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 …

The decline of newspaper readership opens a door for other media to head the news cycle, with everything else trickling down to the TV and radio stations and websites that feed off the original content.
That’s the premise for GoLocal24, a local news and lifestyle content company that started with a website and broadcast partnerships in …

A few years ago, the location of businesses became a big question mark, as well as a strategic issue, as people wanted to shop or dine nearby. These “geo-fencing” issues were especially important for Yellow Pages companies.
Since then, search has become more the norm, along with GPS-based phones, which have location baked into them. What …

No one talks much about certain topics after public crashes — even when the opportunity remains clear. Hyperlocal is one of these. TBD.com in Washington, D.C., crashed last February, and there is a lot of speculation that Patch.com has become a cash drain on AOL.com and is not sustainable (although CEO Tim Armstrong asserts …

One of our big complaints against hyperlocal sites is they haven’t really invested in the commercial lifeblood of their community. They’re more like the (almost totally irrelevant) equivalent of a public access cable TV channel.
That’s why we like the approach of ShopCity, which lets hyperlocal sites, chambers of commerce, local publishers and local governments use …

We’ve liked the idea of an ad network that makes it easy for place bloggers, local news sites and others to combine their audiences for advertisers wanting to target on a hyperlocal basis. The Sacramento Press has been working on this. And Outside.in was developing something along these lines before it was acquired by AOL. …

The appeal of real-time promotions allowing SMBs to add or update a sale or special offer on the fly is fairly apparent. It is a segment that’s been chased after by such players as Google, Yext and others.
Add Chalkboard to the list. The year-old, 12-person start-up launched with operations in Singapore and Malaysia, where it …

Ease of transaction, rewards and “exclusives” will be key to the next generation of deals, and the credit card companies are determined to play a major role. MasterCard is working with NextJump for a special rewards programs, and has a number of other initiatives in the space (which key execs will discuss at our Deals …

Pixelfish, armed with $3.5 million round of new capital raised since October, is evolving its model from a white-label provider of affordable SMB video to a destination site for SMB offers. Today, it announced that it has acquired Steve Espinosa’s Backyard/CitySquares to act as its infrastructure.
Pixelfish was founded in 2006 and has recently settled …

When hyperlocal zeroes in on local marketplaces, it makes a lot more sense to me. Witness ShopBuffalo, an attractive new marketplace from The Buffalo News launched as a companion to Buffalo.com. The site has partnered with ShopCity and Hero, a local design firm.
Launched March 31 as part of a broader redesign, ShopBuffalo provides free …

Q&A sites like Answers.com, Yahoo Answers and ChaCha have been around for a while. They generate huge amounts of traffic because they create millions of pages that target common (and not-so-common) search queries like “how tall is justin beiber?” And with Quora getting a bit of tech buzz and Demand Media (Ehow) going public, the …

What do you do to keep your customer after your deal of the day runs? That’s a big question for tens of thousands of SMBs — many of which have used deal a day as a loss leader and have an investment in making it work.
Companies such as Closely and WildFire Interactive have a number …

Gannett announced during its earnings call yesterday that it is now producing 264 hyperlocal neighborhood sites in 10 markets. This includes the recent addition of 30 hyperlocal neighborhoods in Sacramento. The hyperlocal neighborhoods, produced in conjunction with DataSphere, have put out 30,000 stories and attracted 1.9 million page views.
In addition to the hyperlocal news, Gannett …

 
In December, we discussed the implications of Groupon’s pact with public Wi-Fi network provider JiWire as a potentially significant next step for social commerce — hyperlocal group buying that leverages geotargeting to serve nearby deals to connected customers. The partnership has now gone live across JiWire’s footprint of more than 30,000 locales (cafes, coffee shops, airport lounges) …

I take great delight in the Carlsbad Patch updates on my smartphone every morning. And the Fwix local app on my iPad. But why do I feel they are my “guilty pleasures”? Because there is a rap out there that hyperlocal doesn’t scale and these are toys.
Is it still the case?
Patch now has a …

Local and vertical content is eagerly sought by national players, from The New York Times to Yahoo, MSN/Bing to AOL. Now, Thompson Reuters is leading the local, vertical charge for wire services.
In an aggressive push to lure traditional U.S. media away from the Associated Press, the information industry giant is moving into aggregation with Reuters America, striking …

While 2010 has been lauded as “the year of local,” it has also seen an influx of interest and spending by national brands to drive neighborhood-level store traffic. These initiatives have taken diverse (and sometimes highly publicized) forms: Gap’s deal-a-day offer through Groupon, Best Buy’s mobile check-in experiments with Shopkick, and a host of real-time inventory …

TBD.com, the Washington, D.C., hyperlocal news site branding the online operations of Allbritton Communication’ WJLA-TV and Newschannel 8 under the TBD umbrella, is tabling its local ad network, citing limited advertiser interest.
The site currently has agreements with more than 200 blogs and local sites (up from 120 at launch in August) to link to their work …

There is a lot going on in online media on the East Coast evidenced by the panel on geolocation here at the Internet Summit in Raleigh, North Carolina, sponsored by TechMedia and Southern Capital Ventures. Geolocation continues to be major news given the press coverage of Gowalla, Foursquare, Google and Facebook, which are all chasing …

CityGrid Media (formerly Citysearch) will extend its paid base of 800,000 advertisers across thousands of neighborhood news pages, courtesy of a display advertising deal with Outside.in. The two companies have been quietly conducting pilot tests of custom ads in “a couple” of markets, leading to the wider rollout.
Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson tells us that the …