“).

It’s surprising that Google has been this far behind in a competitive feature in any of its products. The only remaining major online mapping provider without real-time traffic data is Ask.com  also surprising given its mapping feature development of late (it was the first to offer multi-point directions and draggable points on a map).

Below is a screen shot of San Francisco real-time traffic data. More can be found at Search Engine Land and on the official Google Blog.

       

vFlyer today announced a new line of “widgets” that companies and individuals can use to display products on their Web sites or blogs.

Previously, vFlyer’s main product was a multimedia-rich “virtual flier” that let anyone create a professional looking classified listing. Rather than being a classified destination, it distributed these fliers to existing classified marketplaces and aggregators. Up to 10 fliers are free and higher price points, including a subscription, are available for larger volume sellers such as car dealerships or real estate professionals.

The site also serves AdWords ads on the contact reply links that its virtual fliers link back to (hosted on its own site). These ads are complementary to items for sale, according to Oliver Muoto, vice president of business development for vFlyer, so they don’t compete with the company’s target market of classified sellers.

“If you view a flier for a BMW and contact the seller, we have you identified as an active shopper. The engine knows what you are looking at and knows what other fliers you’ve looked at,” Muoto told me after the product launch in October. “This gives us the capability to understand the probability of real intent, and we can use this to offer things that are complementary. If you’re purchasing a car, you may want to do a credit check, or know the blue book value, or get financing.”

This can be a nice seller-centric tool in a marketplace where such a thing is lacking. But the penetration possibilities are only so great here, according to Muoto. Though this is a nice tool for any business or individual to establish a Web presence  a form of microsite that is easy and cheap to build (there is an Advisory currently in the works on the webification of SMEs)  it doesn’t address the other portion of the marketplace that is already online.

The new widgets are meant to appeal to this segment. Anyone with a Web site or blog can plant these widgets on a site to display products or inventory in new ways. The widgets will likely grow in number but for now mostly include photo slideshows.

This will catch on most in autos and real estate, where pictures are important and where the margins and need to chase that coveted lead have forced the industries to be more progressive with online marketing (for the most part). Monetization of the widgets will be similar to the virtual fliers, according to Muoto, in that they will be free for a certain amount of products and contain various price points for upsells to new features and volumes.

Again, real estate and auto will be the sweet spot, as the need for leads lends a certain degree of price inelasticity to promotional tools like this. The company is hoping the buyer-centric nature of the widgets will cause them to market themselves in a viral way. Each widget has the vFlyer logo and a link to go to the site and create your own.

The widgets involve simple HTML code and come with directions on how to set them up, but this extra step to actively plant a new piece of programming on your blog or Web site could be an adoption barrier. If the attractiveness and need for such a tool in the auto and real estate verticals is strong enough, as mentioned above, it should outweigh this adoption barrier though. Much of the product’s success will hinge on this.

An ad model could be the weak point of the widgets at this point, as it’s unclear how ads will be integrated, given that the widgets will reside outside vFlyer’s own domain (I’m awaiting clarification on this). Its need to upsell auto dealers and real estate professionals therefore becomes even more vital to the company’s success.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting development, around which ad models could be built. The ability to appeal to and upsell real estate and auto dealers again will be a defining factor. More details can be found in the press release and on the vFlyer site.

       

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 speakers are already working with video in one form or another. Compare that to 2006, when there were almost none.

One of our featured speakers is Brad Inman, the founder and CEO of Emeryville, California-based TurnHere, a service that began in 2005 and has gathered 2,000 videographers all around the world (but mostly in the U.S.), renting them out to everyone from The Washington Post, for its “under construction” hyper-local effort; to restaurant groups; to Intercontinental Hotels, which produced short local films for each of its 140 locations.

Inman, who previously founded InmanNews, the authoritative real estate news service and conference company, says the key to his network is its ability to scale. Unlike the grand video production houses of the past, “there are no agents, there are no caterers.” Just backpack videographers who get paid by the job. Additionally, Inman has populated the executive chambers at TurnHere with several real estate and TV sales execs  people who know local.

TurnHere trains the videographers in the mini-documentary format  the average film is under three minutes  and anyone can hire them. “We rent them out. Other people’s sales forces” will pay their way, he says. In addition to producing the video, TurnHere has taken care of all the bureaucracy involved in making videos, including rights agreements for on-air talent, music rights, form downloads, etc.

