DexOne has announced a distribution deal with IAC’s Citysearch to give DexOne’s online advertisers the option to appear across Citysearch’s CityGrid local ad network.
This deal is part of DexOne’s effort to find new and varied sources of traffic and leads for its online advertisers.
Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti will give a keynote address this afternoon at …

Canada’s Yellow Pages Group has launched a new modernized company brand that aims to reflect YPG’s “evolution into a performance media and marketing solutions company.”
YPG has also launched a new ad campaign that is clearly focused on the company’s mobile directory products. Click on the image below to check out one of the ads, featuring …

How can social media be leveraged specifically by verticals? This was the subject of a panel this afternoon at the BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplace conference moderated by Michael Boland, program director of Mobile Local Media.
All four panelists gave examples of how they’re integrating social media (tools, connections, etc.) into their core products. Presenters included:
Jon Carder, CEO, MojoPages, …

Joelle Gropper Kaufman from Adify is seeing the broad trend across vertical ad networks of buying audiences across topics (e.g., chic moms); regions (e.g., Sacramento) or shopping (e.g., automotive). While the popular sites drive the most traffic, Kaufman argues that it is on the “mid-tail” sites where the conversations happen. Consumers spend more time on …

Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures, Local & Mapping, gave attendees at Marketplaces 2010 a glimpse into the direction that AOL is moving in its local strategy, specifically with Patch.com, MapQuest, its content management system Seed, its LocalFund investment arm, the relaunch of CitysBest and the forthcoming launch of Patch.org.

Earlier this year Brod …

Google Director of Local & B2B Marketplaces Sam Sebastian today discussed the company’s strategy to verticalize local ad sales and account support, while keeping the search product more of a broad horizontal experience.
“We’ve verticalized from a sales perspective,”  Sebastian told Peter Krasilovsky during a keynote interview, “but from a product perspective, there is more emphasis …

Parallel to expanding its sales team across the U.S., local search company BizNDex officially joins the competitive field of local iPhone apps.
True to trends in mobile local search, the LocalNDex app comes with a discovery function to automatically detect and display nearby businesses. It also boasts the ability to write local reviews and post photos …

Perry Evans, a founder of Local Matters and MapQuest, has launched Closely, Inc., a new group-based promotions company, joining the 100 or more companies that hope to follow in the footsteps of Groupon, and perhaps improve on the deal-a-day experience. Groupon has more than 1 million registered users.
First up is a beta version of Closely’s …

MojoPages started as a Yelp-like directory of local businesses. For the past year and a half, the San Diego-based company has focused on building a distribution network of 1,400 sites, mostly consisting of radio, TV and newspaper sites. Its revenues have come from search-related advertising.
The directory business, which competes against the likes of Local.com, CityVoter, …

The French directory publisher PagesJaunes has made a significant move by acquiring 100 percent of the Austrian people search site 123People, which has a global audience of more than 40 million unique visitors in 11 countries, according to the PagesJaunes announcement. Terms were not disclosed.

Here is how PagesJaunes CEO Jean-Pierre Remy describes the deal:
“We are …

Quietly, SuperMedia is rolling out a new approach to online search. If you look on Switchboard.com today, you’ll notice that search results are presented differently from before. Now, Switchboard’s top results based on relevancy are plotted on a map (this might look familiar), with the remaining results pushed further down the page.
This represents the …

Avvo, the free legal ratings and review site that has taken on the giant legal publishers that have long dominated the business, announced that it has raised $10 million in Series C funding. The new round adds to $13 million previously raised. The round was led by DAG Ventures, which joins existing investors Benchmark Capital …

Leaders of the U.S. independent directory publishing industry were passionate in their defense of print media at this morning’s opening session of the Association of Directory Publishers meeting outside Houston, Texas. Jim Hail, the outgoing chair and head of Idaho-based Hagadone Directories, declared “Print is not dead!” He argued that the industry has become too …

Just six months after it launched its SP411 Twitter integration, Superpages is at it again with an offer to Tweet any coupon that businesses upload to an online profile.
To do this it has created 72 city-specific Twitter accounts, which users in those cities can follow to get daily tweets for coupons and promotions happening around …

PaidContent reports that AOL Ventures is creating a $10 million venture capital fund for local start-ups. The fund expects to support the “increasing number of startups” in the market. AOL Ventures had previously announced that it is spending $50 million this year to launch Patch.com in “hundreds” of communities.
The company also announced it will relaunch …

Online scheduling appears to be one of the break-out features in the marketplaces space this year. Nineteen percent of respondents to BIA/Kelsey’s most recent User View say they made a non-restaurant online appointment in the past six months.
Major appointment sites include BookFresh, Full Slate, ZocDoc, Agendize and MaxiPage. Each hopes to be the OpenTable of …

Lots of news coming from mobile local app provider WHERE today. Just a week after it opened up its WHERE Ads local ad network, it has launched a new Web site and officially changed its name from uLocate to WHERE.
The company not only provides the WHERE local app but is also an app production house, …

Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.
New York-based 8Coupons.com, which …

Six months after launching its iPhone app, Coupon giant Valpak has announced an app for the Android platform. Reaching the enterprise BlackBerry set is next on its list. The company currently delivers about 17,000 offers via mobile which is equal to its online volume.
Features of its mobile couponing include (verbatim from release):

Search savings by categories …

CBS Local has launched an auto shopping guide on the Web site of WCCO-TV Minneapolis, using vertical content and services from High Gear Media, a Palo Alto, California-based auto specialist publisher launched two years ago by Daily Shopper founder Hesky Kutscher.
The CBS Local deal marks the first local effort for High Gear, which has 90 …