Local.com announced today that it has reached a milestone of 5,000 businesses that have directly signed up for online advertising through its Local Promote subscription advertising service. Local Promote includes a landing page, call tracking, and premium placements within search results on Local.com and other sites in the company’s network.
The 5,000 mark compares with the 3,500 …

Google once again took the top spot for consumer satisfaction among portals and search engines in the University of Michigan’s quarterly study. Its score of 86 (out of 100) represents a 10 percent jump over 2007.
This came during a period in which Google’s actual products didn’t undergo major changes and could therefore represent the natural …

To follow up on last week’s post about a prospective Google Android-based T-Mobile phone, here is a video from MobileCrunch that demos Android.
The video walks through an emulator of the operating system, which is basically a desktop version of the software that allows developers to test applications without requiring an Android-based phone (the iPhone SDK …

Local product search provider Krillion today added 96 product categories to its “Localization Engine.” The new categories join Krillion’s current sweet spot of home appliances and consumer electronics, and include computers, office equipment, car audio & electronics, and tools & hardware.
This brings its product categories to 155, including 900 brands, 20,000 big-box retail locations and …

Out-of-home advertising is booming, thanks to the emergence of super high definition electronic billboards now commonly found on the nation’s highways. But can they be used to boost the fortunes of an industry that is not so booming: newspapers? That’s the question posed by marketing execs at the Detroit Free Press (Freep.com) and MediaNews Group’s …

Topix CEO Chris Tolles has a well-reasoned piece in iMedia Connection. He writes that media usage and ad dollars are quickly moving online (which we know), but local content and ads aren’t moving as fast as comparative national metrics.
But we’re starting to see a shift in attitudes and understanding of the local opportunity among national advertisers …

Here are the highlights from the TKG blog last week, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.
Here Comes the GPhone, Part IV
Early rumors of a Google phone, before the Android platform was announced, gave the device a name of “GPhone” (remember?). That name ended up being not that …

Early rumors of a Google phone, before the Android platform was announced, gave the device a name of “GPhone” (remember?). That name ended up being not that far off the mark — though Google ended up building the OS rather than the hardware.
Reports are swirling today that T-Mobile will be the first to offer a …

Sebastien Provencher points to the small but hopeful collection of local sessions that have been proposed for the 2009 South By Southwest conference taking place in March. One is led by Topix.com CEO Chris Tolles (”Think Globally, Post Locally: The Emerging Power of Local Voice“).
Thirty percent of the show’s content is user-generated, and anyone can vote …

Cox Enterprises has announced that it is putting most of its newspapers on the block, as well as Valpak, its direct mail giant. Newspapers, TV and radio currently now make up just 20 percent of the company’s revenues as it has diversified with cable TV and holdings such as AutoTrader and Manheim auto auctions, and …

Windows Virtual Earth evangelist Chris Pendleton writes on his blog about the availability of display advertising on Live Search Maps.
Known as “highlighted listings,” this is similar to the mapvertising Google Maps offers. Both place icons on map locations — sort of a premium placement beyond an organic map listing. Icons also show up whenever users …

Australia’s Sensis released its results for the financial year ended June 30, and many in the global Yellow Pages industry will be interested to find that print revenues are growing in Australia, bucking a global trend of often steep declines.
We will report more details next week in a write-up of why Sensis is succeeding where others …

Real Cities, the national ad network owned by McClatchy, has been sold to fast rising Centro. Or at least, the Real Cities brand has been sold, along with access to Real Cities’ list of 250 national advertisers. The network’s local media affiliates, however, which are mostly newspapers, aren’t included.
It isn’t really a big deal in …

The Huffington Post has launched a beta of its first local “Internet newspaper” in Chicago, with promises to produce 10 to 20 more local efforts in the next couple of years.
The Chicago site is a mishmash of local news, mostly from local publications like Chicago Business and the Chicago Sun-Times; national headlines; local blogs and …

Last night, while watching reruns of The Office on TBS, I noticed something peculiar. During a commercial break, one of the network’s stand-up comedy shows was advertised — a typical house ad.
But it had an odd feel to it. Instead of the montage style you might see on Comedy Central, showing punchy clips of comics …

Matchpoint will soon be rolling out a new set of ad products to complement its flagship online lead-gen forms. On its own site, it will integrate more of an IYP setup with searchable business listings. With each search results page, a lead-gen form will be offered that is germane to the category searched.
This broadens the …

Online newspaper pioneer Chris Jennewein, who was recently re-orged out of The San Diego Union-Tribune, has started a new position as publisher and senior vice president of Greenspun Interactive in Las Vegas. Greenspun dominates Las Vegas as the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun and owner of a city guide, TV and radio stations and …

Yahoo Brickhouse division-head Tom Coates officially launched the Fire Eagle platform today to a packed room of San Francisco journalists, analysts and bloggers (and Yahoo cofounder David Filo).
The platform, in beta since March, is based on managing users’ location data to make online services smarter and more relevant to them. It basically does this by …

The iPhone App Store is kicking butt to the tune of $1 million in sales per day ($30 million to date) and 60 million total downloads. This from an article put out yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, based on an exclusive interview with Steve Jobs.
But a few contrarian viewpoints have since emerged from venerable online …

Freedom Interactive President Michael Mathieu is leaving to be CEO of YuMe Networks, which is sort of positioned as the “DoubleClick of video.” YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, California, and backed to the tune of $16 million by Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, BV Capital and DAG Ventures. Jayant Kadambi, who …