The rumors were true. Last month we wrote about the possibility of Google buying in-game ad placement firm AdScape to broaden its reach in cross-platform advertising.
The company has announced that it purchased AdScape for $23 million. Like Microsoft’s acquisition of Massive last year, this should open up lots of opportunity for Google to “get in …

At the 3GSM Conference this week, Motorola and Nokia fired significant shots at wireless carriers by launching new hardware and navigation systems that they will sell directly to consumers.
They will offer GPS-based navigation systems with local search, mapping and directions, which will be free after the initial device purchase and allow for paid upgrades such …

Australian online directory HotFrog launched yesterday in the U.K. The site brings the buzzcloud concept to directory listings (see how this is used by social search engines such as Eurekster’s Swicki and Yahoo!’s My Web). This is very fitting to online directory content because it is category based.
Listings are free for businesses to post, which …

AP reports (via WSJ Online) that The New York Times Co. and Monster.com are partnering to sell recruitment ads.
This will bring the Monster brand to 19 of the publisher’s sites (including NYTimes.com and Boston.com). There is little information given, but it appears both companies will provide listings. The New York Times Co. will benefit from …

Canpages, the energized Hicks Muse-owned rival to YPG, has rolled out revised versions of its print Yellow Pages along with a unified brand and a dramatic new Web site, which officially launches at the end of next week. The new Web site has “Google Maps and Satellite Images “as its calling card  a feature …

Following up on the previous introductory post on Monster Worldwide’s partnership with The New York Times, there is a lot more that can be said about the deal and the quickly changing newspaper environment it both represents and contributes to. My colleague Peter Krasilovsky also had some insightful thoughts on the deal, represented below.
In short, …

Local is very, very hot right now. There are so many things going on, not only with Google and Yahoo!, but also with all the hundreds of companies feasting in their wake via direct and vertical and niche channels; in the trenches with sales channels reaching out to local businesses; with technologists who are pushing …

Following up on yesterday’s mobile news roundup, we had the chance to catch up with AdStar CEO Leslie Bernhard and others during a call yesterday afternoon.
The company earlier in the day had announced a partnership with Nokia to integrate a private-label mobile advertising platform for any publisher to use to sell ads across Web, print …

YellowPages.com has taken the plunge and is offering user-generated business reviews on its national IYP. Here is the release for more details.
While YPC is not the first IYP to offer user-generated reviews, its decision does provide more evidence of a shift taking place. Directory publishers are getting over the notion that an advertiser-supported business model …

In the past, we’ve talked about the effect smartphone use has on mobile local search adoption. Many third-party mobile local search applications such as Earthcomber only work on smartphones. Similarly, designing a robust and compelling enough mobile search platform is much easier when the form factor involves a larger screen and keypad. But the mainstream …

The newspaper consortium (”the amigos”) that teamed up with Yahoo! for Hot Jobs is planning to invade used autos next, according to a post by newspaper insider Ken Doctor. If it pans out, such an alliance would probably signal that Yahoo!’s 2005 deal with AutoTrader for listings will soon be over.
A Yahoo!-newspaper alliance for used …

Local name sites, whether they are geo-domain (city name) sites or local verticals, have been the low-class players of Internet advertising. People stumble on them, they see ads and maybe click on them, and have no reason to ever come back.
They’re misleadingly functional for travel and relocation, but not much else. In my eyes, they’re …

The 3GSM World Congress is going on this week in Barcelona, and we’ve already seen a handful of important announcements that relate to mobile local search.
 Yahoo! announced a display ad platform for mobile devices that will involve banner ads at the top and bottom of mobile home pages. Yahoo!’s forte online is display advertising …

Tellme Networks hasn’t exactly lived up to its 1999 vision of becoming the “Yahoo! of voice portals.” Using the portal has been a clunky experience, and ad revenues have never really developed.
But Tellme has stuck it out by providing directory assistance to key carriers and voice mail systems for FedEx, Merrill Lynch and other corporate …

In a move that resembles MySpace’s partnership with SimplyHired (to create MySpace Jobs), fast moving social network Facebook has partnered with career site Jobster.
CareerBuilder and Monster were in the running for this deal, according to GigaOm, but Jobster won out, giving it a much needed boost in distribution and exposure.
For Facebook, this brings an added …

The long-awaited launch of local business search functionality for Google Maps Australia happened earlier this week, as reported by The Australian.
According to the article:
“The latest competitor to the established players, to be known as Google Maps, will directly target customers of Telstra’s highly profitable Yellow Pages directory business. It will include map and satellite images, …

A few interesting pieces of news came out of the Yellow Pages world today:
 Telstra has bailed out of the bidding for Telecom New Zealand’s Yellow Pages Group. This comes as no surprise, as intense bidding has pushed the price up considerably. It’s now more likely that a private equity purchase will take place. More …

FAST put on its own kind of MacWorld this week in San Diego, evangelizing the way to its “enterprise search” solutions for every kind of customer, including major local players such as MediaNews Group, The Washington Post, InfoSpace, Scandinavian publishing giant Schipsted, and the online directory efforts from Deutsche Telekom and Portugal Telecom. The event, …

I’m a few days late to this, but FAST earlier in the week announced the launch of AdMomentum, a new contextual ad system meant to compete with Google’s AdSense.
AdMomentum will let Web site publishers sidestep Google and other online ad networks and have more control in managing and serving ads. It’s also being marketed as …

Idearc held its coming-out party today. President and CEO Kathy Harless sounded positively giddy: “This is an exciting day for us. We’re off to a strong start as a publicly traded company. We have an established, value-generating portfolio, a resilient multi-platform business model and a national base of diverse markets.” The last sentence she could …