Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional partners.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is live, and other newspapers and local media companies are anticipated …

As promised, here are the “day 2″ thoughts on the fate of the iPad. Obviously, lots of talk about the device this week — whether it’s a viable device, whether it’s a Kindle killer, etc. The former question is more important and the answer is yes.
The User Take
The timing is right as touch screens have …

Center’d started its mission in June 2008 like most city guides, albeit one largely aimed at women and planning. But over time, the local space has changed. And the site itself has refocused to meet “the missing pieces” in local.
CEO Jennifer Dulski and CTO Chandu Thota, in a conversation with us, say they’d encountered  a …

Examiner.com, the Philip Anschutz-backed site that calls itself “the insider source for everything local,” says it is likely to pass 30,000 active contributors, or “Examiners,”  within days, and 85,000 by 2011. The current tally includes 1,234 active contributors in L.A., 1,189 active contributors in New York, 921 in Chicago, 901 in San Francisco, 900 …

The Berry Co. announced today new alliances with Yodle and Web.com that will add to the portfolio of online product and services Berry will offer its small-business customers. The deals are part of a new branded offering called Berry Leads that the company will roll out market by market in 2010.
The deals fit into Berry’s …

AT&T released its full-year 2009 earnings today, and its Advertising Solutions unit, which includes print Yellow Pages and Yellowpages.com, posted total revenues of US$4.8 billion, a 12.6 percent decline.
AT&T online directories unit Yellowpages.com grew 12.7 percent in Q4, compared with Q3 growth of 20.7 percent. Total online revenues for the year were US$884 million, which …

Mobile ad network Millennial Media is out with its latest monthly (December) Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach & Targeting (SMART).
Most notable from the findings was that Entertainment was dethroned as the top mobile ad spending category by Portals & Directories. These include online portals such as AOL and Microsoft, trying to plant a stake in …

Minutes ago, the fabled iPad was unveiled by Steve Jobs at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. An exciting moment: I’m at my desk constantly hitting refresh on the Engadget live blog coverage to get details.
Though I’ve kept an open ear to the pre-launch frenzy, I mostly avoided covering it here because the dial was already turned …

Here’s a question: How long would directory publishers sit back and let new companies such as RedBeacon, AlikeList and others disrupt the leads economy for SMBs with search and socially driven features such as Twitter and Facebook? Or Google, with Place Pages? That’s a question that Local Matters and other Yellow Pages  vendors have obviously …

Bono and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman
As widely reported last week, Yelp has confirmed that it will receive a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, which is widely known for the involvement of U2 frontman Bono among its seven partners.  Elevation, which manages $1.9 billion, will also seek to increase its total investment to $100 million …

Venture capital king Frank Quattrone (the banker behind Amazon, Netscape and Cisco) has a message: IPOs have gotten too big, innovation is being stifled, exits are being delayed and firms need straight-forward advice, not Wall Street “casinos.”
“Wall Street no longer knows how to value,” he complained, during a breakfast talk before 500+  VCs and entrepreneurs …

Among the highlights of today’s mobile session at OMMA Social were comments from location-based social networks Loopt and Brightkite. Both continue to evolve their product features and, by extension, the ad formats available to marketers.
Loopt is on a roll with the recent acquisition of GraffitiGeo and the newest version of its product (2.0) that includes …

Today I moderated a panel at MediaPost’s annual OMMA Social show in San Francisco.  A designated mobile session symbolized the topic’s rising prominence relative to last year, when it was discussed (but not as much).
Interest in mobile is clearly growing among brand advertisers and agencies: That much could be felt in the air, not to …

Canada’s Yellow Pages Group has deepened its investment in verticals with its recent acquisition of Restaurantica, one of Canada’s largest online dining communities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a report by Paul Steep at Scotia Capital suggests the amount was immaterial to YPG’s financial results.
Restaurantica was founded in 2003, and has more …

Topping the list of hot topics in digital media these days (besides iTablet rumors) is social gaming (i.e. Zynga), mobile social apps (i.e. foursquare), and mobile gaming.  Mobile startup Booyah is combining all of them in an iPhone app called MyTown whose growth can only be described as explosive.
After launching its version 2.0 last week, …

Having been in the trenches for the past year talking about multiproduct selling and how a consultative or collaborative sales process is a key component for selling multiple media, I keep hearing over and over again “I’ve been training on consultative selling for years so why should we rely on it to take us into …

EBay founder Pierre Omidyar  and former eBay VP Randy Ching are setting up a local public affairs and civic news site in Hawaii, where Omidyar lives, according to a post on Omidyar’s blog that was picked up by paidContent. Former Rocky Mountain News Editor and Publisher John Temple has been hired as its editor, and …

By Steve Passwaiter and Rick Ducey
For broadcasters, it is an article of faith that “localism” is a point of differentiation that adds value to their operations. Localism tends to mean local news, sports, weather, traffic, local events, coverage of local government, and other promotional and volunteer involvement in the community. There’s a lot of chatter …

The Berry Co. (formerly Berry and Local Insight Media) has unveiled a revamped organization and business model aimed at greater efficiency and support of a new “client–focused” strategy, the company announced last week.
As a result, the company is slimming down, closing offices in Hudson and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and consolidating operations in North Carolina. …

Most of the money spent on mobile ads is from brand advertisers and agencies. And the targeting methods they use, via ad networks, are mostly borrowed from the online tactics they know best.
This involves branding and some direct response, but the targeting is woefully behind what mobile devices are capable of (see past commentary/rant on …