It’s safe to say that Ted Leonsis is at the center of the local revolution. He’s done it all, from his early days trying to jumpstart ecommerce at RedGate, to his work building a local framework at AOL (i.e. Mapquest, Digital City, MovieFone, Studio Now); to his current role as Vice Chair, Groupon; Board Member, Amex; a Principal with the $450 Million Revolution Growth Fund; and of course, as owner of The Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards and The Verizon Center.

What is Ted’s Take on key local issues? We’re talking live with Ted Monday at 3pm pacific/12 pm eastern in conjunction with his keynote at ILM East in Boston, which takes place March 28.

Sign up for the free Webinar. Registrants also get a discount code towards the conference, which is March 26-28.

Following in the footsteps of major brands such as Apple, Nike, Harley Davidson and ESPN, LivingSocial is now seeking to enhance its core brand via a retail “experience” center where book clubs, cooking classes, painting classes and performances can all take place.

The effort follows a trial of a LivingSocial membership program with built-in discounts and perks, a la Amazon Prime. Amazon, which owns 31 percent of LivingSocial, has been developing drop-off sites and is rumored to be contemplating its own stores.

As reported in The Washington Post, LivingSocial has paid $3 million to renovate 918 F Street, a six-story building near the hot new retail area of the Verizon Center and a few blocks from its headquarters. As the article recounts, “There’s an industrial-grade kitchen for temporary ‘pop-up’ restaurants. In a cooking classroom, high-definition, flat-screen monitors connected to motion-sensor cameras give an over-the-shoulder view of a chef at work. Another area could host intimate music sessions, and ‘flex’ rooms will host everything from yoga classes to book lectures.”

To us, the center is a natural extension of Living Social Adventures, in which Living Social acts as the host and promoter for experiences that can combine an outing, a meal and entertainment. One question is whether the cost can be paid back — $3 million appears to be the cost of the building. The extensive renovations may bring the cost higher. A second question is whether the experience center can be replicated in other markets.

The center opens Feb. 16 with a $119 Mexican dinner — not cheap — by celebrity chef Mike Isabella. The meal is a warm-up for a new D.C. restaurant Isabella is launching in the spring. LivingSocial told The Post that the idea is to extend its focus on lifestyle branding and move away from being known as a coupon company. The term it uses is “scarce experiential.”

Given the focus on classes, LivingSocial’s tie-in with Amazon, and Amazon’s purchase of TeachStreet, it’s surprising that Amazon isn’t leveraging TeachStreet’s relationships with independent teachers. Instead, it has closed down the service.

The deals culture is shifting from customer acquisition to customer loyalty by necessity. Why? Deals have begun losing high-income women. That’s the view of Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim, a featured speaker at ILM East in Boston March 26-28.

“Daily deals had an initial surge then quickly lost flavor on a key customer segment — higher income women with jobs,” Kim said in an email exchange with us. “This segment is the most profitable to most merchants. Acquiring them as a loyal repeat customer is worth quite a bit over any other customer segment.

Are deals really losing these women? Kim said the explosion of daily deals has led directly to lower conversion rates. “Daily emailing of 50 percent discount offers quickly turned from value to fatigue users,” he said. “ Email response rates and all conversion rates took downward dips across almost every vertical. That’s echoed by all the e-commerce merchants we have talked to.”

Loyalty programs such as those run by Next Jump, however, have begun to reverse the downward course “Towards the second half of 2011, we managed to climb conversion back up. This was not done via targeting, but through loyalty. The growth of loyal repeat visitors increased conversion rates at every level 50-150 percent higher, category by category.”

Kim said loyalty is mostly measured as a byproduct of points and rewards. “From 2010 to 2011, as the points platform got stronger, we saw metrics increase as follows: 100 percent increase in first-time visitors converting into a transactor. 300 percent increase in single-transactor converting into a repeat loyal transactor.”

Kim adds that the big trend on the horizon will be ease of purchase — convenience. “Make it easy for me to find and buy what I need,” said Kim. “Earn my trust as a consumer, and even at good prices [not best], you will have my wallet share. This is how you earn loyal customers.”

Charlie Kim is a featured speaker at ILM East, which takes places March 26-28 in Boston. Other loyalty-related speakers include Jim Douglass, SVP, Cartera, and John Valentine, VP, SCVNGR/LevelUp. You can register here.

We’re seeing more vertical players trying to leverage their brands with deal offerings and advertising. The latest one is Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Twenty-two Blue Cross state organizations around the U.S. are working with Analog Analytics to launch Blue365, a deal program offering health and fitness discounts, as well as adjacencies like tax prep.

SnapFitness, eDiets.com, Reebok, H&R Block and others are charter deal providers for Blue Cross. The launch will be supported via a media campaign launching in late spring. “Health and fitness is the quintessential loyalty program,” says Analog CEO Ken Kalb. He notes that consumers are making more of their own health decisions, so a health marketplace makes more sense in this climate.

Besides health, Analog has made a move into travel, working with Travelsavers Partner Services, a mega-booker working with more than 17,000 hotels and representing 20 percent of all travel bookings. Kalb says the biggest problem with travel as a deals vertical is sourcing new deals all the time. While destination deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial are scoring very well with travel, smaller sites do well to hook up with a one-stop such as Travelsavers. ‘They have 1,000 people trying to find travel deals,” he says.

Amazon.com, which is moving in multiple directions vis-à-vis local, has agreed to buy TeachStreet, the service for matching teachers and students. Amazon’s interest appears to be less in TeachStreet than in the underlying e-commerce platform for SMBs. The platform already is being used by The Washington Post for its Service Alley SMB leads service.

TeachStreet had raised just over $3 million from Madrona Venture Group, Bezos Expeditions, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and others. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has obviously been involved form the beginning of the company.

