ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and Michael Silberman.

Other highlights of the two-day event includes a preconference rundown on local search run by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide; a full plate of top BIA/Kelsey research and forecasts; a special venture capital panel; and innovator panels on social, mobile, deals, video and hyperlocal (the latter co-moderated by Merrill Brown).

KEYNOTES/KEYNOTE DISCUSSIONS
� Ted Leonsis: Owner, Monumental Sports (Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards); Vice Chair of Groupon; board member of AmEx, former vice chair of AOL; author, “The Business of Happiness”
� Jason Calacanis: CEO, Mahalo; investor. Calacanis’ career has been at the cutting edge of local and social media and reflects all the big trends, from his development of The Silicon Alley Reporter to Weblogs (AOL), Mahalo and the creation of TechCrunch50 and Launch.
� Leslie Berland, vice president, social strategy, American Express. Berland’s a major deal maker deeply involved in AmEx’ss mega Foursquare and Facebook deals.
� Jay Herratti, CEO, CityGrid Media. Herratti always gets top rankings at our events. He runs IAC’s super quad of the CityGrid Media Network, Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Insider Pages.
� Michael Zimbalist, VP, research operations, New York Times Co. Zimbalist leads the NYT’s 12 person-research unit. He’s deeply immersed in cutting-edge social, mobile, tablet and video efforts.
� Michael Silberman, GM, New York Magazine Silberman is the mastermind of NYMag’s development of a super set of verticals catering to the “New York state of mind.”

FEATURED SPEAKERS
� Bill Bice, CEO, SpaBoom
� Merrill Brown, Cofounder, MSNBC.com, Court TV
� Jim Douglass, EVP, Cartera Commerce
� Jere Doyle, CEO, EverSave
� Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
� Adam Japko, CEO, Digital Sherpa
� Maria Kermath, Director, New Tech & Sales Apps, AT&T Advertising Sales
� Mark Josephson, SVP, AOL Local
� Charlie Kim, CEO, Next Jump
� John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
� Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications
� Randy Parker, President, SMB Apps
� Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact
� Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360
� Andrew Shotland, Publisher, Local SEO Guide
� Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave
� Darren Waddell, EVP, Product and Corporate Marketing, Reply.com

Join hundreds of senior level local executives at ILM East for the local community’s best networking and insights. You can register here for earlier bird rates.

Internet Pioneer Ted Leonsis

Shopping portals have moved beyond “federated search,” and now combine the best of daily deals, coupons, weekly ads and other promotional information in ways that are more efficient — and drive more shopping.

At the national level, Gannett’s ShopLocal.com has been moving in this direction for some time. At the local level, we’ve recently seen the launch of Local.com’s multi-pronged shopping portal. The daily deal and coupon aggregators such as The Dealmap, 8coupons, Deal Radar and Yipit probably also qualify as shopping portals.

New to the game is FindnSave.com, an effort by Travidia, the digital media vendor that works with 700 newspapers. Two McClatchy sites are currently launched: The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star. Next up are McClatchy newspaper sites in Charlotte, Fort Worth, Fresno and Tacoma.

Travidia Chief Marketing Officer James Green says the newspaper sites have seen an immediate and dramatic increase from their previous shopping areas, which had a lot of information but were not presenting shopping information as efficiently. “They caused consumers to go off in a million directions,” he notes. “Consumers just want the best deal, regardless of the source.”

With newspapers, however, one size doesn’t fit all, Green emphasizes. Some newspapers have different vendor deals locked in, while others want to emphasize different types of information. Both The Sac Bee and KC Star, for instance, feature Groupon deals, Milo.com inventory information and standard features such as a Twitter board of local shopping Tweets.

But The Sac Bee also opted to include online coupons, while The KC Star opted out of online coupons. Such customization isn’t always easy to pull off: Most shopping related vendors don’t have an API that can make them easier to plug in their feed.

The result is that FindnSave has been developed as more of a customizable platform, rather than a turnkey site. Its primary feature is the development of “search blocks” that are integrated on top of the database, and extract relevant information.

Is it better than the competition? Green believes that FindnSave has a competitive edge via the newspapers’ localized information, plus the deep integration of the platform. Eventually, it will integrate various types of shopper-related content as well, such as local shopping blogs, ratings and reviews.

Another asset cited by Green is FindnSave’s easy verticalization, which can be used to create entirely new online vertical properties. The Sac Bee, for instance, is using the product to create a dedicated grocery portal. The portal will feature a slightly different user interface, as well as a combination of newspaper and syndicated content.

