Events are a vertical that cuts across many segments: travel, retail, sports, entertainment, education, dining, culture and others. Major players include specialists such as Zvents, Eventful, Americantowns.com and Center’d. City sites such as Citysearch and Yelp are active in the space as well.

A new one for us is Goby.com, a venture-backed firm that comes out of Mike Stonebraker’s relational database studies at MIT. The site, which launched in September 2009, has already had 250,000 visitors. It reviews 300 categories of things to do, from camping to opera. It can be embedded into other sites via Facebook Connect. An iPhone app is coming out “soon.”

The site breaks things up three ways: What would you like to do? Where? and When? It makes a special effort to go beyond “cities with airports next to them.” For instance, the most thorough listing of events in Carlsbad, CA 92009 that I’ve seen.

CEO Mark Watkins, a veteran of vertical search at Endeca, says the site is task- centric and created to be a “search engine for things to do in your free time. It does equally well for people planning a trip or sitting around the dinner table on Friday, wondering what they are going to do this weekend.”

It also approaches events in a way that Google may not. “Google gives answers for general purposes. But it understands keywords, not structured data. Plane tickets and other semantic information are not on Google,” he says. “We’re getting very focused results. We can sort Web data by price,” among other things.

The general model for search engines is to have a keyword and give back a URL, says Watkins. But Goby seeks to convert those Web pages to real world entities people can make decisions about. “We’ve cross-referenced photography from across the Web, and integrated more video types, and MP3 from concerts,” he says.

Another focus is to figure out how people decide to go to events. “We want to know: How did you decide to be at that restaurant?” says Watkins. It is the interaction of the search and gaming worlds, building off location-based sites like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Indeed, Watkins emphasizes that Goby.com is not just about events. “Events are really important. But they are one dimension of how we spend free time.” Travel is another aspect. “We’re coming at it like a search engine, as opposed to TripAdvisor,” he says. Travel is surprisingly local oriented and is more complementary to local than is generally realized, notes Watkins. More than half of queries — 55 percent — are typically near users.

As for revenues, the site expects to initially receive the lion’s share from affiliate and lead generation fees. It anticipates revenues from sites such as Priceline, and tour providers if it can recommend an Alcatraz tour in San Francisco, for instance. Or its personalization and recommendation engines can promote an Opera performance. When the site gets bigger, it will be more interesting to advertisers, says Watkins.

The site will also have a white label “pro” model for sites that might be licensed by media publishers, or travel suppliers.

Centro, the local and regional media service company, has branched off into Web-based support for ad management. The company today announced the launch of Transis, a new division dedicated to automating the “other 80 percent” of the display industry not served by cut rate ad exchanges and demand side platforms. Specifically, Transis has been developed to make it easier for agencies and media buyers to buy premium display advertising by helping everything in one place. This includes all their research, site selection, negotiation, planning and buying, campaign management and billing reconciliation.

In development since 2005, and built at a cost of $11 million, Transis represents a significant “phase two” for Centro, which now has 11 offices and 115 employees. “First, we were helping advertisers place locally,” notes CEO Shawn Riegsecker. “The second part is build media software that would help scale the business for agencies across the U.S.”

But Riegsecker thinks the risk will pay off big time. He notes that many agencies are currently charging a premium for online ads because, ironically, of all the extra labor involved. “The fact is digital is more complex and the digital budget is much smaller. It doesn’t scale very well when contracts are held in different Outlook folders. It takes a long time to process 15 Web sites. Imagine buying 100 Web sites. It just doesn’t happen,” he says. The addition of mobile,video, social and search complicates things even more.

Riegsecker claims that Transis, which provides full-service information for 50 categories, makes buying “26 [percent] to 46 percent more efficient.” He also says it will eliminate the “double and triple entries” that plague ad buyers today. Transis, very simply, opens the way for agencies “to place more creative buys than any opportunity in the past,” he says. “It moves us into a software supported services model.”

Centro, of course, isn’t the only company moving ads into an automated environment. Google last week unveiled DoubleClick for Publishers, which provides many of the same automated features for publishers on the selling side. It will likely complement Transis’ buy-side solution.

Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau defended the role of the site in journalism and said it is helping to herald in “a golden age of journalism” that has more content and audience participation than ever before.

Speaking at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, Hippeau noted that HuffPo is publishing 500 pieces of content a day, compared with the 100 pieces published by The New York Times. Each piece is curated constantly with the help of the site’s “hyper-efficient editor.” And it publishes 2 million comments a month.

