No surprise that a takeaway from the “Building a Better Database” panel at DDC2007 was that it is getting harder and harder to acquire good listing data — fragmentation, latency issues and disparate data are just the tip of the iceberg.
Building a Better Database Panelists
Jeff Beard, President and General Manager, Localeze
Matthew Berk, …

Trader Pubs, the Canadian shopper publisher of AutoTrader.ca and assorted other titles acquired by YPG last year, is seeking synergies between the companies that add usage and extend advertiser relationships in both directions, according to Geneviève LeBrun, a longtime YPG exec who became Trader’s VP of marketing last June. LeBrun keynoted Kelsey’s Directory Driven Commerce …

What’s fun about attending a DDC conference is that at some point a challenge is laid down calling for a radical change. Yesterday afternoon, Neal Polachek and Charles Laughlin outlined the challenges major metropolitan markets face around the world including:   

The scope of the directory area is too large to meet the needs of advertisers 
Shrinking …

Today at DDC, we saw a lively panel on Consumer Reviews — among the earliest and most widely used forms of UGC. Mike Boland’s intro used Kelsey data showing how much consumers want reviews on Web sites. Reviews have the most rapidly growing demand curve of all types of Web site content with more than …

Sprint announced this evening that it will launch a mobile search service that rides on Microsoft’s Live Search for Mobile. This will include location-based and voice-enabled search, which will pull in the Tellme platform Microsoft acquired earlier this year. Some of the high-level features will include:

On most Web-enabled Sprint phones, automatically finding local businesses near you …

Tribune is eyeing the launch local editions of Varsity MyTeam in all its newspaper markets and perhaps the creation of a national high school sports database that would include non-Tribune papers, following the successful launch of the high school sports service by The Orlando Sentinel. The Varsity MyTeam concept, which features team data, personal home …

While I am in Reston, VA, attending Kelsey’s Directory Driven Commerce conference, I thought it would be a good time to start talking about our next show, which I am co-producing: Interactive Local Media 2007. The show is being done in tandem with SES Local, takes place Nov. 28-30, and is at the Los Angeles …

Idearc Media announced today it is buying the Switchboard online directory asset from InfoSpace for US$225 million. This is the latest in a series of moves by Idearc to own more elements of a comprehensive IYP/local search platform. The overarching strategy is to own more pieces of the value chain, increase the amount of organic …

For this pre-conference week, here is a recap of news and views from the TKG blog in case you missed any posts. We hope to see you at DDC.
Sign of Times? Online Newspaper Vet Goes to TV
If you were running the online operations for Seattle Times Co., and were given the chance to run the …

It must be tough running online newspaper sites right now. After many years of strong annual growth in the 30 percent range, online revs are beginning to plateau. And in most markets, the rest of the ship has begun to go down, or at least, taken on water.
If you were running the online operations for …

One year ago, head of AT&T Directory Operations Dennis Payne (apropos to the previous post) mentioned during his DDC keynote address that AT&T would push hard on bringing directory listings to new formats, most notably IPTV. Then last march at the Drilling Down on Local conference, Yellowpages.com CMO Matt Crowley presented some mock-ups of …

After 33 years of working in the directory business, Dennis Payne has been a firsthand witness to the changes and evolution in the industry. Denny began working for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. as a directory sales rep in Kansas City when it was a division of the giant AT&T Corp. He was there in January 1984 when …

Today, I had a brief call with George Garrick, CEO of Jingle Networks, which operates the service 1-800-FREE411. The Jingle team has been aggressively wringing costs out of the system for months trying to reduce the cost per call as much as possible.
In some locales, where there are fewer advertisers, Jingle has removed the operator …

As my colleague Charles Laughlin has written, Idearc Media has purchased Localsearch.com from American Town Networks and will presumably use it as the foundation of a new local search destination to feed off its Superpages.com site. Under terms of the deal, Idearc is paying $3.3 million in cash for the URL and an unstated interest …

As part of the mobile forecast we released last week, we thought it would be interesting to show a little detail about the ad-sponsored directory assistance portion of the forecast. As we wrote previously, we have been watching the market unfold for over a year. The predictions in the original report last October along with …

Today, Yellow Book made it official and announced its deal with AgendiZe, with the aim of adding word-of-mouth functionality to the Yellowbook.com IYP. Here is a copy of the release. The company has also recently rolled out a video ad trial, signaling a ramping up of energy around adding new products, functionality and distribution to …

As part of the mobile forecast we released last week, we thought it would be interesting to show a little detail about the ad-sponsored directory assistance portion of the forecast. As we wrote previously, we have been watching the market unfold for over a year. The predictions in the original report last October along with …

Idearc Media announced today that it has acquired the URL Localsearch.com from AmericanTowns.com and has made an investment in AmericanTowns.com, a network of community-based Web sites. The deal totals US$3.3 million, plus “deferred purchase consideration.”
Idearc is clearly looking to spread its wings. As Eric Chandler, president — Internet, says in the deal announcement: “With the …

Marchex released a report today that examines some of the opportunities in local search. The report is written on a basic level to educate a general marketplace on local online media and advertising (while not being overly promotional of Marchex).
It likewise reaches a few basic conclusions that we have examined here on the blog and …

Amateur sports and lifestyle services are great vertical categories that are generally worth many times more in their own wrapping than in a magazine, newspaper or Yellow Pages.
Active Networks, whose leadership and original funding have some roots from IAC, has been a longtime leader in the space. Mostly, it’s focused on the reservation category for …