Ultimately, FindnSave has been “10 years in the making for us,” says Green. “It’s been a natural evolution. The bottom line is we are not trying to facilitate e-commerce; we are trying to facilitate in-store traffic.”

Group software seems obsolescent in the social revolution. Or is it?

A few weeks ago, John Battelle’s Federated Media acquired Big Tent, the women’s group enabler with 1.3 million users. It apparently plans to target women with very specific advertising.

Oodle, the mega-classifieds platform, has now followed course, buying Grouply, which is described by TechCrunch as “a do-it-yourself social network built on top of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.” Oodle isn’t disclosing how much it paid, but Grouply had been funded by VCs (including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman) to the tune of $2.6 million.

So, what can you do with group software? Oodle CEO Craig Donato sees it as a first step to moving social media beyond just friends. He notes that groups bring in different kinds of conversations in a social context, whether people are giving things away, want to talk to other mothers, or share tips on recycling. Among “first degree friends,” there simply isn’t enough liquidity to engage in robust commerce, he hints.

While the social graph is still mostly about friends, the graphs are getting more complicated, adds Donato. “There are lots of circles, and lots of different affinities. The texture to the graph is incredibly important for commerce. The sweet spot is two or three degrees of separation. This might include friends of friends, college classmates or people from your hometown.

Last week I spoke at the annual gathering of the International Classifieds Media Association (ICMA) in Vienna, Austria. My colleague Peter Krasilovsky and I have had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this function in past years.

What I noticed this year is a definite reawakening in the classifieds business, which now sees itself surviving the entry of Google (and now, also Facebook). That’s a very different situation from when I addressed this audience five years ago.

It is more than just survival, however. The ICMA attendees themselves have remarkably evolved. At this year’s gathering, there was a noticeable increase in young entrepreneurs operating businesses in more than 33 countries around the world. And there were plenty of vendors to enable the transformation of classifieds from the offline to the online world.

I was especially struck by two companies. Mocality.com is an early stage, online-only classifieds and directory company that has launched in Kenya. The company, which has found an interesting way to aggregate and verify business listings, is a division of Nespars, the large but little-known South African media conglomerate.

Mocality.com CEO Stefan Magdalinski told me that Kenya leads the way in Africa and perhaps other parts of the world in the use of mobile payment technology that lets mobile users pay for goods and services via SMS message. In essence, Kenya is moving to a cashless economy at a very fast pace.

As I listened and asked questions of many of the “delegates” — this is the European term for attendees — I learned a great deal about the new business opportunities being pursued by energetic entrepreneurs in both emerging and developed markets.

Axel Springer, the large German media company, for instance, has built a leading position in the jobs/recruitment space by leveraging e-mail and newsletters to drive traffic and conversion.

Another player is ISV, a mobile player that has already established a presence in Canada with a solution that allows mobile users to focus more on browsing than find and buy. ISV also offers an easy and fast approach for loading a listing via a mobile device. One can upload video and pictures and text via a mobile phone and can also remove a listing via the mobile.

ADConversion is another exciting company exhibiting at ICMA. The company, which is run by former Google AdSense execs in Europe, helps smaller publishers drive incremental revenues by optimizing AdSense advertising. In return, it asks for a percentage of the incremental revenue it helps generate.

All in all, it is very interesting to see new businesses and new business models in local media springing up all over the globe. While it is true that the U.S. market accounts for nearly half of the advertising budget around the globe, there are non-U.S. entrepreneurs — some running start-ups, some launching new business from inside long established media companies — who are driving very exciting business models in directories, local search, classifieds and social media.

India’s auto classifieds marketplace is heating up, as the country’s burgeoning middle class becomes more auto dependent. In August 2009, MotorExchange acquired CarTradeIndia.com, apparently leading to investment in MotorExchange by Canaan Partners.

Now, Axel Springer, the German media company, and the India Today group have acquired 70.4 percent in Carwale.com, a company that previously teamed up with AOL India to provide vertical content. Axel Springer is taking 52.1 percent while India Today is taking 18.3 percent.

The acquisition complements the two companies’ JV on the Indian version of Auto Bild, a print magazine. Carwale had raised $7 million from Sierra Ventures in 2008.

AutoTrader.com is paying a reported $500 million to acquire the assets of Kelley Blue Book. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2010.