Much of the content comes from newspapers and other media. But Hippeau argues, “I did not kill newspapers,” echoing the five-word acceptance speech of a Webbie award by site founder Arianna Huffington last fall. Rather, he says the site brings new users to newspaper sites by links, like Google.

In fact, he contends that newspaper sites are actually doing pretty well. It is the traditional print business that is hurting. Basically, it is a coincidence that “our business is soaring while circulation at newspapers is declining.”

“If I was starting a news business today, the last thing I’d do is hire a team of traditional journalists and buy a printing press,” he says.

Hippeau also contends that the site’s success in boosting usage is based largely on successful verticalization. While the site boomed during the Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama campaign, it is now only dependent on politics for 20 percent to 25 percent of its traffic. The site, in fact, has just launched its 13th vertical section: colleges. The section enables students to contribute campus-by-campus news for 50+ colleges.

The site also has four local editions (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Denver) and has also recently launched a sports site, which now accounts for 10 percent of its traffic. The timing was fortuitous as the launch occurred around the Tiger Woods scandals three months ago. “It is the gift that keeps on giving,” he says.

Yodle, the third-party SMB reseller, has now divided its business into “Yodle Sponsored” and “Yodle Organic.” The formation of the latter division, which has been live for a month with 150 clients, is a recognition that SMBs are increasingly relying on organic search as much as paid search — and they need help driving exposure to their Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

For $400 a month, with six-month initial contracts, Yodle Organic is set to pump up its clients’ organic search rankings. It will provide personalized consultations, design and code Web sites to maximize search rankings; help create and syndicate video; distribute local business profiles to search sites and directories; and provide a dashboard that allows SMBs to measure goals.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the timing feels right. “SEO’s price-per-lead and price-per-click is substantially lower than SEM. But it isn’t ‘either-or.’ They complement each other,” he says. “SEO takes time to build your site so it becomes visible and builds authority in the eyes of the search engines. It is about building equity in a brand that is long lasting.”

The challenge is to properly scale the effort for each client and make money — Yodle gets an average of about $1,000 per month from its 7,000 paid search clients. “No one has productized and automated and put clear accounting” around something like this, he says. But “we’ve been building Web sites for three years. We’re experts in automation.”

Still, it is an ongoing experiment as Yodle works to get clients non-paid traffic in such new areas as maps, article sharing sites and even Google’s 7 Pack. “We look at these things as organic distribution,” says Cunningham.

Content production is probably the biggest question mark for Yodle (and for any company entering this space). Out of the gate, Yodle is using a combination of external contributors, internal editors and curated content from other sources. It hopes to provide at least 10 fresh pieces of content a month to each client.

What if consumers could personalize the ads and content they see when they open utility sites such as Google, or portal sites such as Yahoo? That’s the idea behind Optini, a new 12-person company based in Utah that has developed the concept of Optini Vu System “browser connectors.” These enable users to put Fandango listings in their Google page, or ESPN scores into CNN, etc.

The concept is not entirely new. Add-ons and extensions have been increasingly commonplace for tool bars and now Google’s SideWiki. But Optini President John Wright says that connectors enhance the concept, since they are available on an opt-in basis from the consumer end. They can also be integrated beyond Web browsers for use with iPhones, etc.

On a local basis, Wright envisions their use with Internet Yellow Pages and others. They can reach “an entire generation that never uses e-mail,” but relies instead on messaging and other insert media.

While popular sites such as Google or CNN may not like sharing their own pages (and advertising impressions), Wright says such sites really don’t have many legal options to fight it — in fact, Google’s Side Wiki has set its own precedent. It is really the consumer’s page, he says, noting that opt-in happens “after the dom,” rather than “before the dom,”  and no cookies or beacons are involved, so it is not any of the site’s business.

Of course, one tends to pause about a technology that allows a consumer to enjoy one publisher’s expensively produced content and/or search results, while displacing any chance that the publisher can get revenues from advertising. But then again, who is to say that a company like Optini couldn’t actually work with publishers to enhance their own sites?

The new breed of content aggregators is among the biggest bets in online media. These companies are assembling content from hundreds of thousands of contributors, optimizing it on the search engines so it is easily found and syndicating it.

Demand Media is probably the biggest company in the space. But others include Examiner.com, which has a distinctly local/vertical tilt, and Associated Content.

