Universal McCann has been the definitive word in advertising forecasts for more years than most of us have been alive, and team leader Bob Coen has been consistently conservative yet accurate. In December, he predicted that Yellow Pages would come in at about $14.6 billion for 2007. In his recent update, his prediction for Yellow …

In case you missed any posts this week, here is the TKG blog highlight reel. Click below to read each post in full.
Newspapers and Home Pages: Getting Personal
Business 2.0’s Erick Shoenfeld writes an exclusive on his blog on the next version of the Pageflakes personalized home page. It looks to be a compelling and elegant …

New West is a different concept from other community sites. Started two years ago by Jonathan Weber, the former editor of The Industry Standard (the dot-com era trade bible), the seven-person site covers all of the Rocky Mountain region from its base in Missoula, MT. It has multiple revenue streams from Google AdSense and ads, …

Business 2.0’s Erick Shoenfeld writes an exclusive on his blog on the next version of the Pageflakes personalized home page. It looks to be a compelling and elegant product that should meet the rising demand for personalized features online.
It also has a nice set of widgets that can be personalized and planted on other Web …

The NewTeeVee blog has some interesting thoughts following comments made by Google’s Marissa Mayer at the Searchonomics conference going on today. Google’s free directory assistance product, Goog-411 (past commentary here), will assist in helping Google develop speech to text ability, which will in turn help it sharpen its ax when it comes to video search.
This …

After a five-hour installation job – apparently, many are longer – I am now among the first in San Diego County to have AT&T U-Verse, a new fiber-based service with a node down the street. They are definitely not calling it “IPTV.”
The service provides cable modem-like speeds for Internet, a wireless router and 400 channels …

A handful of official iPhone reviews from professional product reviewers came out today. The verdict: It lives up to the hype.
There are still lots of possible flaws, such as slow speeds on AT&T’s EDGE data network, but the overall picture is that the iPhone does things no other device before it could do. Furthermore, this …

Summary
Local and vertical online search company Marchex today announced the rather bold move of launching 100,000 local search sites. Yes, that’s right, 100,000. The move represents the culmination of years of work in assembling a portfolio of URLs and companies that will come together to enable the ongoing content population and generation of such a …

Avvo CEO Mark Britton posted today on the Avvo blog about a change the site will make to its flagship rating system, which we wrote about here.
The automatically generated rating system was getting questioned by many lawyers and users alike about some, well, questionable ratings (”why does Harriet Miers have a 6.1 out of 10?”); …

Summary
Pay-per-call provider Ingenio and market research firm Harris Interactive released results of a survey (n = 4,123) today that shows interesting data around consumer preferences for mobile devices and advertising. These are important data, as any embryonic area requires knowledge of consumer preferences as a leading indicator of product development. Nowhere is this more appropriate …

As reported last week, Blinkx today officially unveiled its new contextual ad matching technology for video content, known as AdHoc. The company has also partnered with both Lycos and InfoSpace to provide its video search technology as an additional feature to these sites’ search interfaces.
The InfoSpace partnership will actually bring Blinkx video search to Dogpile, …

The week of the iPhone’s launch has begun, and the needle on the hype-o-meter has begun to twitch.
The official launch is on Friday, and you can expect a fair amount of pushing and shoving as everyone tries to get his or her hands on one. Already, AT&T has released crowd control instructions for store owners …

We can argue somewhere else whether the U.S. Patent Office is helping to foster innovation in 2007 or hinder it. But the bottom line is that yet another wide-ranging, fairly obvious patent has been issued – this time to Local.com  – and local media and local search companies can ignore it only at their own …

The Kelsey Group and AMR International joined forces to hold a summit in London on the Future of Local Search in Europe. It was an invitation-only affair, which is why you probably didn’t hear about it. Not surprisingly, most of the attendees were from Europe and the event was cosponsored by Agendize, Call Genie and …

They’re cool, but unless you want to torture yourself, you’ll probably want to use a 3D Virtual Cityscape for less than 15 percent of your local lookups. Watching the innovation in the space, however, is thrilling. The applications are already fun, and getting more useful all the time.
A new beta that I especially like is …

In case you missed any posts last week, here is the TKG blog highlight reel. Click below to read each post in full.
On the Road, Talking ‘Local Local’ and ‘National Local’
You learn a lot from talking to local advertisers. Occasionally, I get to leave my Ivory Tower, and give a speech or appear on a …

Following in the footsteps of Jingle Nets’ 1-800-Free411 (and failed services, like inFreeDA), Verizon LiveSource has launched a trial of a free DA service in Boston and Denver. The ad-supported service boasts the catchy number: 800-THE-INFO. It uses Call Genie’s automated DA system, like Yellow Pages Group and Telus in Canada, and Jingle in the U.S. …

You learn a lot from talking to local advertisers. Occasionally, I get to leave my ivory tower and give a speech or appear on a panel in front of local advertisers.
Generally, I’m talking “Local Local.” A couple of weeks ago, I was in Atlanta to address the Buck Rogers society of the Photo Marketers Association …

Summary
Video search engine Blinkx has taken a considerable step toward monetization by developing an ad serving technology that contextually matches advertising with video clips. Known as Blinkx AdHoc, this will offer a few different ad formats including insertion of small text and graphic ads within video clips at appropriate moments, based on the same voice …

Sprint has formed a “4 G Local Content Group” that will handle “local news, weather, sports, traffic, directories, user reviews and other User Generated Content.” All this from a recruitment ad it placed for “an  innovative and creative Product Manager to leverage the network’s location and presence capabilities to build new utility and value for …