Will the iPhone soon be able to not only receive FM and HD Radio stations but also provide an electronic program guide? Apple Insider reported on a patent filing this week (”Digital Radio Tagging Using an RF Tuner Accessory”).

Post Source: Is That a Local Radio Station EPG in Your iPhone or iPod Nano? from Digital …

Today marks the last day that AOL will have a corporate connection to Time Warner, as the two companies officially separate on Dec. 10 and a new AOL emerges on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company.
Over the past several weeks, AOL has been aggressively moving to put the merger with Time Warner …

Today at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Digital Marketing Conference, there was quite a bit of buzz around Blyk, a Finnish mobile phone company with an interesting hybrid model for distribution.
Blyk is a free mobile operator targeting young people (ages 16 to 24) and funded by advertising. Brands pay Blyk to help them reach their …

Closing remarks at the Warrillow Summit Toronto yesterday gave advertisers targeting the small and medium-sized business market some hope despite the alarming descent in optimism on the current Canadian economic situation.
A recurring theme over the past two days of the conference was the effectiveness of reaching small-business owners during times of major disruption. Two examples …

Last week Bebo, the global social network, announced its new OpenMedia platform partnerships. The network has partnered with major media brands to deliver premium content to its 40 million users.
Partnerships include CBS, MTV Networks, ESPN, the BBC, Channel Four, ITN, Yahoo! and BSkyB, as well as emerging media companies like Music Nation, Next New Networks, …

Angus Frame, editor of Globeandmail.com, presented an interesting CaseCamp study this evening in Toronto. He showed how the many twists and turns it took to implement one simple social media aspect to the site have paid off.
Globeandmail.com launched its “Comments on Every Article” feature in September 2005. Frame explained that the motivation behind allowing readers …

Closing remarks at the Warrillow Conference in Toronto this week confirmed major opportunities for business-to-business platforms in Canada.
Major Canadian national brands that target the 2.3 million small businesses in Canada plan on increasing their online media budgets in 2008.
E-mail had a planned increase of 54 percent, paid and organic search was up 47 percent, and spend …

I attended Warrillow & Co.’s Canadian conference in Toronto this morning where more than a hundred eager marketing managers gathered to hear about the latest trends in reaching the 2.3 million small businesses in Canada.
John Warrillow’s opening presentation referenced a recent survey indicating that small-business owners are using social networking sites.
The survey results indicated a …

Today’s Media Life talks about this week’s release from Borrell Associates that shows local search revenues will jump 31.6 percent in 2007. What is most interesting about this is Borrell Associates’ prediction that local Web advertising is going to explode this year because of paid search and e-mail ads.
Coincidently, next week at the …

The senior management of TMP Worldwide Advertising and Communications in North America has acquired the agency from Monster Worldwide with backing from VSS Mezzanine Partners, an investment fund managed by Veronis Suhler Stevenson. The deal is valued at US$45 million. The European division was sold in May, and Audax Group purchased TMP Directional Advertising last …

Interesting articles today in Media Post Online about how online media got the scoop on two stories before mainstream mass media. Yesterday a big news report in all media, including various online news alerts, was how CBS gave its new anchor, Katie Couric, instant weight loss by photoshopping a promotional picture.
So …

The Yellow Pages Association just released the industry’s annual usage numbers. The good news is overall usage continues to grow for the industry and Internet Yellow Pages usage is increasing … the not so good news is continued decline in usage for the print product.
While usage for the print product has been …

Great shower here at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. And lots of good stuff yesterday at the show and in the exhibit hall. Safa R. was very good as a keynote speaker (predicting that the further development of local search may actually hurt e-commerce). So was SuperPages President Eric Chandler, who made an announcement …

Google appears to have introduced — or more likely be experimenting with — a new AdSense-like format for search results, placing ads in a box above the "organic" Web results. Here’s "Hotels New York." Here’s "Health Insurance." (If you’re seeing what I’m describing, you should see four ads at the top of the page in …

There are maybe eight firms out there enabling Yellow Pages, Web hosts, verticals and newspapers to sell simplified search distribution to local businesses. One firm, which is doing well under the radar, is Kevin Dufficy’s LocalLead.com. Dufficy was in on all this early but hasn’t taken any VC money (but is now looking for angels), …

There’s an incredible amount of hype and anticipation among marketers and the mobile industry in general around ad revenue projections and the anticipated size of the mobile TV/video market. This mostly bullish BusinessWeek article does a nice job of assessing the state of mobile marketing.
But, in reality, mobile is still years away. Most people …

A few weeks ago at SES, Google told me they were going to be allowing advertisers to add logos and graphical images to the mapping balloons that appear on Google Local. I looked for them but couldn’t find them. Today, apparently, they started appearing. This blog has a screenshot. I was unable to find …

Study after study confirms what we’ve known for a long, long time: Consumers do research online but make the overwhelming majority of purchases offline. This article in MediaPost, profiling a study done by comScore for Google, offers yet more evidence. From the comScore press release:
comScore Networks today released results from a new research …

Cairo is a local shopping aggregator that was crawling ShopLocal’s content as one of its sources. ShopLocal sued and yesterday a settlement was announced:
Cairo agreed to an order of the court preventing it from making further robotic or other automated access to ShopLocal’s computers or websites, and Cairo has acknowledged ShopLocal’s proprietary rights in …

Here’s the press release.