The connection between Amazon and TeachStreet is partially personal. TeachStreet founder David Schappell previously worked for Bezos from 1998 to 2004. GeekWire reports that the entire TeachStreet team has already joined Amazon Local, which is now in 40 markets. It reports that TeachStreet itself is being shut down.

Schappell also told Geekwire that he’s pumped to be “working on things that millions of people use.” At TeachStreet, he said they had been “pushing the peanut up the hill for a long time.”

In 2008, Schappell told BIA/Kelsey that he eventually expected TeachStreet to evolve into all kinds of expert services. “We’re helping to find local experts near you,” he says. Categories could include a full range of advisory services, such as career counseling, or kitchen remodeling. “You might need someone to guide you through some of the steps. Or you may want some help negotiating to buy a car.”

LivingSocial, in a battle with Groupon and other deal providers to gain (and keep) market share, lost an eye popping $558 million beyond its $245 million in net earnings, according to a regulatory filing by Amazon.com, which owns 31 percent of the company. The filing was written about in today’s Washington Post.

The Post article notes that LivingSocial has 4,900 employees and claims more than 60 million members worldwide in 647 markets across 25 countries. Its vouchers grossed $750 million.

Here are the accounting details. Its vouchers grossed $750 million, giving LivingSocial net earnings of $245 million. It had operating expenses of $686 million. It also had other expenses associated with various acquisitions and stock compensation of $117 million, resulting in the $558 million loss.

In our view, companies such as LivingSocial (and Zynga and Groupon et al) aren’t really tied to earning immediate profits. The gamble is whether their massive spending leads to building a solid foundation for growth — and profits — going forward.

Local isn’t easy, or even worthwhile. Chris Devore, Seattle-based co-ounder of Judy’s Book, wants to remind entrepreneurs to stay away. In a new blog post, Devore gives three top reasons NOT to do a local + online start-up:

1- There’s no money in it.
2- It doesn’t scale.
3- It’s too obvious.

“Combine expensive, high-touch selling, small budgets and high churn rates, and you have a perfect recipe for persistent negative margins,” says Devore. “There are literally millions of business opportunities that [are] …. better than the best local business I’ve ever seen.”

It’s a good blog post with sound reasoning. I suspect Devore, one of the most passionate entrepreneurs out there, has a major local project up his sleeve and will be socializing it at ILM East in Boston March 26-28.

The focus for vertical sites is likely to shift in coming months. In addition to regular features, such as listings, many vertical sites will also begin to blend personalized or on-demand “maintenance” information with various social media features such as scheduling and reviews.

We’ve seen it with garden and health sites, and also, increasingly, with car maintenance sites. DriverSide and RepairPal, both launched in 2008, have pioneered the personalized garage approach, which links car owners with auto diagnosis and leads to service providers.

A new site, CarCareKiosk, targets DIYs — Do It Yourselfers. Founder Hans Angermeier, a former investment banker, has developed the site to provide car owners with “how to” videos that are specific to their car make. AT&T/Compete research shows that “How to” videos are major drivers for vertical sites. The site now has 8,000 car repair videos in its library.

Based in Milwaukee, CarCareKiosk has a team of seven who work with new and used car dealers to contribute videos on everything from how to check your own oil to changing the cabin air filter. “Every car is quite different — the cabin air filter on one car might be behind the glove box on one model, but in a completely different place on another car,” says Angermeier.

CarCareKiosk currently has a PayPal “donate” button for support the site, but Angermeier says he expects to sell some search-based advertising. There is also a directory for finding local mechanics, a la RepairPal and DriverSide, but that is just at a starting phase. The real target is used parts manufacturers. Sites such as eBay Motors are stores onto themselves.

He cites research showing that used parts will account for $43 billion in sales in 2012 and $47 billion in 2013. The poor economy might be contributing to people keeping older cars and maintaining them, and also doing their own work, he suggests.

Gilt Groupe confirmed today that it is eliminating 10 percent of its staff, including Gilt City chief Nathan Richardson and Park and Bond CEO John Auerbach.

The luxury-but-discounted goods provider will close several Gilt Groupe offices, including Atlanta, Seattle and Dallas, and several Gilt City offices inherited from last fall’s BuyWithMe acquisition, including San Diego, Houston and Philadelphia — a purchase that occurred after BuyWithMe ran out of money.

Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan implied in an interview with AllThingsD that Richardson and Auerbach were more oriented toward “start up” modes, suggesting that development will continue. We would expect the separate companies to consolidate under one roof. 

Speaking at ILM East last year in Boston, Richardson said the site had strongly differentiated itself from other deals providers, leveraging Gilt Groupe’s upscale list of 5 million members. He also noted that Gilt City’s flash sales approach — which put items on sales until inventory was depleted — provided higher average dollar values and better email open rates.

The Home Depot is set to significantly boost its home contractor leads network with today’s acquisition of Redbeacon. No price was announced for the acquisition. The deal puts Home Depot in the same boat as Sears, which has been quietly developing ServiceLive, its own contractor leads service.

Redbeacon, which takes a 10 percent commission for service jobs, was one of a number of socially driven leads companies that started in the 2008-2009 time frame. Others include Cox’s Kudzu, which has developed an intriguing partnership with Scripps’ HGTV; The Washington Post’s Service Alley; LikeList; HelpHive; and Thumbtack. The latter received $4.5 million in venture funding last week.

Last year, Redbeacon announced $7.4 million in funding from Mayfield and Venrock, but it hasn’t been easy sailing for the company. The service never landed media partnerships that it had been hoping for and replaced its founder last year with new CEO Anthony Rodio. It has, however, managed to launch services in nine markets. Under Home Depot, one assumes it will take a national approach to contractor leads.