Om Malik reports that the hotly anticipated 3G iPhone, rumored to come out next month, will have GPS capability (by federal mandate). The provider is rumored to be Broadcom — a big win for the chip maker, which only recently entered the 3G chipset market.

Putting two and two together, this means we’re likely to see multimodal location awareness, given the iPhone’s existing Wi-Fi positioning software, care of Skyhook Wireless. The two together will open up lots of possibilities for local application development (a common theme with all things iPhone and Android).

With GPS and Wi-Fi positioning, essentially one picks up where the other leaves off. GPS is much more accurate (down to the meter level) but drops off in urban areas and indoors — places where Wi-Fi positioning has proved to shine. So they could be a powerful combination on an already powerful — and soon to be much faster — device.

Some industry bloggers like to throw “Google” in the title to get some attention. For me, it is “Hyperlocal.” And somewhere in the middle of any discussion of hyperlocal is Rob Curley.

The hyperlocal maestro has taken his Web 2.0 experimentations (videos, maps, databases, photo galleries, blogs, citizen journalism, pictures of local girls) in rapid fire succession from Augusta, Georgia, to Lawrence, Kansas, to Naples, Florida, before finally hitting the “big time” 20 months ago, with The Washington Post.

The Post, for him, was probably a mixed experience. It is now history as he and his “Curley team” of nine people who have followed him from market to market export themselves to sweltering Las Vegas. They’ll be working on the Las Vegas Sun and other Greenspun Media sites in the area. Curley has a budget to hire 40+ people for the Vegas ventures.

I spoke with Curley last night about why he’d leave a place that is considered a pinnacle of journalism to move to Las Vegas, which might be a good place for George Clooney to party on weekends but is no “Brooklyn” full of community publishers, if you know what I mean.

Curley’s spin is that having free rein to develop hyperlocal across a set of Vegas media properties plays to his strengths. In addition to Webifying the Las Vegas Sun, he is set to begin work on Las Vegas Weekly (an alternative newspaper) and also a broadcast property.

He takes pains to note that Vegas isn’t exactly a backwater. It is now a top 50 market. And it not just a rootless place of telemarketers and casino workers, as I crudely suggest. “If you live here, there is community,” he insists.

TV and video, in fact, are a big part of his ambitions now. He says he learned some hard truths from failures in TV in Naples four or five years ago, and is ready to build some great community video now. If Naples had been a success, video would have just trudged along. But instead, something more radical will be developed. And the page views are up there now to be monetized from advertising.

As for The Post, which has spent generously to develop hyperlocal, Curley says it remains well positioned to roll out its next phase of hyperlocal this summer: FairfaxExtra.com. It will be a pivotal effort for The Post, which has traditionally been more oriented toward D.C. and its Maryland suburbs, where the paper’s staffers tend to live, than its Virginia suburbs (when I lived in Virginia, I called it “The Bethesda Post”).

One lesson from Curley’s initial effort, LoudounExtra.com, however, was the need to be more granular. “We geocoded everything in Loudoun from Day 1” but that wasn’t enough. There is a big difference from suburban South Riding and Chantilly to Middleburg in fox country, he notes. FairfaxExtra.com will additionally have 22 or 23 URLs dedicated to specific communities, rather than the single URL for Loudoun County. This will be more akin to the model set by Backfence.

Curley says he doesn’t expect the sites to radically change in the near term, but over time, it is likely that they’ll be better integrated with The Post. The lack of integration has been an ongoing problem, he acknowledges.

On a personal note, Curley says his departure was not a surprise to The Post’s leadership, but that they had asked him to stick it out, which he did. His core staff, which has followed him from market to market, however, began flowing to the Las Vegas Sun in January. There was nothing secret about it, he says. It just wasn’t a cultural fit. He wasn’t appreciated by everyone (and I don’t know enough to take sides here).

Curley also says he believes The Post’s leadership is as committed to hyperlocal as ever. The Post’s leadership at the top – Don Graham and Katherine Weymouth — is “all about giving readers content that they would like to read every day.” He also notes that the community sites will still be managed by Henry Tam, who was working side by side with his team. “He really gets it.”

Note: In my original post from yesterday, I inaccurately noted that LoudounExtra.com hadn’t yet rolled out high school sports (hence, a few notes in the comments). In fact, high school sports have been a core focus of the site from the launch last fall. The section has got the full Curley play of video, photo galleries and blogs.

There has not been all that much fresh coverage of the rumor, reported earlier this week, that Microsoft may acquire Yell Group, the U.K.-based international publisher with operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain and Latin America. We have not been able to pick up much to support the rumor, though circumstances might suggest that Yell is poised to make some kind of significant move to generate cash without further driving down its share price. The company took a hit after it announced its earnings last week (along with a dividend cut), and gained a little back on the Microsoft rumor. At this writing, the stock is trading down by about 2 percent.

