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 partners in coming months. Allmenus.com is the second brand from parent company Dotmenu.com. The original brand was Campusfood.com, which brings online ordering to college students.

Allmenus’ media partnerships involve co-branding and promotional advertising, potentially including display, direct, e-mail and social media. They also involve contextual integrated content. While they notably don’t involve the papers in sales, the papers receive a minority share of local market revenues. Revenues are derived from online food ordering, advertising and monthly maintenance fees.

Allmenus Chief Revenue Officer Tony Wills, a former exec with Quigo, Newsday and R.H. Donnelley, says the company determined that local markets had to be launched one at a time to be truly successful — even though it has good distribution via Google and Yahoo Local. Newspapers still have the online brand and promotional power to best drive local awareness and sales, he says, despite their drop-offs in penetration and usage. Newspapers also appreciate Allmenus as a “content” service since it strives to have the most comprehensive set of menus in each market — something it handles with local feet on the street, and fly-in teams.

Under terms of the partnerships, Allmenus widgets for online ordering will be featured in specific contextual parts of newspaper sites, including sports, local, weather and business. While it would seem to make sense to have newspapers also handle local sales, Wills says that it wouldn’t really work because newspaper sales staffs are paid on commissions.

A primary reason it wouldn’t work is that Allmenus takes no money upfront. Instead, it charges a transaction fee that is a little over 10 percent.  It takes 11.5 percent, or $5.75, out of a $50 order, for instance. “If there is no revenue, there is no sale,” says Wills.

In any case, newspapers may have trouble committing the resources in today’s environment. “Newspapers are under siege,” says Wills. “They can’t commit the resources. They need it to be turn-key.”

There is a role for newspaper sales reps, however — to build awareness for the Allmenus service. “It makes the print sale” for restaurants more valuable because of added awareness and usage, says Wills. Indeed, online ordering is a big piece of the restaurant landscape. Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales — online orders are 10 percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items. Ultimately, however, it is a different ballgame than brand and awareness advertising.

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 assimilated into the mainstream. The “lean back” nature of the device makes it perfect for reading or watching video on the couch; the size makes it suitable for a kitchen device; and the portability + 10-hour battery make it a no brainer for travelers and commuters (there are well-covered technical limitations, but to focus on the big picture … ).

Besides form factor, the 140,000 iPhone apps compatible with the device on day 1, give it an extra boost. This is especially true for iPhone owners who have spent time and money building app libraries. The timing is also right for Apple’s content deals, as newspapers and other industries are hoping for iTunes help, a la music industry.

Will it fit? In other words, can Apple pull off a third device class between laptop and smartphone? I believe yes. We’re too early in mobile device lifespans to discount a device class. The same “in-between device” logic made against the iPad can be used to argue that the smartphone itself lies “in between” a dumb phone and an iPad-like device.

Don’t assume smartphones have “won” yet as a device category. With still relatively low penetration of mobile devices, the market can still adopt form factors on either end that do smartphones’ hybrid functions better (an ongoing debate). Pan back: Again, it’s still early and the market has made few decisive judgments.

The Advertiser Take

The other interesting angle here is advertising. Like user acclimation to mobile, advertiser demand levels have likewise risen for the many reasons we talk about here daily. The iPad gives the growing ecosystem of in-app advertising a boost by increasing usage, traffic and ad coverage — a function of inventory and screen size.

In this light, it makes Apple’s Quattro acquisition that much greater, as we speculated. Quattro will likely be positioned as the preferred ad network that is integrated with the SDK workflow for app developers. Meanwhile other major mobile ad networks have announced support for the iPad app format (same SDK with option for iPad optimization via more pixels).

Apps aside, it also makes mobile Web advertising a bit more interesting. One question is whether this will be mobile advertising, or is it the same ads you see when browsing via laptop? The answer is both: The iPad renders the “real Web” but does so through the mobile Safari Web browser.

This means that it doesn’t read Flash ads (Apple is likely awaiting broader adoption of HTML 5 among other reasons), and that certain ad networks (like Google) differentiate to a certain degree which ads are seen on mobile browsers. So it can be seen as a mobile browsing experience to a certain degree. As such, it will bring more users and inventory to the mobile web.

No One Really Knows Yet

Like the reverberation throughout the tech media and blogosphere over the past 2 days, this is mostly speculation. The market is yet to react, and the device’s true use cases and killer apps are yet to be seen. But judging by the rapid fire rollouts of the iPhone and other past Apple products, you can bet to see a lot more from this device that hasn’t even been mentioned yet.

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 noisy ecosystem of local sites suffering from content overload and meaningless, one-dimensional user-generated content that gives four stars + to everything. “There is certainly not a lack of content,” says Dulski.

Their solution: comprehensive information and deeper context. Dulski, the former head of Yahoo Marketplaces, says the Center’d team has spent the past year building “Sentiment Analysis,” a data platform that pulls in and analyzes data and language from social media sites, maps and other sources. “It is more robust than it appears at first glance,” she says, noting that it actually understands language, while most sites are focused on a keyword approach.