Associated Content CEO Patrick Keane talked with us last week. Keane, a former analyst with Jupiter Communications who has since had major roles with Google and CBS, says the game is all about cost-effective, scalable content generation. “We want to own event content around where ads are found,” he says. The company can also develop content on a custom basis — something it has done for Reuters, Hachette as well as major advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble and Toyota.

Publishers — which Keane calls “the owners of audience” — can increasingly see the value of unique content creation assets, he says. AOL, for instance, owns less than 10 percent of its content. Yahoo’s percentage of ownership may not be much higher.

For such sites, local content is a key differentiator, especially since so much of it has a utility angle. “We see more and more contributors contributing content on a localized basis,” says Keane. Consequently, one of Associated Content’s big initiatives is to find, discern and empower contributors on the basis of local DNA.

Keane notes that Associated Content, which has 60 employees, has 350,000 contributors. Perhaps 40,000, for instance, are in the greater Boston area. They can submit restaurant reviews, local school reviews and other local content, he suggests. That would fit in with the identity of some of the contributors.

A third of the contributors are mercenary agents settling for the upfront, per article fee of $1.50 to $2.00, notes Keane. Another third are experts of some kind who want to have a professional voice about what they’ve done, such as an accountant in Phoenix. The remaining third are “social media Web freaks. They create community about what they write about.”

While Associated Content is a powerful site onto itself, ranked 39th overall by Quantcast, Keane emphasizes that it is not about “being monolithic with singular content. For us, we are 2 million destinations. It is about how people use content in certain way.”

True to his roots at Google — and investor Tim Armstrong’s roots at Google — Keane says much of the equation ultimately revolves around search. He notes that 80 percent to 85 percent of the site’s content is found via natural search. “We are about search effectiveness and having accountability to brand advertising. It is not about the best cordless drill. It is about people who are predisposed to buy the drill,” he says.

“We are increasingly a navigation hub,” Keane adds. “We’re playing in that world as opposed to super bowl ads.” Consequently, a major effort for the company is to achieve higher page rankings over time by incorporating lots of different kinds of content, including images, slide shows, video and real-time search.

Seventy percent of the company’s 2 million content pieces continue to be text-based, although that percentage might be slightly declining.Text indexes better through natural search and it is faster to render, says Keane.

Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional partners.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is live, and other newspapers and local media companies are anticipated as partners in coming months. Allmenus.com is the second brand from parent company Dotmenu.com. The original brand was Campusfood.com, which brings online ordering to college students.

Allmenus’ media partnerships involve co-branding and promotional advertising, potentially including display, direct, e-mail and social media. They also involve contextual integrated content. While they notably don’t involve the papers in sales, the papers receive a minority share of local market revenues. Revenues are derived from online food ordering, advertising and monthly maintenance fees.

Allmenus Chief Revenue Officer Tony Wills, a former exec with Quigo, Newsday and R.H. Donnelley, says the company determined that local markets had to be launched one at a time to be truly successful — even though it has good distribution via Google and Yahoo Local. Newspapers still have the online brand and promotional power to best drive local awareness and sales, he says, despite their drop-offs in penetration and usage. Newspapers also appreciate Allmenus as a “content” service since it strives to have the most comprehensive set of menus in each market — something it handles with local feet on the street, and fly-in teams.

Under terms of the partnerships, Allmenus widgets for online ordering will be featured in specific contextual parts of newspaper sites, including sports, local, weather and business. While it would seem to make sense to have newspapers also handle local sales, Wills says that it wouldn’t really work because newspaper sales staffs are paid on commissions.

A primary reason it wouldn’t work is that Allmenus takes no money upfront. Instead, it charges a transaction fee that is a little over 10 percent.  It takes 11.5 percent, or $5.75, out of a $50 order, for instance. “If there is no revenue, there is no sale,” says Wills.

In any case, newspapers may have trouble committing the resources in today’s environment. “Newspapers are under siege,” says Wills. “They can’t commit the resources. They need it to be turn-key.”

There is a role for newspaper sales reps, however — to build awareness for the Allmenus service. “It makes the print sale” for restaurants more valuable because of added awareness and usage, says Wills. Indeed, online ordering is a big piece of the restaurant landscape. Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales — online orders are 10 percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items. Ultimately, however, it is a different ballgame than brand and awareness advertising.

Bono and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman

As widely reported last week, Yelp has confirmed that it will receive a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, which is widely known for the involvement of U2 frontman Bono among its seven partners.  Elevation, which manages $1.9 billion, will also seek to increase its total investment to $100 million via stock shares from vested employees and other eligible shareholders.

