The impact of mobile access on media is still being sorted out, but some preliminary data suggests it extends consumer research to the weekends and at night — and that news is a real driver. The first data we saw came from Cars.com. The latest data come from Verve Wireless, a provider of mobile publishing, …

During a session I ran today on local search marketing at SES Chicago, Atif Rafiq, Yahoo Local’s director of strategy and business development, presented comScore data showing that local queries grew 76 percent in February (year over year).

After going back and crunching some comScore numbers for overall search query volume, I found it has comparatively …

The Wall Street Journal has been making some bold statements in its recent coverage. A couple of weeks ago, The WSJ’s Emily Steel pronounced Yellow Pages “extinct.” This week, a new article by Steel noted the “tapering off” of ad spending on auto sites — another bold statement (although the article itself was measured and …

AOL’s MapQuest has strived to remake itself for several years. But it has really been going into overdrive since June, with new management, and the launch of MapQuest Local, a map-based directory and city guide service. More recently, it has unleashed specially tailored versions for smartphones.
What’s surprising about MapQuest is that it remains the industry …

Huffington Post started it, with a local site in Chicago, with promises of many more. Now Playboy is jumping into the local game as well.
The news was buried in this week’s news that Christie Hefner was resigning as CEO. But during a presentation at UBS Media Week, EVP Bob Meyers said Playboy is launching a …

Spas and salon advertisers are a huge focus for local sites. They’re a Top 4 selection for Citysearch, and also rank highly on Yelp and other sites. Now they are being specifically targeted by InnerRewards, a new health and wellness vertical site for women launched by Julie Elaine Brown, a veteran marketer for Johnson & Johnson’s …

Bakersfield Californian President and CEO Richard Beene says smaller advertisers will be receiving more and more focus by the independently owned paper — something that many newspapers say, but few really do much about.
In a note to employees discussing recent company layoffs, published by LA Observed, Beene says the newspaper’s New Business Development team is “focused …

Urbanspoon has been one of the hottest iPhone apps of ’08. It recently was named to the top 10 most downloaded apps of the year and boasts 2.2 million downloads to date.
Following some of our conversations with cofounder Ethan Lowry, he was interviewed by MobileCrunch where he shared some interesting insights on mobile marketing. These …

Google announced today that it will add an option to AdWords that will let advertisers specifically run search ads on iPhones and G1s.
According to the Google Mobile Blog:
Today, the Google mobile ads team is announcing a new campaign-level option that allows those of you who are AdWords advertisers to show your desktop text and image …

The embrace of social media by the real estate and apartment communities has been strong, with many sites displaying videos of units and the community (or linking to YouTube), writing blogs, and participating on social sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
Vitrue, a consulting/analytics company that measures “brand conversations,” says apartment sites are especially dominated by Dominion …

Here are the highlights from the TKG blog last week, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.
IPhone Voice Search: Vlingo Joins Mix
I wasn’t able to report this yesterday, but Vlingo has joined Google in the small batch of iPhone voice search apps. It has gotten good reviews …

I wasn’t able to report this yesterday, but Vlingo has joined Google in the small batch of iPhone voice search apps. It has gotten good reviews so far from Wired and CNET. Ours is to come soon (to see how it holds up to the local search test). You can also see a video tour …

Yellowbook.com has undergone lots of changes over the past year, including the integration of video, reviews, redesigns, ad campaigns, a partnership with YouTube and an overall rebranding.
Much of that can be attributed to the site’s newly appointed new media officer and the “father of IYP” (Superpages) Pat Marshall. Our friends at ReelSEO sat down with …

After I posted about San Francisco “Yelp Day” earlier in the week, I was alerted to the fact that it actually never happened: It was canceled at the last minute by Mayor Gavin Newsom. An interesting turn of events. SFGate has the details.

We keep going back to Clayton Christensen and his disruptive technology timeline … and we really don’t see that anything in the local space truly qualifies as the disruptor (although Google is worth pondering). Still, they keep coming.
The latest contender is Brownbook, the free Wiki-based directory that lets anyone submit and edit a directory listing, …

Following the BIA webinar last month on the technological and competitive dynamics of mobile TV, we’re already seeing television reach the iPhone. U.K.-based streaming television provider Livestation will preview an iPhone app tomorrow that will show live television on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Technically, this isn’t pure mobile TV because it will only work on …

Reply.com is gaining some attention on the local search scene with a proposition to pare down local search traffic to more qualified users. The site buys search traffic, which it then passes through a landing page that resembles a lead gen form. After ascertaining relevant info about a user’s location (ZIP) and other needs, it …

Today is Yelp Day in San Francisco, by order of Mayor Gavin Newsom. If memory serves me correctly, this is the second annual Yelp Day. It’s a nice PR boost for Yelp. For the city, it’s probably a way to give a nod to a local tech company while also encouraging people to go out …

Facebook will give up preliminary efforts to build its own classified service and will have classifieds powered by Oodle’s network instead. The effort, announced in Oodle’s blog, will launch by Q1 2009. With the signing, Facebook joins MySpace, Wal-Mart, Media General, Cox, The Washington Post Co., CanWest and others as Oodle distributors.
CEO Craig Donato told …

Following yesterday’s post on the 10,000-app milestone for Apple’s App Store, the company today came out with its own list of the most downloaded apps of the year.
It divided these into categories like top free apps, top paid apps, top games, entertainment, social networking, etc. Amid the most popular ones, there are lots of good …