Reply.com this week announced plans to raise $60 million in an IPO. ReachLocal had earlier announced similar plans to go public. The success of one or both companies’ efforts will have a major impact on other local-themed companies’ efforts to raise funds and/or go public.
Looking at Reply.com’s SV-1, we see that the company has 127 …

In all the excitement around geolocation, Google’s latest move to discern local intent is a search tool that enables “nearby” filtering. This is useful during the times when a geographic modifier, like a ZIP code, is not used in a search query.
The underlying technology has been there for a while to serve local results when …

Foursquare is blowing up in the tech mediasphere. It’s also standard issue for the mobile elite in cities like New York and San Francisco, and I admit addiction. But there is a certain amount of tech media distortion going on — also known as the Silicon Valley effect.
This refers to the coverage bias to focus …

Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”
Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by …

Mobile and online “questions” company ChaCha today has partnered with local search and listings provider Localeze. This primarily involves ChaCha’s Web site (as opposed to mobile), and will insert deeper local business information around questions asked on the site.
Specifically,15 million local listings will be provided through a search bar. Results will come with the …

Mobile M&A activity continues … except this time it’s a mobile ad network on the buy side. Following Google’s $750M AdMob acquisition, and Apple’s $275M Quattro acquisition, the largest remaining independent ad network, Millennial Media, will acquire mobile analytics firm TapMetrics for an undisclosed amount.
TapMetrics will allow Millennial to offer developers more comprehensive revenue management …

SuperMedia has announced a new program that extends its SuperGuarantee idea into the autos vertical. The SuperGuarantee Autos program gives anyone who buys a car on SuperMedia’s EveryCarListed.com automotive vertical a free limited powertrain warranty good for up to $3,000.
SuperMedia acquired EveryCarListed last February and has since made its comprehensive video inventory a key point …

This Thursday, Feb. 25, at 2 p.m. EST, we’ll hold a free webinar to outline the key discussion points that underly the upcoming Marketplaces 2010 program.
This will include a unique look at some of the presenting companies, as well as commentary and data around the opportunity drivers in local verticals across all media. Highlights will …

Juniper Research has released a report that projects the global mobile location based services (MLBS) to reach $12.7 billion by 2014.
This is different in scope from BIA/Kelsey’s forecast released yesterday — or at least the mobile component of that forecast that projects U.S. mobile local ad revenues to reach $2.2 billion by 2014. Juniper is …

Google VP of ad products Susan Wojcicki told IAB’s Leadership Meeting yesterday that “the display industry is one of the most innovative parts of the Web right now,” and “will be one of the largest ad markets, if not the largest. It has to be,” she added. “Everything is moving online.”
Video, social and mobile will …

The default strategy for many start-ups is to plan to be acquired by Google or Microsoft. But the M&A scene is much more complex than that. Jordan, Edmiston Group Co-President Tolman Geffs, speaking today at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, joked that Google is set to buy Oregon, Washington and Canada “just to …

Today, BIA/Kelsey released its 2009-2014 U.S. local advertising forecast. Over the past two months, lead analysts Charles Laughlin, Matt Booth, Mike Boland, Peter Krasilovsky, Rick Ducey and Mark Fratrik have grinded through the process of forecasting local ad revenues.
This applies across 12 local media sectors and includes multiple layers of traditional and interactive revenues. The …

Cost-per-click ad network Reply.com today filed for a $60 million IPO. The company targets SMB advertisers with the majority of its 125 employees in media sales positions. My colleague Peter Krasilovsky spoke to the company recently and wrote this post. Also see the press release for today’s announcement.
Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker …

Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau defended the role of the site in journalism and said it is helping to herald in “a golden age of journalism” that has more content and audience participation than ever before.
Speaking at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, Hippeau noted that HuffPo is publishing 500 pieces of content a …

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, celebrating its 15th anniversary, is holding its annual leadership meeting at La Costa in Carlsbad, California. The sold-out meeting, dubbed “Ecosystem 2.0,” has attracted 650 attendees, up 30 percent from last year: a further omen of recovery in the economy. Over the years, we have actively helped IAB develop its leadership …

It’s been made clear here and other places that mobile devices enable advertising that’s much more granular and targeted than the PC. We’ve also argued that the ad formats and campaign objectives should therefore be de-coupled from online equivalents.
But there is one big caveat. Along with granularity and newfangled metrics comes complexity. This is especially true …

There are now 150,000 mobile apps for the iPhone and quickly growing libraries from other smartphone platforms like Android. Every once in a while an app comes along to truly underscore the fact that nearly every imaginable niche has been filled.
The latest is PMSbuddy (via TechCrunch). From the makers of the online product, the $0.99 app …

EveryScape, a Massachusetts-based company that offers an immersive local search experience, has secured a new $6 million funding round. We see this as a sign of confidence that the model EveryScape is pursuing — creating a virtual local search experience where you can find a local business, walk in the door and virtually browse and …

Today I had the chance to catch up with GetFugu, a mobile tool applying some of the voice and visual search technologies we’ve examined here over the past few months.
The app, currently in beta for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android, allows users to speak or take pictures of search inputs (video demos here). But unlike the …