In case you haven’t seen any of the materials, The Kelsey Group’s new parent company, BIA, is launching Winning Media Strategies, its first full-fledged conference. The developer of the conference is BIA’s Rick Ducey, who previously was head of research at the National Association of Broadcasters. The event is geared to provide broadcasting, cable TV …

The iPhone took top honors in JD Power’s influential consumer satisfaction study, smartphone edition. This doesn’t come as a big surprise, and it was mostly a clean sweep across the main categories (features, ease of operation, physical design, etc.). The only place it didn’t kick everyone’s butt was “battery life” — where BlackBerry and LG …

I had the pleasure of attending an excellent mini-conference yesterday on Digital Media Thought Leadership. The organizers were the prolific “emerging technology connection” SDForum and the venerable VC firm Sierra Ventures. (The key commercial sponsor was the law firm Nixon Peabody LLP.)

The conference covered some of the most challenging and topical issues around the transition …

Every time we turn around another local-oriented Web site says it’s targeting rural and exurban audiences. So far, we’ve got Center’d, Topix, MerchantCircle, WeddingMapper.com and others zeroing on the rurals (are we missing any?).
All these sites are drawn by the technical capability of geotargeting thousands of population centers by ZIP code. They’re also encouraged by …

 
In addition to a 22 percent year-over-year revenue decline, IAC announced during today’s first-quarter earnings call that it will acquire Urbanspoon for an undisclosed amount.
There are many possible synergies with IAC’s Citysearch — most notably mobile. Citysearch is pushing harder on its mobile strategy after seeing that its mobile users are 5X more likely to …

Local/social/event planning site Center’d announced a redesign late yesterday, which will make the site more effective as a local search and discovery engine.
This will be version 3.0 if you count the site’s first iteration as FatDoor. The second version of the site, under the direction of former Yahoo Marketplaces head Jennifer Dulski, fashioned itself more …

Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, the man behind top business tomes such as “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and now “Outliers,” spoke today at the Yellow Pages Association conference in San Diego, suggesting that Yellow Pages publishers’ advantage over Google and others is their “deep trust” with advertisers — something he may have picked up at a …

Microsoft announced today that it’s working with Spotzer to bring video production capability to small businesses in the Netherlands. This will be part of a broader product under Microsoft’s advertising division that involves a self-service platform for SMBs to create and manage video, display and text ads.
According to the release:
On the basis of a few …

National Yellow Pages advertisers appearing on a YPA conference panel moderated by The Kelsey Group’s Charles Laughlin reiterated the importance of Yellow Pages to their businesses. While they were open-minded about experimenting with new types of directional advertising, including Yelp, Internet Yellow Pages and search, print clearly remains their core effort.
“Yellow Pages is core to …

Arguing that local and state “opt-out” requirements for Yellow Pages delivery would cripple local businesses and force industry layoffs, the Yellow Pages Association has successfully fought and beat back opt-out requirements this year in some states, reports YPA President Neg Norton.
But the industry must still contend with additional opt-out efforts in other states, as well …

Keynoting at the Yellow Pages Association Convention in San Diego today, R.H. Donnelley CEO Dave Swanson acknowledged “the worst local media environment this country has seen since the Great Depression.” But the YPA’s outgoing chairman also noted that “the will to live, in our industry, is very strong.
“We’re moving from sellers of advertising products to …

Clickable, a third-party online search manager, says local search packages are too heavily marked up, with too little emphasis on conversions. It is re-aiming to fix these problems with a “highly scalable” local solution for publishers and resellers. The “Clickable Platform” is supported by a team of 85 people, of whom 55 are dedicated to …

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.
Dinan Takes Helm at Telmetrics 
Call measurement pioneer Telmetrics last week named Bill Dinan president. Dinan takes over from Richard Zurawski, who will stay on the company’s board and, in an unusual move, remain on …

Call measurement pioneer Telmetrics last week named Bill Dinan president. Dinan takes over from Richard Zurawski, who will stay on the company’s board and, in an unusual move, remain on the management team as CFO.
I chatted with Dinan about his new role and developments in the Yellow Pages industry, which is reeling from a cascade …

Google announced yesterday that it has optimized Google Product Search for iPhones and Android. Google Product Search (manifestation of Froogle) allows users to compare products, prices and reviews. The move to mobile is a smart one, given increased use of mobile devices for things like product search.
But this “porting” over to mobile is probably only …

Fresh from the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, it is clear that local TV stations should continue to extend their advertising and programming on — and for — new media platforms, including the Internet, cable and mobile TV. “Just having a presence on these multiplatform extensions …

Cox’s AutoTrader.com, which reaches 15 million unique visitors per month, bills itself as the Google of auto search. For the most part, the visitors come from the URL, plus various affiliate relationships.
But now it is reaching out to potential car buyers in general via “AutoTrader.com Access,” a customized vertical network developed with Adify, which is …

AT&T reported its first-quarter earnings this morning, and its Advertising Solutions unit, which includes the Yellow Pages business, recorded top-line revenues of US$1.3 billion, down 10.4 percent over Q1 2008. In its earnings briefing, the company attributed the double-digit revenue decline to “economic pressures” and the sale of The Berry Co. to Local Insight Media …

Neal Polachek and I are at AdTech today and tomorrow and noticing some love for local — something traditionally missing from the mostly brand marketing-focused show.
This mostly came in the form of a location-based advertising panel this afternoon. Local was first framed as one of the oldest targeting metrics — before behavioral and contextual — …

Citysearch’s strategy of winning wider distribution for its user reviews, editorial content and business profiles, “and living wherever consumers want to be” has becoming closer to reality as it has announced back-to-back partnerships with Idearc’s Superpages.com and AT&T Interactive’s Yellowpages.com.
The deals reinforce an earlier deal announced last month with MySpace. While the business relationship is …