The scheduling space is heating up, with a number of key vendors competing for SMB business, companies such as Groupon and Merchant Circle acquiring and integrating scheduling companies into core activities, and new companies such as MyTime attempting to aggregate all the players.
Bozeman, MT-based Schedulicity is one of the key players in the space, selling …

Photo: CNN
Online restaurant ordering and discovery giants GrubHub and Seamless have agreed to merge their operations, creating a single company. Chicago-based GrubHub currently serves more than 20,000 food ordering establishments in 500 cities, while New York-based Seamless serves more than 12,000 food ordering establishments in 400 U.S. cities plus London.
GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney, …

We like the idea of using corporations as a distribution base for media and services. In the 1990s, The Family Education Network built a great newsletter business distributed in corporate lobbies. The concept’s been widely extended with the addition of email and the ability to more effectively target employees based on different criteria.
NextJump, for …

Payment processors and related companies work with most SMBs and are increasingly seen as a potential sales channel for reaching them with additional services. This week, we talked with one processor, Boston-based Merchant Warehouse, about its efforts to leverage its base of 75,000 business customers beyond terminal sales.
CEO Henry Helgeson told us the 15 …

Former Localeze business develoment guy Gib Olander is back in the game, this time switching his focus from local business listings innovation to maximizing effective local business reviews. Think of a variation of “Net Promoter Scores” for local business.
Olander’s new company, Local Viewpoints has won seed funding from Wavetable Labs. It launched at the end …

Is appointment scheduling poised to be a new anchor for service promotions? That vision –”look for an appointment, get a deal or upsell ” — has been articulated by a number of scheduling vendors, such as Agendize, FullSlate and Schedulicity. Most recently, RedBeacon founder Ethan Anderson has launched MyTime as a scheduling supermarket …

Will tech companies like Google, Apple, eBay/PayPal, Amazon, Microsoft, Square and Intuit move in on the role traditionally played by banks? It is a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, as digitized transactions, mobile payments and offers, and digital wallets usher in a debit-oriented environment that loosens traditional ties to credit cards and bank branch …

Disruption happens. In the local space, we’re seeing it happen with Yellow Pages and newspapers. Banks are seeing it happen as well, which will cause a major change in the way that customers keep track of their money, buy goods and services and stay “loyal” to merchants.
At NACHPA’s Payments 2013 in San Diego this week, …

Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. The average Facebook user has 124 friends, and 70 percent of its users have “liked” at least one local business. But at this point, how local is Facebook really? And as an open network, it the ideal medium for local recommendations?
This is the soft underbelly …

I think Yelp is a fantastic service and a top resource, especially when I am travelling. But it was disturbing to read a column in The Los Angeles Times on Saturday by Sandy Banks, which suggests that Yelp is suppressing good reviews, and implies that there is a linkage between ad sales and allowing …

Ads aren’t just valued for bringing in calls and walk ins. Local businesses increasingly place value on consumers looking up maps and directions, or participating in loyalty efforts, notes SuperMedia Director of Mobile Development Chris Folmer, who was speaking on a panel at The Local Search Association conference April 16 in Las Vegas. “There are …

Seven years ago, in 2006, we began evangelizing a vision of local media driven by vertical specialties. These would drive high value leads with better, more relevant searches. In this light, Google was seen as a “perpetual vertical machine,” driving every query higher and higher up the food chain.
The vertical revolution never happened — at …

The newspaper consortium-owned Wanderful Media is rolling out a retooled version of Find & Save, a shopping info site that it hopes will reinforce ties between the newspapers and the national retailers and brands that have traditionally driven their (estimated) $4 billion circular/insert business.
The new version is a localized shopping platform that boasts standard features …

Chip Perry, the visionary who was asked by Cox in 1997 to facilitate its own disruption with the launch of AutoTrader –going right after its print classified revenues — has resigned as President and CEO of Cox Enterprise’s AutoTrader Group. Manheim Auto President Sanford (Sandy) Schwartz will now take the helm …

The Long Tail in advertising may be SMB-centric. The Short Tail may be ad agency centered media buying, which only go to the Top 100 sites on the Web. If that’s the case, the “Mid-Tail” comes from local publishers, suggests Centro Media CEO Shawn Riegsecker. But these publishers, which rely on high value journalist-based content …

Primitive (and perhaps misleading) estimates on effective ROI have driven many local publishers up the wall. During Yelp’s IPO period, one analyst suggested that it cost pizza shops almost a hundred dollars in advertising on Yelp for every pizza sold.
To combat such mistakes and show how local ad dollars are really working, Yelp has come …

BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local 2013 conference March 18-20 in Boston broke so much new ground it’s hard to build a report card on what happened among the 50+ speakers and hundreds of participants. But the “local industry” has clearly moved from the idea of a single breakout player (i.e. Groupon) to a broader picture, …

Deals are still going strong but are never going to be the principal promotional channel for the vast majority of businesses, noted Deal Current President Patrick Dillon, who was speaking March 20 at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference in Boston. Dillon said that in San Diego, for instance, there are 23,600 businesses that advertise, but …

One of the key challenges in local is to level the playing field for local SMBs so they can compete against national brands. Key areas where national brands outgun local SMBs include search ranking, automated listings management, lead generation and ecommerce.
Speaking at our Leading in Local in Boston March 20, LocalVox CEO Trevor Sumner …

The old model of pay per leads that had driven the success of ServiceMagic and other home and trade oriented service companies is shifting as social media makes its impact.
Speaking at Leading in Local 2013 in Boston March 19, Home Advisor CEO Chris Terrill discussed how the company, formerly ServiceMagic, has taken social media …