In a statement, Yelp said it “plans to use the additional funding to deepen its market leadership position throughout the US, accelerate growth in Canada and throughout Western Europe, and continue the development of innovative mobile applications.”

Yelp had been in apparent talks to be purchased by Google for $500 million in December , but it isn’t clear why the deal didn’t go through (or even if the talks really happened). Elevation’s valuation of Yelp appears to be for less than $500 million.

Elevation is also an investor in Move.com, Palm, Forbes Magazine — all  contrarian bets.

Yelp Product Manager Eric  Singley is appearing on the Mobile Superforum at Marketplaces 2010 March 22-24 in San Diego.

Digital media is more cannibalistic than complementary and is seriously eating into the demand for traditional news sources such as newspapers, TV and news magazines, according to the third annual survey of news users done by Outsell Inc.

The survey findings are based on almost 3,000 consumers and are fully detailed in Outsell’s “News Users 2009” report, written by former Knight Ridder executive Ken Doctor. It essentially pours water on hopes that online traffic from Google and other news aggregators represents new growth opportunities for traditional publishers that ultimately outweigh any cannibalism. In fact, 44 percent said news headlines on aggregator products such as Google News suffice in themselves.

Indeed, such aggregator products are increasingly competing with traditional news products as primary “morning” news sources. They’re tied with newspapers and catching up with TV, which leads with a 30 percent share, a drop-off from 36 percent three years ago.

Long-term trends may be worse than the broad numbers suggest, as a segmentation analysis by Outsell found that “Power Users,” who represent slightly less than half of the market, are increasingly relying more on digital products. These users have “omnivorous” appetites for news, simultaneously serving as core newspaper subscribers while relying more heavily on news aggregator products.

Outsell, however, found they are spending less time with print publications. Moreover, they are increasingly inclined to drop their newspaper subscriptions.

“It’s worth watching the trends set by power news users — they tend to foreshadow where all news usage is moving,” notes Outsell. “The daily newspaper and news magazine habit is quickly ebbing.”

The survey also suggests that paid content may not be a panacea — something that The New York Times is betting on, as it implements plans to move to paid online models in early 2011.  Analysts (like me) would argue that The Times exists in a class of its own as a news source and may prove the exception. Another industry hope –shared by Apple, Amazon, HP and others — is that large computer tablets might entice people to pay for a la carte or subscription content.

Without thinking about the exceptionalism of The Times, or the future of tablets, 75 percent of news users told Outsell that they would get their local news from a different source if a pay wall was put up. Only a small minority said they would be willing to pay for some type of paid content (i.e., online access included with print subscription, online-only access or some other type of “press pass.”).

When the time comes, however, many users will surely reconsider. Just look at the evolution of pay per call, and more recently, paid iPhone apps. None of this, however, undermines the challenges that traditional media face with/and against Google and other digital sources.

Rumors have been flying that Google is poised to buy Trulia, “the real estate search engine” that competes with, among others, Zillow (which just said it is aiming to IPO in 2011).

But according to reports by attendees, no information was forthcoming at Inman’s 2010 Real Estate Connect conference in NYC, where Google Director of Local and B2B markets Sam Sebastian addressed the audience. Sebastian did note, however, that “we’re actively looking to acquire one to two companies a month.” (Note: This is a corrected quote, per an investigation by Greg Sterling. A previous version suggested he had specifically said “real estate companies.”)

The Trulia rumors have been partially fueled by the development of Google’s new Place Pages, a merchant profile feature that could theoretically be used to develop a national Multiple Listings Service, competing with Realtor.com. If that were the case, Trulia would probably help enlist agents and brokerages.

But there is “not some evil plan we have in Mountain View, with millions of folks talking about how we want to take over the real estate markets,” said Sebastian, again, according to published reports. And there really are no plans to focus on Place Pages for real estate.

Sebastian did note, however, that brokerages were finding out Google’s advantages on their own. “Agents have always been pretty engaged in buying keywords and targeted ads from Google to drive traffic to their Web sites,” he said.

Trulia, itself, reports that it has come off a gangbuster year, with 62.3 million unique visitors, 45 percent more visits and 105 percent more page views. Along with increased engagement, Trulia reports that “consumer interest in homes exploded, with nearly 1 million home buyer inquiries sent to real estate agents in 2009.”