Inman says prices for filming vary from project to project. But he says it is going to be more than the $100 that one service is tentatively charging local advertisers for video Yellow Pages or the $60 per month add-on fee that Canpages is charging for video  a rate that includes the cost of video production. The quality of TurnHere standards is going to require a much higher cost than that. Low-quality video won’t help an advertiser, he says.

One component of TurnHere’s business model that’s in development is a “short films, cool places” local video network that will feature local videos and featured businesses. Currently, there are 18 featured cities  14 in the U.S., plus Sco Paulo, Brazil, and Reykjavik, Iceland.

Clicking on San Diego, for instance, you can check out a short film on Carlsbad (where I live), as part of a series on area locales. The film features my wife’s favorite raw-food restaurant and the local Witchcraft wine-tasting room. The whole thing is a lot of fun  a million times better than the $50,000-plus video the city council paid for to promote the town. Based on what TurnHere’s done in San Francisco, it looks likely that the local destination sites could be paired with “local business” videos. Still, it remains to be seen whether usage will eventually attract townies as well as tourists.

While the city services clearly have some commercial possibilities, Inman says they’re currently more for demo purposes than anything else. No sales channels are envisioned.

Other Video Leaders at Local ‘07

In addition to TurnHere’s Inman, we’re having a lot of other video-oriented execs at Local ‘07. In fact, I imagine “video” will be mentioned at least once a session. Keynoting, for instance, is Nick Grouf from Spot Runner. Grouf will talk about how Spot Runner is using the Web to manage video production and media placement for local businesses.

We’ve also got execs running TV station Web sites (Michael Mathieu, Freedom Interactive, and Steven Barth, MediaSpanOnline); a newspaper exec who has set up a virtual TV station (Chris Jennewein, Sign on San Diego); a news aggregator who is melding video and articles from TV stations and newspapers into a coherent presentation (Elizabeth Osder, Yahoo! News); and a newspaper exec who is featuring video in his classified verticals (Ira Silberstein, NYTimes.com).

But the first place to look is probably our dedicated panel: Injecting Video Into Local. That’s going to have Fast’s Perry Solomon, who will talk about video search and its localization; YellowPages.com’s Matt Crowley, who will address the development of YellowPages.com’s local IPTV channels; and ShopLocal’s Bob Armour, who will talk about how ShopLocal is leveraging the viral video wave.

       

Bambi Francisco wrote a column today weighing in on the notion of online video ads for local merchants. She recalls the launch, seven years ago, of VYP.com, a site devoted to video ads for plumbers, carpet cleaners and the like. VYP.com, like so many Web start-ups, may have been ahead of its time.

Last week, our Michael Taylor blogged on this topic, suggesting the stars might be aligning for a push into video in the online Yellow Pages space. Certainly, most if not all of the major IYPs are at the very least considering video as part of their portfolio. In Italy, Seat PG has made video a key piece of its ambitious Pagine Gialle Visual effort.

Many questions remain, including how the ads can be produced efficiently, whether local sales will embrace it, and ultimately, whether users will make a buying decision based on viewing a 30-second ad for Barry’s Bail Bonds in Bakersfield.

       

AT&T Advertising & Publishing, the new directory organization arising from the combination of AT&T and BellSouth, is beginning to establish a new identity.

The company announced this week that it would adopt “the AT&T Real Yellow Pages” as its new brand. All new AT&T books, whether in the old SBC or BellSouth regions, will carry this brand, which adopts the former BellSouth Real Yellow Pages brand.

This choice is significant. It signals that the new AT&T organization is playing to its strengths. And the former BellSouth was widely regarded as an innovator among its U.S. incumbent Yellow Pages peers.

So while the new AT&T organization leans toward former AT&T executives, marketing and product development have more of a BellSouth flair. Similarly, when RHD absorbed Dex, the buyer kept on much of the Dex marketing and product development team, widely seen as a strong point at the old Dex business.

       

Hearst Interactive Media has bought into local search in a big way by loaning $8 million in a debenture to Local.com. The amount would translate into roughly 20 percent of the publicly traded company if Hearst converts the debenture notes into an investment.

The relationship with Hearst puts Local.com in a good position to integrate its offerings with other Hearst Interactive Media investment properties, including Jingle Nets’ 1-800-FREE411 and iVillage. Other relationships could be formed with core Hearst properties, including White Directory, the fourth-largest independent directory with properties clustered largely in Florida and New York; its 12 daily newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and the Albany Times Union; 30 weekly newspapers; and Hearst-Argyle Television, which has 29 stations around the U.S.