On the surface, the acquisition of KBB is fairly straightforward. While AutoTrader provides its own research for consumers to value cars and check out reviews, Kelley Blue Book is the gold standard in that segment, which also includes NADA Guides and Edmunds. AutoTrader says it plans to keep the Kelley Blue Book brands.

The acquisition, however, has interesting angles. Last year, KBB added The Trusted Marketplace, a used and new car site that put it in direct competition with other car portals, including AutoTrader, with which it had a two-year deal to provide leads. That deal, which succeeded a similar arrangement between KBB and Cars.com, was allowed to end six months early.

Classifieds haven’t been especially enhanced by mobile apps — although it is nice to have them on the go when shopping for a car or a house. But Oodle keeps pushing the envelope with its effort to bring the world of social media to classifieds.

The classified site, which also acts as a platform for clients such as Facebook and Walmart, has now added an iPhone app that CEO Craig Donato says is less about search than it is about making it easier to post items. “We’ve made it really simple. You post an ad, take a picture and you’re done,” he emphasizes. The iPhone isn’t just a phone, he adds. “It is a wireless camera.”

The app also makes it easier to see what your friends (and friends of friends) are looking for via Facebook Connect. Roughly 70 percent to 80 percent of the site’s traffic is via Facebook Connect, says Donato. “Mobile and social are very interrelated.”

Friends who have too many friends (i.e., 2,500 friends) kind of water down the exclusivity on this. Their friends could be just about anybody. But it still interesting. “Classifieds exist as a second degree of connectiveness,” says Donato. “The amount of want ads is very high,” especially for items such as tickets.

Donato notes that other efforts at Oodle have been moving along, including its Oodle Pro reputation management and classifieds placement program, which has just gotten its 1,000th customer. “People [especially Realtors] use Pro to get leads and to focus on taking advantage of other social features.”

We’re taking part in a good webinar next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific dedicated to the acquisition and retention of vertical classified advertisers. The webinar is hosted by ATG, which provides a wide range of commerce tools for SMBs.

I will provide the lay of the land in classified trends followed by a case study from Courtney Chalmers, director of marketing and brand management at Dominion’s BoatTrader.com. Chalmers will be joined by Scott Spears, call center director, Trader Media.

Ryan Hoppe, director of marketing of ATG Optimization, is the host.

Sign up here.

Craigslist has been taking a beating from law enforcement officials over its adult ads and other subjects, but Newmark says that the complaints are not really making much of an impact. “People like to manufacture controversy,” he says. But Craigslist remains both “a business and a community service.”

In fact, the service has generally made strides in most areas, thanks in part to the addition of more customer service employees. The service now has 35 employees.

The most complaints are in New York, due to abuses of apartment listings. But “there has been a big improvement. It is better than it was five years ago,” says Newmark, who also answered personal questions and discussed government issues. In answer to an audience question, he noted that he did not find his girl friend on Craigslist. He also says that a pre-nup between them is the “subject of negotiation.”

Zillow announced today that it will power Yahoo’s “for sale” listings, in much the same way that Cars.com powers Yahoo’s new and used cars listings. Zillow typically carries 4 million-plus listings. The announcement spearheads a slew of online real estate announcements prior to next week’s Inman Real Estate Connect conference (which I am attending).

The enhanced Yahoo and Zillow tie doesn’t achieve the “buy a slot” status of other Yahoo vertical outsourcing — it would have been too expensive for any of the major real estate portals — but it also goes well beyond the current Yahoo-Zillow relationship, which basically consists of Yahoo’s syndication of Zestimate home valuations. That has been in place since 2006.

Under the new deal, the two companies bring together the real estate Web sites that have the second (Zillow) and third (Yahoo) highest number of unique visitors, per comScore. The deal, which is symbiotic for both companies, shows how things have changed from five or six years ago, when Yahoo itself was seen as a major threat to use open Internet listings to dominate real estate advertising. Now, Yahoo is basically content leveraging its sales relationships with national brokerages, while Zillow focuses on the content and local accounts. Real estate remains highly profitable for Yahoo.

While Zillow listings won’t go up on Yahoo until later this year, the two companies are immediately coordinating their sales efforts. Zillow’s “Premier Agent” program will be extended to Yahoo Real Estate. Current Zillow advertisers will be offered the chance to extend their relationship to Yahoo. Additionally, Zillow’s local “Showcase Ads” and “Featured Listings” will automatically be extended to Yahoo, making it easier for both sites to reach a quorum of users. For Sale By Owner advertising will also appear on both sites. One thing that Yahoo doesn’t get is access to Zillow’s growing display business.