Knowledge@Wharton published an article Wednesday that uses some Kelsey Group information. It’s a mini case study titled “All Politics Is Local and So Are Sales Leads: The Birth of an Internet Search Company.” The subject is a company called Natpal whose goal is to get local businesses online and offer them sales leads through key …

A new Interactive Local Media Advisory looks at Google’s moves over the past week to continue its march toward becoming a one-stop shop advertising powerhouse across all media. They include of course the massive DoubleClick acquisition and the deal with Clear Channel.
The paid search market where Google hangs its giant hat is maturing. Like any …

A few months ago, Freedom Interactive President Michael Matthieu said he was “tearing out the infrastructure” at his newspapers and TV stations and making everything Web-centric. Now we see the first tangible results.
At The Shelby Star, Freedom’s 15,000 circulation paper located near Charlotte, N.C., page views are up 84 percent, according to editor Skip Foster, …

Last week, Yell Group sold its Brazilian directory operation (TPI Brazil) to regional rival Publicar for US$8.5 million. This was a challenging market for Yell, which inherited the operation when it acquired the Spanish publisher TPI last year. Yell continues with its South American operations in Argentina, Chile and Peru.
Publicar, based in Colombia, will combine …

This morning, I joined 500 or so members of the San Diego Venture Group to hear Vint Cerf, the tech legend who was instrumental in the Internet’s creation in the 1960s. More recently, he’s been working as a very high-profile goodwill ambassador for MCI, and now Google.
Before the talk, the conversation at the breakfast table, …

For media “old-timers,” the annual NAB show is synonymous for where-it-all-happens. Year after year, the masses of media professionals still come, with this year’s edition attracting 108,000 people from around the world.
I went yesterday, mostly to see how TV stations were doing with their Web sites. As regular readers know, I think that TV and …

We all share the grief in the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but it is especially gnawing on me. Over the years that I lived in Virginia, I watched with pride as the Hokies became a first-rate school and a true rival to prestigious UVA in sports and academics. NAA’s Digital Edge has a …

Whenever a new man moves into my community, one of the mothers in my neighborhood immediately searches the Megan’s List database, which is dedicated to ID’ing sex offenders.
A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side of having new neighbors. The start-up crawls the Web for publicly available info (college, job, church, …

The recently acquired Tellme today announced that it will integrate a new local business search into its multi-modal voice search platform.
From the press release:
The free service launches today with local business search by business name or category. Designed to provide fast, accurate results, Tellme users now have three ways to access the service: Tellme by …

Google and Clear Channel Communications will announce a partnership today whereby the search company will sell 5 percent of the radio group’s inventory in 100 top U.S. markets. The agreement covers roughly 675 Clear Channel stations. Terms of the deal, including any potential cash or revenue share agreements, were not released.
Clear Channel is the largest …

We’ve got several meaty personnel moves to report in the global Yellow Pages business this morning, most of them involving Australia’s Sensis.
The big news is that Sensis has hired U.S. industry veteran Carol Johnson as chief operating officer, directory solutions. Johnson was a longtime sales executive at US West Direct (later Dex Media and now …

Google has reached an agreement to buy DoubleClick, a display ad network, for US$3.1 billion in cash. The acquisition moves Google deeper into the critical display and rich media markets, a segment the company has vowed to become a larger player in for some time.
According to a Google statement, all 1,200 DoubleClick employees will be …

The disintermediation of local media doesn’t stop. First, we got Realtors cutting into newspaper audiences (and advertising) by adding all the area listings to their Web sites. Phase Two is going to be the disintermediation of Yellow Pages, if you buy into what the thoughtful people at iBegin are working on. Using iBegin’s services, anyone …

A successful SES New York is coming to a close. This was a significant event for many because it was the last SES show that Danny Sullivan will run.
Last night, Danny hosted his evening seminar, a bittersweet event that was essentially his swan song for SES. It ended in applause and a standing ovation for …

The WSJ is reporting that McClatchy, the publisher of 30 newspapers, is set to be the 12th newspaper publisher to join the Yahoo! consortium, leaving behind Gannett and Tribune, which had hoped to work with McClatchy to build an alternative national ad network.
Meanwhile, The L.A. Times reports that Yahoo! has agreed to provide prominent links …

After weeks of rumors that Microsoft was in talks to buy DoubleClick, and subsequent rumors that Google had swept in to start its own talks, Google today came away with the company for whopping US$3.1 billion.
This could mean a great deal for Google and its ongoing efforts to diversify its ad offerings beyond paid search, …

Mobile versions of newspaper and TV station sites  WAPsites have mostly been corporate vanity projects, generally attracting just a couple of dozen regular users. But as the demographics for enhanced mobile services have graduated from kids downloading ringtones and wallpaper to adults using news and weather, commercial prospects have improved.
Crisp Wireless CEO Boris Fridman, …

Between sessions at SES New York, I had the chance to sit down with Alex Vlasto, head of global communications for Miva. The company is moving in some interesting directions, shown most recently by the deal it formed with Conde Nast to be the exclusive contextual ad provider across its network of magazine Web sites.
Miva’s …

OpenTable, the secretive eight-year-old restaurant reservation service, was slow to take off, with some of its local media and directory affiliates reporting little traffic in its early days (and a competing service, Foodline, basically dropping off the map). But in the past nine to 12 months, OpenTable has seen a real upsurge in traffic, according …

WCAU-TV, NBC’s owned and operated station in Philadelphia, is launching DigPhilly, a city site, reports today’s Wall Street Journal. The site isn’t yet up and running, but a teaser features buttons for “learn,” “do,” “share,” “find” and “shop.”
The Journal article, by Brooks Barnes and Emily Steel, reports that the site will host user-generated videos, and …