Citysearch officially rolled out its CityGrid publisher network this week. The network moves Citysearch away from an exclusive focus on its individual sites (“Citysearch.com,” “Insiderpages.com,” “Urbanspoon”). Instead, it works on a distributed basis with partners (i.e., “SuperPages”) to marry local content and advertising.
In the short term, CityGrid represents the new face of Citysearch and the …

A few weeks back, in an Advisory, we released the following chart of the “Quarterly Revenue Index.” The Advisory was released the day after we got the final Q2 number filings from the different media groups. Our idea was to look holistically across a few ad segments, and make some comparisons about where we are …

Today Yellowpages.com, a subsidiary of AT&T, announced a multiyear distribution deal with Microsoft. In April, Yellowpages.com’s local listings and advertisers will begin appearing across Microsoft properties, including, MSN Yellowpages, MSN Search, Live Search and Maps.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Typically, however, these distribution deals involve a minimum guaranteed payment in exchange …

David Drummond, senior vice president, corporate development, and chief legal officer, responds to Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo!. In part:

“… Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
“Could Microsoft now …

Intuit has announced that it will acquire Homestead Technologies, a company that provides a suite a Web creation and e-commerce tools, for US$170 million in cash. This acquisition continues Intuit’s march into what we term a “connected services,” or combined software and Web services, business.
We have been believers in this concept for some time now. In fact, …

AT&T has bought Ingenio and will use its call tracking platform across Yellowpages.com, 800-YellowPages, Mobile and Print Yellow Pages. We think the deal is quite important. This is a story that will unfold in the months ahead as more information about integration becomes public.
For a while now, we have been saying that the inclusion of …

A few of us were invited to attend the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit in Laguna Beach, California, this week. (We decided to tough it out and attend.) Peter ran an interesting panel titled “The Local Opportunity.” The panel included Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media & Advertising; Zorik Gordon, president and CEO of ReachLocal.com; …

Google announced the beginnings of a consortium that includes 30-plus members to create an open source mobile operating system called Android. The operating system is built on the open Linux Kernel and uses the liberal Apache v2 open source license.

The liberal open source license means developers will be able to build applications for mobile …

Today, I had a brief call with George Garrick, CEO of Jingle Networks, which operates the service 1-800-FREE411. The Jingle team has been aggressively wringing costs out of the system for months trying to reduce the cost per call as much as possible.
In some locales, where there are fewer advertisers, Jingle has removed the operator …

As part of the mobile forecast we released last week, we thought it would be interesting to show a little detail about the ad-sponsored directory assistance portion of the forecast. As we wrote previously, we have been watching the market unfold for over a year. The predictions in the original report last October along with …