Here is a bit more discussion on ClickZ regarding the rumor that Microsoft may acquire Yell. The focus here is on Yellowbook.com, which has been a second tier player in the U.S. IYP space, but has recently revamped and is growing usage rapidly, albeit from a small base. One key difference is the veteran leadership of Pat Marshall, who helped found Superpages.com back in the IYP pioneer days, and joined Yell last year to lead efforts to make Yellowbook.com a more competitive digital platform.

This article reports on a recent BNP Paribas report that suggests Yell might sell off its U.S. and Latin American operations (with Carlos Slim’s Telmex being the likely buyer of the latter) to avoid violating debt covenants. No mention is made of the prospects of a Microsoft acquisition.

This article reveals, ironically enough, that Yell and Microsoft were both voted into the top 10 U.K. companies to work for.

News.com provides screenshots of Google’s Android operating system, straight from this week’s Google I/O conference in San Francisco. It is a touch screen interface with a home screen that looks a lot like the iPhone.

Like the iPhone, lots of local applications will come out of this given the open developer environment and the natural ties between mobile and local. Meanwhile ease of use could push these platforms and applications into the mainstream, causing more incentive to innovate than we see today.

These factors will lead to lots of useful applications outside local as well (such as social). Note the mobile Streetview image. Very cool.

You’ve got to figure if anyone is going to lead the local revolution in the newspaper space it is going to be The Washington Post. To me, the paper signaled its seriousness about getting hyperlocal when it hired two of its big guns: Adrian Holovaty and Rob Curley.

But Holovaty, the father of computer data journalism with chicagocrime.org, left a while back to create Everyblock. And now Curley, who was put in charge of The Post’s effort to create local editions in outlying communities, has just left after 20 months to join the Las Vegas Sun – the lesser half of the Las Vegas Joint Operating Agreement that essentially puts out a “daily magazine,” as Curley calls it.

Curley hasn’t moved to Vegas empty-handed either. He took nine people — a huge chunk of his skunkworks team from The Post. Apparently, the export was done with The Post’s blessing. An intimidatingly good spinner –his clear vision of where local can go has played a huge role in his efforts, winning numerous local media awards over the years — Curley calls the Sun “easily one of the most interesting local media operations in the nation.” He notes that owner Greenspun Media also has TV stations and an alternative newsweekly to Webify.

I don’t know the real reason(s) why Curley left, although he says on his blog that he wasn’t the best fit for The Post. The company has just had a round of major buyouts of editorial staff and cost cutting may have had something to do with it. The Post has a new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, and Curley’s departure may be part of a new direction.

Curley asserts in his blog that The Post management stood behind him in his efforts. Chairman Don Graham, who is related to Weymouth, even drove out to distant Loudon County to meet with the schools superintendent when a joint effort hit a snag. He says Graham also helped with the launch of the newspaper’s Facebook app.

Alternatively, there could have been dissatisfaction on all sides with last fall’s launch of LoudounExtra.com, a nice community effort but without any special features that stand out. The second effort from the team, Fairfax Extra, is slated to launch in a few weeks.

LoudounExtra purports to go deeper than The Post’s section with a restaurant guide, a calendar, a school guide, photo galleries, a house of worship guide and a moving center. It also has a couple of traffic Web cams and two local blogs.

But numerous promised features are still in development, including community publishing tools and databases of home sales and building permits. I don’t know the actual circumstances. It does seem like Curley and his team had enough time to get it done.

Meanwhile, The Post says it is going full steam ahead with hyperlocal. Publisher Weymouth, in a staff memo republished by Washington City Paper, said that “while we are sad to lose Rob, our commitment to the communities we serve is as strong as ever.”

CNET is reporting the rumor that MenuPages could be close to acquisition by an unnamed suitor. If past partnerships are any indication, it could be IAC/Citysearch. Or perhaps Yelp? Keep an eye out.

Nielsen has released figures on the top brands and top TV programs involved with product placement. This is an area that could represent lots of opportunity when the interactivity of the Web reaches the television (read: IPTV).

We’ve already seen some models developed and speculated, but it has yet to really take off. In broadcast television, as shown in Nielsen’s figures, it’s mostly brand advertising so far. But with IPTV, there are implications for more interactivity that plays off products used in video programming.

In other words, we could see local directional advertising tied to products used in certain programs (think cooking, home improvement, fashion, etc.). It could take a while before IPTV providers work this into their service packages and hardware will be an issue (at the onset IPTV won’t look much different from cable). But the underlying architecture is there to build these types of ad delivery models.

We’ll also have IPTV providers with directory assets (AT&T), where the synergies between the two will only take a matter of time to be realized. Some of these integrations were hinted at by former Yellowpages.com president Charles Stubbs, and first signs can be seen in the Yellowpages.com channel on AT&T’s U-verse IPTV package.

In the meantime, the interactivity brought by IPTV will apply more to national brands. This could involve interactive options to find out more about products, or in some cases order them online. Like many other media, including the Web, the massive local opportunity will come later.

Local search platform provider Local Matters has just acquired a Facebook application-in-progress from online real estate player Point2. The app will be called Neighborhoods for Facebook and will allow Facebook users to network with others in their area and find out about local events. It can be thought of as a sort of hyperlocal play within Facebook.

