John Hanke, Google’s head of Maps and Earth, keynoted this morning at ILM:07 and spoke in-depth about these products’ recent announcements. These include MyLocation, terrain maps, user address corrections and enhancements to MyMaps.
Just a normal week for Google though, as the frenetic pace of feature development rages on in the mapping world. Google in fact …

Speaking this morning at ILM:07 in Los Angeles, Russell Horowitz, chairman and CEO of Marchex, dismissed the idea that a clean slate is needed to communicate the value proposition of local online advertising to small businesses. He is betting on legacy sales channel like Yellow Pages publishers.
“Local sales forces sell lots of products,” Horowitz …

Jonathan Weber started his career in traditional media as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, but the new media bug got hold of him. He was the cofounder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard, which more than any other publication reflected the rise and fall of the dot-com boom. In …

Google has launched MyLocation, a nice tool for mobile maps that triangulates your location based on your distance to cell towers.
A blue dot and a circle are placed on Google mobile maps that show you where you are and eliminate the need to type in a geographic modifier when looking for things around you. The …

Executive Interview: The Leading Edge: Auto Advertising in Transition had very much the same ring to it as yesterday’s session on real estate in transition. At The Kelsey Group’s ILM:07 event, the final panel each day was on two of the most rapidly changing classified advertising verticals. Since home and automobile buying are typically the two …

ILM:07 was fortunate to have Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, as a speaker. Always a straight shooter and a prolific blogger, Calacanis is very outspoken about his feelings about search, social media, SEO and local search.
When asked about the Facebook phenomenon, Calacanis said “Facebook is the best technical social network who iterates faster than …

A panel of national agency representatives (”National Advertisers Going Local”) delivered the message that more local revenues would flow to local sites, including IYPs, if the focus were more on making their properties easier for national advertisers and their agencies to work with.
“The search value proposition has been established. We are feeling no sales …

During a keynote at our ILM:07 conference in L.A., Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s VP of product marketing and operations, said the company is keenly interested in driving local advertising via local media partners, its own outreach efforts and other means.
Just six months after opening up beyond the college and high school student market, Facebook now has …

There have been a handful of announcements in and around ILM:07 so far. Here is a jumping-off point:
Online Consumer Generated Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behavior
Yellowpages.com Advertisers Come to Live in Online Video Profiles
Citysearch Announces Strategic Partnership With MerchantCircle, Web’s Fastest Growing Local Business Network
WAND Taxonomy to Power UniversalBusinessListing.Org Local Search
Mediatel Licenses Discovery …

Speakers on a spirited panel on the “Convergence of Local Media and Directories” here today at ILM:07/SES Local agreed that online directories need to embrace elements of search and social networking as well as Yellow Pages in order to be viable long term, and need to partner more aggressively since none can assemble all the …

The concept of localized e-commerce was discussed at one of the breakout sessions this afternoon at ILM:07. The essence of the question is how soon will SMBs be part of the growing trend that helps consumers find out where brand name products can be bought locally? Increasingly, local retailers will have to be able to …

Stuart McKelvey, president and CEO of TMP Directional Marketing, gave ILM:07 attendees a second look at their online user study to help clarify its results and provide insight on how this can serve to help more effectively plan both online and offline media. National advertisers drove the demand to track this information for both online …

Stuart McKelvey, president and CEO of TMP Directional Marketing, took some time today at ILM:07 to dissect some of the data that came out of the consumer survey, released in August and co-produced by comScore.
TMP executes the largest placement of Yellow Pages advertising in the U.S., and this survey was done to discern the value …

Charles Stubbs, president of Yellowpages.com, was a surprise guest this morning at ILM:07. Stubbs came to discuss AT&T’s recent acquisition of Ingenio and its implications for Yellowpages.com and AT&T Advertising & Publishing.  
AT&T purchased all Ingenio’s assets, intellectual property and technology. According to Stubbs, ”The acquisition provides us with the opportunity to create a common business …

The ILM:07 session on cutting-edge demos was devoted to a presentation and demo by Claudia Poepperl, CMO of Copenhagen-based mobilePeople. MobilePeople is a vintage player in this nascent space, having been in business for more than five years now. It’s currently in 12 markets, comprising eight languages, with a variegated client base of mobile search …

Those were the words of a Network Communications Inc. CEO Daniel McCarthy as he announced that “we will have a deal with Zillow in the next 14 days.” McCarthy made this statement during an executive interview, The Leading Edge: Real Estate in Transition, at The Kelsey Group’s ILM:07 conference today. Other panelists in this session …

“This year is about social media, video and partnerships,” said Jay Herratti, president of Citysearch, during his keynote address today at the ILM:07 conference here in Los Angeles. In his first major presentation/interview since taking the helm at Citysearch eight months ago, Herratti shared with the roughly 600 attendees how his division of IAC has …

Three investment heavyweights speaking today at the Interactive Local Media/SES Local conference in Los Angeles said the environment for funding is still attractive for early stage companies. However, the credit crunch looming over the market since August is having an impact on leveraged transactions for later stage companies.
Nick Veronis, managing director at Veronis Suhler Stevenson, …

Jake Winebaum, president of RHDi and CEO of Business.com, a self-admitted neophyte in the local search space, shared his unique “new guy” perspective of the state of selling local search to small businesses at ILM:07. Now working for a large incumbent directory publisher, R.H Donnelley, Winebaum outlined a number of critical challenges and advantages of …

In an opening session to TKG’s part in the ILM/SES Local Show, Neal Polachek, Matt Booth and Peter Krasilovsky presented some groundwork data for the rest of the conference and the rest of the decade.
Verticalization is a trend we’re seeing all over the local search space, as search aggregates and pushes traffic into vertical …