The platform, which has some similarities to Marchex’s OpenList, “understands food terms. We know that salmon and crème brulee is food.” The presentation of the analysis is also more complex, showing sentiment as a series of bar charts, rather than simple “star” systems.

“One piece of this is like Zagat,” the popular ratings company, says Dulski. “But it is much broader,” partnering with sites such as Topix, Mobimissimo, Insequent, Silicon Valley Moms Blog Network and various other local and travel blogs and Web sites (a few dozen or so). At the same time, Center’d’s own count of city guides has expanded from 12 to 50 cities.

The site has also added a Twitter page and a popular iPhone app. Dulski, in fact, projects that mobile is going to play an increasingly important part of the city guide business, perhaps accounting for 50 percent of usage within a few years.

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 in Denver and 804 in Washington, D.C.

All 240 major markets are expected to surpass 1,000 Examiners by 3Q 2010. The site also has 500 Examiners in Canada, plus a major network of user-generated content coming from its NowPublic site.

Examiner.com, which is largely search driven, differentiates itself from other content aggregators such as Demand Media and Associated Content by its local focus. It pays its Examiners based on a formula that includes page views and other factors. While some Examiners make little more than coffee money, Examiners who hit on a major story can receive hundreds of dollars per article.

CEO Rick Blair said in a statement that “we have the reach, and now we are working on the depth.”

Former AOL Digital City vet Blair is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, which takes place in San Diego March 22-24.

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 broader strategy of becoming less print centric and more about selling a wide array of local media solutions, supported by performance measurement. To achieve this, Berry is collecting a growing list of partners to deliver components of this strategy, Yodle and Web.com being the latest two. Berry already resells Yellowpages.com and Google, and it has formed a deep partnership with 3L Systems and Salesforce.com to create the systems to enable the company to sell and provision media across multiple products and platforms.

“Our goal is to ensure that our small and medium-sized business clients are generating local leads from the multiple sources and platforms that today’s consumers use,” said Scott Pomeroy, president and CEO of Berry, in the announcement today. “We believe that Web.com and Yodle will bring best-in-class products, fulfillment and digital expertise to our clients, complementing our client-focused approach.”

A year ago, we talked with Yodle after it raised a US$10 million round. At that time, the company reported 5,000 advertisers and 250 employees. Yodle, like rival ReachLocal (which recently filed for an IPO), deploys a direct sales force.

As we learned recently, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein is open to the idea of companies like ReachLocal reselling its inventory. The Berry-Yodle deal has Berry reselling Yodle’s products. However, we wonder if the Berry-Yodle deal couldn’t be a two-way street, given Yodle’s direct contact with SMBs?

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 accounts for about 18 percent of total Advertising Solutions revenues. This puts AT&T at the high end of North American publishers in terms of share of revenues from online.

Margins took a hit in 2009, not a surprise given the grim economic environment. BIA/Kelsey calculates the Advertising Solutions 2009 margin at 39.2 percent, compared with 45.5 percent in 2008.

One avenue that AT&T will pursue this year to shore up its position online — increasingly critical to restoring the business to growth — is the launch of social media site Buzz.com, currently in invitation-only “alpha” phase.

This article from Forbes yesterday outlines the new product — widely reported to be in the works for some time. Yellowpages.com President David Krantz is interviewed in the piece. While the site draws immediate comparisons to newly flush Yelp, there are some key differences, notably the choice of a “favorites” option over the use of full user-generated reviews.

Buzz.com will be a critical test case for how traditional directory publishers (a label AT&T Ad Solutions no doubt will increasingly resist) can pivot their approach to business into social media. Other directory publishers actively involved in social media include Eniro, European Directories and Truvo.

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 mobile and buy traffic to get the ball moving.

Another fast moving category on the list was Travel, moving from 10 to 8. This was one of the focal points of this month’s report and the drill down of travel spending categories was likewise offered (chart below).

Other highlights include (Millennial’s emphasis):

• U.S. Mobile Web: Decreased slightly to 66.6M users, according to Nielsen (Nov.)

• Special Section: Travel Knows Mobile. Millennial Media Knows Travel: For the first time since S.M.A.R.T was first published in March 2009, Entertainment was not the top advertising vertical.  Portals and Directories took the top slot in Q4. Telecom, Finance, Entertainment and Dating round out the top 5.

• Engagement: Average monthly page views per user increased to 125 in December from 113 in November, and average user session times increased from 5:02 to 5:09 (min:sec).
• Devices: Samsung represented approximately 23 percent of our network impression share in Q4. But the iPhone was the leading smartphone on our network with 41 percent of our network U.S. impressions.

The SMART report is similar in concept to AdMob’s monthly reports in that it highlights spending and activity on Millennial’s network. As such, it’s not directly representative of all mobile activity and spending, but valuable data nonetheless to view directionally and over time. Past coverage is here (scroll).

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 up way too high for a device that no one had seen.

We heard lots of speculation. Based simply on the law of large numbers (and some leaks), a few on-target calls are likely to result from thousands of speculating analysts, bloggers and reporters.

