Next week I will be moderating a panel discussion at the Yellow Pages Association conference in San Diego featuring national companies that spend tens of millions annually on Yellow Pages advertising. The hour-long panel (Monday, April 27, 11:45 a.m.) was put together by Telmetrics, a leader in the call measurement space.
To prepare, I’ve been chatting with the panelists to …

American University’s J-Lab, which is funded by The Knight Foundation, has announced new grants for eight hyperlocal sites as part of its New Voices competition. All of the sites are focused on geographic communities, with many of them appearing to be run by former newspaper journalists.
The awards consist of $17,000 in the first year, and …

Steve Espinosa’s budding Local Search News site has begun to produce podcasts. We’re the guest on the second episode — a discussion about mobile search and mobile technology in general. The podcast builds off our guest column on his site and can be listened to here.

One of the disadvantages of being the “most respected analyst firm” is that other people (including otherwise knowledgeable pundits) are wont to misquote you, use your comments out of context, or simply draw erroneous conclusions.
Although we were flattered to see The Kelsey Group quoted in SunValleyOnline.com recently, about the fast rise of Web searches for …

ReachLocal has launched ReachLocal XChange, a local business ad exchange, with Fox Audience Network, Ask Sponsored Listings and others. By doing so, the company moves beyond its initial reliance on search packages to small businesses.The introduction of an ad exchange is the second major change to its model in recent months. A …

I saw several more articles over the weekend on how small businesses are using social network sites like Facebook and MySpace for marketing.
This triggered a couple of thoughts…
There’s a whole a ‘shadow network’ of business marketers (B2C and B2B) thriving in many of the large, consumer-oriented social sites. Many of these are small businesses and …

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.
Skype Redefines Itself: It’s All About Local
I’ve spent the past few months in talks with Skype about how the company would like to diversify its product model, and better position itself as a tool …

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, a new report by consultants Sageworks reports that amid the economic gloom, some industries are actually doing pretty well. These industries, with their sales growth rates for the past year, include accounting and tax services (up 10.9 percent); specialized freight haulers (up 6.8 percent); health practitioners other than …

Intuit has purchased BooRah, a rating and review site, and will add its functionality to the Intuit small business platform, which has also incorporated the old StepUp e-commerce site and Homestead Web site construction services. The companies aren’t talking much about the deal, which closed yesterday.
BooRah had changed strategy from its early days, moving away …

I’ve spent the past few months in talks with Skype about how the company would like to diversify its product model, and better position itself as a tool to generate leads for local businesses.
Perhaps the timing couldn’t be better for a redefinition like this. Months of speculation over eBay’s divestiture of Skype culminated with this …

Mobile ad network Millennial Media released its first monthly Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting (SMART). This extrapolates market data based on the activity it sees on its network — much like the reports we’ve covered from the likes of AdMob.
According to SMART, mobile ads now reach 31 million of the 56 million Nielsen …

Recently the company that delivers Idearc Yellow Pages in the Princeton, NJ, area brought our office a few copies of the most recent edition. I imagine that most people do what I did when the book came, which was to check to make sure both my residential and business listings were in the directory. (They …

Apartments are in the vanguard among online marketplace verticals, as more apartment owners take advantage of Web and mobile features to target prospects — especially younger prospects.
Indeed, apartment owners are increasingly leveraging video to show off floor plans and surrounding communities. They’re also using social media such as MySpace to differentiate their communities and give …

Selling advertising on customized Google Maps is becoming increasingly common, with agencies such as LAT49 showing the way. Ads have been sold on maps for hiking, jogging trails, local transit and other categories.
Now Wedding Mapper is taking the same concept to weddings, where it allows couples to map out a wedding trail of airports, receptions, …

Under the new leadership of CEO Carol Bartz, everything is up for review at Yahoo, and that probably includes HotJobs, its recruitment site. But recent press reports suggesting that HotJobs has already been designated for sale are off base.
The news stories are based on Bartz’s broad answer to a question about which Yahoo properties might …

Jumptap took an evolutionary step today with the launch of its tapMatch mobile ad targeting platform. The company has traditionally provided a range of mobile products, including a white-label search platform for publishers and carriers like AT&T and Virgin Mobile. TapMatch extends its capability as an ad network.
The ad network side of its business has …

Superpages today officially launched its iPhone application. This joins iPhone apps from all the major U.S. Yellow Pages publishers, as they each try to solidify brands and build traffic levels on the quickly growing mobile Web.
Some of the features of the new app include:
Add Photos: Did your food taste as good as it looked? Take …

We’ve written recently how Twitter and other real-time feed based communication tools have potential integrations with local search. We’re also hearing a lot about how Twitter can be used for a new kind of search — used to comb through a real-time index of conversations happening now (the statusphere).
This is potentially threatening for Google and …

TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy poses the specialist vs. generalist question, as it relates to mobile devices. It’s an issue we’ve raised here before: Despite improving smartphone market penetration and quality standards, are they hybrid plays that lose quality in the many functions they are trying to cram into one device?
From TechCrunch:
“It seems the closer the industry …

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer followed The New York Times‘ lead today with a segment on “news alternatives” (audio download here). Featured on the program were Joel Kramer of MinnPost, John Brod from Patch.com and Esther Thorson from The University of Missouri’s J-school.
News Hour correspondent Jeffrey Brown took the “journalism-first” approach, wondering how the …