Hyperlocal sites are well intentioned, and most have some kind of business plan. But they haven’t really focused much on making money. That’s where GrowthSpur, a new company, comes in.
Launched by former Washington Post executive and BackFence founder Mark Potts, GrowthSpur is a “soup to nuts” provider of training and services, targeting an estimated  2,000 …

Today I had the chance to talk to Todd Mozer, CEO of speech recognition technology developer Sensory Inc. In the past 15 years, about 60 million products have shipped with its chips and software embedded. These include everything from in-car voice command systems to Bluetooth headsets to voice controlled toys.
The company’s next big area of …

A year since IAC’s spin-off of several businesses, IAC Chairman Barry Diller, during a 2Q earnings call, saw some bright spots, including ServiceMagic, which saw a 5 percent jump in service requests. Diller also expressed optimism that the company had strong opportunities in several key areas, especially vertical search, and extensive downloads of its iPhone …

Praized Media continues its march toward blending Twitter and local. The latest product is a browser plugin called TwitArea that lets users tweet about places.
Specifically, the plugin plants an “insert place” button under the Twitter.com text box. When clicked, this launches a mini local search tool. After searching and browsing local listings, clicking a “tweet …

The Huffington Post has hired a staffer for a Denver site. The site, in the nation’s 20th largest market, will be HuffPo’s third local site when it launches in September. New York and Chicago are already up.
Los Angeles is slated to be No. 4, with more than a dozen sites planned in all. The sites …

According to the Internet Broadcast Local Index for May 2009, local TV station Web sites beat all other local media sites in total local minutes in 28 of the top 50 markets. BIA/Kelsey analysis of the April 2009 IB Local Index focused on how local TV stations also out-deliver newspapers in Web audiences by sometimes …

As speculated yesterday, the search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft has been officially announced. Many of the expected terms apply, and the official release has lots of detail and video addresses from Steve Ballmer and Carol Bartz (notice she mentions mobile twice). Here are the key terms:
The term of the agreement is 10 years;
Microsoft will …

NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller, left NYTimes.com to join public radio because she saw a void in local media that needed to be filled. In a Newsweek interview published this week as NPR.org is relaunched, she elaborated on her strategy to reposition public radio around not only its on-air home but also its digital and online …

Yahoo and Microsoft are expected to announce tomorrow the search deal that’s been three years in the making, according to many sources. If we do see a deal, expect it to be structured something like this:
–Bing will become the default search engine on Yahoo, while Yahoo will take over Bing’s search inventory to sell search …

We’re doing a bunch of research on self-service advertising by talking to companies that provide various ad formats such as paid search and display. This is mostly in the online realm, but we’re starting to see a move toward self service in mobile, led by companies we’ve profiled here in the past like AdLocal and …

Women have become a prime target for service referrals. The appeal of Angie’s List’s premium gated community is largely oriented around them. Now ServiceMagic is ramping it up.
The IAC company, which recently launched an ambitious TV campaign, has announced a new partnership with Meredith Corp. that integrates a ServiceMagic widget (“find a pro”) with several …

The conventional wisdom is that alternative weeklies have their best days behind them.  But that’s clearly not the position of Village Voice Media, which owns 15 titles reaching about one-quarter of the 7.6 million alt weekly readers in the U.S.
President and COO Scott Tobias notes that VVM has aggressively moved online in the past two-and-a-half …

OK, I confess. I watched “30 Rock” last Thursday.
About midway through the program, I caught a 30-second spot for ServiceMagic. This was the first network TV spot I’ve seen for ServiceMagic (although once I started looking around online, I found other TV spots it has run). This particular spot is known as the “tale of …

The Walt Disney Co. runs a media research lab in Austin, Texas, for the Disney TV Group and ESPN as well as doing other consumer research. Peter Seymour, the unit’s EVP of research and strategy, told The New York Times, it will be releasing new Web ad effectiveness research to advertisers on July 28 at …

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.
Google Brings More Local to AdWords
Google announced today a new feature in its AdWords search marketing product that will let advertisers automatically list their address as part of their text ad. Known as “local …

ESPN, which revealed a plan this week to launch a series of local sports Web sites, may soon be contending with local CBS Sports sites as well. As reported by the Fang’s Bites blog, ESPN has registered at least 26 ESPN(Cityname).com sites, but CBS Sports is also in on the action, having registered at least …

Google announced today a new feature in its AdWords search marketing product that will let advertisers automatically list their address as part of their text ad. Known as “local extensions,” it allows businesses to link their AdWords account to their Google Local Business Center (LBC) listing.
The result is that AdWords will automatically serve ads to …

Ambassador Media has filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of New York’s Southern District. The publisher, which operates in the five boroughs of New York City and surrounding areas, published nine directory titles in 2008 with distribution, we estimate, of 3.5 million copies. Ambassador  relaunched its IYP platform via Canpages’ ImmersiFind platform in …

Digital marketing agency John Ryan conducted a study of attitudes toward digital signage among more than 60 leading European and South African banks. Eighty percent expect financial digital signage to be in wide use in the coming years. However, one of the key challenges bankers see is in creating, localizing and managing content. To be most …

Google announced on its Mobile Blog that it will launch its mobile social tool Latitude on the iPhone. It took a little while to do this simply because it prioritized other mobile platforms that were better suited to the product such as Android and BlackBerry. In other words, the iPhone’s lack of “background” functionality made …