Local.Com CEO Heath Clarke says the relationship with Hearst is starting out as a pure investment. “It is in its very early days” and the two companies are basically “shaping ideas” at this point. But Clarke says the deal could be seen as an affirmation of local search in general. Local.com claims 10 million unique visitors per month. It recently acquired soUno Directional Media Solutions for $2.25 million and also announced that it was providing local search solutions for Microsoft Office Live.

       

BT has just launched a free click-to call feature from eStara on its “Tradespace” local listing product. More details from the BT Blog.

       

Sebastien Provencher points out an interesting new development found on the Skype Blog. The newest version of Skype allows users to search for local businesses and call them at the click of a mouse.

This is a great add-on to Skype’s core product (see above link for screenshots) and should be another compelling reason to sign up for SkypeOut. Currently it’s only $30 for an entire year of domestic outbound calling and a few cents a minute for international calling. The extra step required to go out and buy a headset or computer mic is one of the things that has unfortunately kept Skype languishing in limbo between early adoption and mainstream. This has been a challenge with VoIP adoption  outside of companies like Vonage that let you use your existing phone  since the beginning (see Advisory “VoIP: Calls, Clicks and the New Telephony Infrastructure“).

That should change, however, as Skype continues to expose itself and gain traction by pumping out and integrating new products. Its newly launched online video site Joost, for example, just signed a landmark deal with Viacom to pick up the pieces of all the content the media giant just pulled from YouTube. This left a great void (not voip) where there is considerable demand and now leaves Joost in a nice spot.

This local business search should also be the first step in a product evolution that will take Skype beyond just being a VoIP calling platform. This is the first sign of local search that could lead to a more diversified value proposition and possible ad models around pay-per-call. This new version also experiments with user reviews for local businesses, something that continues to get a great deal of attention for its value-generating potential (and many challenges).

Given its worldwide installed base and this continued innovation, Skype will be a company to watch.

       

Tellme Networks announced today that it will expand its mobile voice platform to allow mobile search application developers to build products that integrate voice and visual search.

In essence this brings together the ease of speaking and of seeing results on a screen. One of the detriments to mobile search is hardware restrictions (small keypad, etc.); being able to speak search queries or business lookups can be easier than typing. But when results are returned, sometimes it’s easier to see them on a mobile screen than it is to hear them  particularly if the information can be saved and then used to dial a business or interact in other ways that can still be developed (think mapping and coupons).

Forty million people use Tellme every month, including its voice portal and free (downloadable) beta product Tellme by Mobile. These are based on the VoiceXML 2.0 protocol that makes Internet data available on mobile devices via voice applications. New “multi modal” capabilities should expand the company’s overall user base, by opening the door for new partnerships to be formed and functionality to be built.

This should be a step toward bringing the company’s voice search capabilities together with other mobile applications, as the amorphous and enigmatic mobile local search area continues to experiment with new and interesting ways to appeal to consumers and build ad models.

Voice recognition technology developers TuVox and Viecore were also named today as Tellme partners that will use its platform to develop various voice applications for mobile search. We’ll have the chance to speak to Tellme soon and will find out more about this development and what else it could mean.

       

The Los Angeles Times, a great newspaper that has been widely derided for its ineffectual Web site, hopes to turn the site around by bringing in Meredith Artley as its executive editor. Artley previously served as the Web site director for the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

In a podcast by Sandeep Junnarkar at Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review  frustratingly, no transcript and hardly any text  Artley says her goals are to focus on local, while exploring possibilities in mobile. “We need to make the L.A. Times integral to the community at large  whatever way that takes shape,” Artley told Junnarkar. She cites a broad list of possible activities, including database journalism, lifestyle coverage and user-generated content.

Artley notes that the L.A. Times already has a good building block in its Your Scene photo sharing feature. A recent series of photos focused on the snow in Malibu. “Readers are instinctively going to LATimes.com to share,” she notes.

Coming from Paris, where mobile services are more prevalent, Artley senses that compelling mobile services are just around the corner. But they aren’t really here yet. Mobile champions are “in the shoes of being a print person 10 to 12 years ago” before there were online advertising revenues, audiences, etc., she says. “All the news organizations need to pay attention to it. (Maybe) they need to invest in something new that is wireless only.”

Note: I like the idea of podcasts for certain things (instant conference coverage, conveying the tenor of Barry Diller’s sarcasm, whatever). But forcing readers to wade through the MP3s because there isn’t a transcript of the remarks or an edited story … I don’t know.