The closest thing we’ve seen to this so far is Loladex, which launched in March to fuse local search and social networking within Facebook. One of the advantages of these applications is that they can piggyback on Facebook’s existing (and growing) social graph, rather than attracting users to a new social network. Still, attracting users to grab and use the application within their Facebook accounts won’t come entirely without a challenge.

The application also has a real estate angle. It will allow real estate brokers and agents in Point2’s listing syndication service to automatically distribute listings to the Facebook app. They can also purchase enhanced placement in a way that targets specific geographies or demographics within Facebook (similar to Facebook Ads launched in November). The benefit here is additional distribution to a place where the benefits and growth potential of a network effect are inherent.

For Local Matters, this is the latest in a string of acquisitions and product launches, and the second that specifically builds capability around social media. It will be developed on an ongoing basis by Local Matters, but draw upon Point2’s Neighborhood database.

ABI just released a report that projects a billion Web video viewers by 2013. This is presumably a unique monthly viewer count, which makes it about a 4x to 5x increase over current levels.

That’s a lot of viewers, but it could make sense if you look at evolving video technologies. Broadband penetration and killer apps like YouTube have made video a standard for hundreds of millions of users, especially younger generations and at-work users. This has even caused Google and other search engines to rethink their algorithms and SERP rankings (universal search).

Going forward, we’ll have high-speed fiber network rollouts that the likes of Verizon and AT&T will use to power their television (IPTV) and triple-play packages. But the byproduct will be some bandwidth left over for richer online media such as higher res video and 3-D mapping/metaverses. At the same time, compression technologies will improve along with graphic chips and other supporting technologies for online media, including video.

“Here, Moore’s law helps you across the board,” said Erik Jorgensen, Microsoft director of Live Maps and Virtual Earth, at TKG’s Drilling Down on Local conference last month. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3-D will see greater adoption when these technologies make it appealing and accessible to the mainstream. Not to mention that 3-D mapping is intuitive for a generation of gamers.

These factors all translate to online video as well. And the appeal of online video for users and advertisers continues to trickle down to the local level. Local is arguably more fertile ground for video, given the absence of intrusive forms of monetization that are necessary with most other forms of online video.

In other words, there aren’t pre-roll or overlay ads because with local merchant video — given its informative qualities for local searchers — the advertising is the content. This was all explored in a TKG White Paper last year and will be revisited in more quantitative terms in a local video forecast currently in progress.

In the meantime, a billion viewers for online video in five years? What do you think?

Several years ago, it looked like real estate brokerages might be marginalized by “Virtual Office Websites” (VOWs) that grabbed multiple listings service listings from the Web, using a licensed agent. They then acted as cut-rate sales agents to home buyers.

At the time, it was envisioned that major online entities such as Yahoo! might use VOWs as a loophole for getting into the tent. Worse, there was a fear that banks would use VOWs to facilitate a sneak attack on the industry (if restrictions on their participation eased).

The response by the National Association of Realtors in August 2005 was to draw up new rules that would deny the VOWs access to the listings, making it difficult for them to stay in business. Penalties were imposed on members that assisted VOWs.

It seemed clear that the NAR’s cartel-like actions wouldn’t hold up in court. But that didn’t matter. Mostly, it would buy time for the industry to develop better Internet positioning — like deliberately fouling Kobe Bryant to make him miss a basket and hope he doesn’t make his foul shots from the line.

That’s almost exactly how it has worked out. Almost three years after the Department of Justice sued the NAR to overturn its policies in October 2005, the two sides have settled. For the NAR, it has been time well “bought,” if you want to have that perspective. In the interim, the market has greatly evolved vis-a-vis the ready access to information allowed by the Internet, and changes brought on by bad market conditions.

Under terms of the settlement, the NAR is unable to prevent VOWs from gaining access to listings from its members, or to punish members who cooperate with VOWs. At the same time, the NAR gets to narrowly define what a VOW is (i.e., someone who is actively engaged in selling real estate).

The DOJ issued a statement that the settlement will help innovative real estate practices and help reduce commissions paid by consumers. “Today’s settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Deborah A. Garza. “When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates.”

The reality is that the settlement means very little to most players — although it will be reassuring to investors of cut-rate brokerages that saw their lifelines being cut off. It has been an especially tough marketplace for them.

During the intervening years, brokerages have pre-empted many of the advantages of VOWs. They have widely opened their listings to third-party players such as Zillow and Trulia or discount sites such as RedFin. They have more broadly participated in Internet Data Exchange — some had boycotted it — and they have become less reliant on one-size-fits-all sites such as Realtor.com — although it remains the largest real estate-oriented site, by far. At the same time, cut-rate brokerages such as ZipRealty have generally been able to gain access to the listings they need.

To be sure, the real estate industry has major changes ahead of it as the market continues to shake out and the role of agents and brokerages continues to shift. But as the market has shifted, very few people currently use VOWs. Certainly, this settlement is not going to bring in a new era of VOWs competing against the big (and little) guns of real estate.