Here’s what turned out to be on-target:

• Name: iPad
• Touch screen device that resembles a larger iPhone/iPod touch
• Device built for portability of iPhone but larger screen of a MacBook
• Apps-centric interface for home screen navigation (though customizable)
• Accelerometer-controlled dual mode landscape and portrait
• Full capacitive multi-touch display
• 10 hours of battery life
• 9.7 inch display, 0.5 inches thin, 1.5 pounds
• Wi-Fi 802.11n & Bluetooth 2.1
• Available in 16, 32 and 64 GB Flash storage capacity
• Like iPhone, Syncs with PC via USB (adapter required)
• Also like iPhone, mobile connectivity is Wi-Fi plus 3G dual mode on some models
• Deal with AT&T for $29.99 for unlimited data ($14.99 for 250MB). Compares with average wireless broadband access for laptops (via dongle) of about $60.
• Price: starts at $499 and goes up to $829, based on a matrix of options:

Additional specs:

• iTunes and YouTube HD built in
• Docking station available for keyboard & desktop setup
• Photo viewing/sharing showcased as a central use, along with calendar, e-mail
• Web browsing is also central component, employing what looks like a larger version of mobile Safari
• Google Maps and Street View showcased in Jobs’ demo; so much for Bing rumors (for now)
• Video capabilities showcased; lots of power under the hood with a 1GHz Apple A4 chip
• Environmentally friendly (arsenic and mercury free)
• Can run all iPhone apps (now up to 140,000)
• Additional support for larger screen now included in iPhone SDK for developers to optimize apps for iPad (optional)
• More robust gaming apps showcased for this additional capability: partnership with EA will yield many games
• Brushes — capacitive touch-based sketching app will be powerful tool for graphic designers
• As expected, device built for reading newspaper: NY Times example showcased
• iBooks app is built in eReader with Kindle-like “e-ink” (ePub format)
• Online bookstore looks to be an offshoot of iTunes and includes partnerships with Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Penguin and others (sounds textbook-heavy … student target market?)
• iWorks productivity suite rebuilt for the iPad (again, likely a student play here)
• Device will begin shipping in 60 days for non-3G models and 90 days for 3G models

Jobs ended the presentation by stressing that more than 75 million people already know how to use this product. In other words, the design is built on the interface and mobility of the iPhone and iPod Touch (also interesting that we get to hear the previously undisclosed number of iPhones and iPod touches shipped).

This is Jobs’ preemptive answer to the question of whether the company can pull off a third class of products between mobile device and laptop. My gut feeling is yes. Apple is a market maker. Period. This is yet another game changer from Cupertino.

More thoughts to come over the coming hours and years.

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 asked themselves.

Now Local Matters has come out with “Destination Search,” a new social platform that seeks to level the search and social playing field for its U.S. and international clients, which so far includes  Dex B2B in the U.S;  Truvo, European Directories and Pagini Aurii in Europe;  and Yellow Pages Group in New Zealand.

Playing off a feature set originally developed for real estate multiple listings services, Local Matters’ platform includes state of the art social and search features. It also seeks to leverage existing strengths, such as business profile information.

Key features of the white label solution include enhanced profile listings; search optimization; integration (and easy sharing) with Facebook and Twitter; blog enablement; ratings and reviews ported from Yelp and other sources; and the addition of social media feeds on assorted online advertising.

Kris Skavish, Vice President of Products and Marketing, told us that Local Matters started planning Destination Search last September, with the specific intent of focusing on building rich local context. “A problem with online directories has been search relevancy,” she noted.

Another challenge has been to reconcile Yellow Pages headings with most searched categories, which are typically microheadings. “’Plumbers’ is too broad. You need to get to the correct root,” said Skavish, noting that Local Matters has also created custom microheadings for categories such as hotels and attorneys.

For instance, “romantic hotels” might be sought out in user generated content but not generally included as a category. Users can also rate pictures included in romantic hotels.  Publishers can also insert content at the top of the page, or refine results. They can also create brand oriented categories, such as “Toyota.”

While Destination Search leveraged Local Matters’ work with real estate Multiple Listing Services,  important differences revealed themselves, added Skavish. “With the MLS,  you prove your value with a lead ” she notes. “It isn’t a ranking model.  And in real estate, the default view is maps. But with Yellow Pages, it is an ad model. You want users to make an action.”

Local Matters CEO Mat Stover is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010 March 22-24 in San Diego.

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 via stock shares from vested employees and other eligible shareholders.

In a statement, Yelp said it “plans to use the additional funding to deepen its market leadership position throughout the US, accelerate growth in Canada and throughout Western Europe, and continue the development of innovative mobile applications.”

Yelp had been in apparent talks to be purchased by Google for $500 million in December , but it isn’t clear why the deal didn’t go through (or even if the talks really happened). Elevation’s valuation of Yelp appears to be for less than $500 million.

Elevation is also an investor in Move.com, Palm, Forbes Magazine — all  contrarian bets.

Yelp Product Manager Eric  Singley is appearing on the Mobile Superforum at Marketplaces 2010 March 22-24 in San Diego.