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

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 Providence, Rhode Island, and will add a Worcester, Massachusetts, site in February. The site has seed funding from Angel Street Capital and 10 people on staff — including a well-known local news personality.

Founder Josh Fenton says he lived and breathed the news cycle as a Hill staffer in Washington and later as the owner of an ad and PR agency. The decline of newspaper readership has convinced him that there “is a likelihood that the newspaper that drives the news cycle will cease to exist.” Already, newspapers have “no relevance” to most consumers under 45 years old, he says.

Launched last year, GoProv is likely partially responsible for a decline of Belo’s Providence Journal website, which Fenton says is down 30 percent to 40 percent since last summer. Local readers “have had a choice for the last 12 months. We’ve broken more news stories” – quite a claim for such a small site, given the large newsroom that the Providence Journal has.

Multi-channel targeting is the key, notes Fenton. Right now, GoProv is acting as the news source for Channnel 10 NBC and four Clear Channel radio stations. “We go on drive time with the big story of the day, and also to their websites, where we are the local news widget,” he says. Some of the stories, in fact, break on the broadcast stations, then push back to the website. In addition to breaking news, GoProv is producing a five-minute clip of daily news, using two anchors.

Video, in fact, is seen as a great asset as the site preps its Worcester site. Living in the shadow of Boston, there is no network TV station affiliate in Worcester, although it is a city of 1 million people. “You never have Worcester or Worcester County news on the Boston stations, unless something really horrific happens,” says Fenton.

Social media also plays a major role in building the company. Roughly 20 percent of its traffic derives from Facebook, where it has 85,000 social relationships between fan pages, writers, friends and other social assets, notes Fenton. That number may be ramped up more as additional media outlets come on board. The company is currently in discussions with a sports radio group.

Leveraging a social competency is also a vital component for the company’s advertising relationships. More than 30 advertisers buy a broad package that can include display ads, rich media, email promotions, inclusion in deals and social blasts. The site, in fact, has been cash flow positive since it was seven months old.

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 hasn’t changed is that you still need the geo-fencing data tied with other meta data for local discovery. You still need to know what subway line is near, where the nearest parking garages are, or what your choices are for dining when you are visiting your friend in Chelsea.

Companies such as Maponics, Urban Mapping, Zillow and others are still licensing or providing their geo-fencing results. And now, the customer base is more universal among companies in the local space, along with key verticals related to schools, real estate and other verticals. Other companies, such as Yahoo, have used such data to introduce Proximity Search.

The result can be a seamless paradigm that integrates local mapping information with coupons, deals and other merchant information. But not everyone gets it.

“Some publishers still don’t get how to have cross platforms,” suggests Maponics CEO Darrin Clement. “They’re still looking for leads in the social world; still bolting on coupons to their results. They’re too intent on protecting the existing paradigm.”

Clement says mobile users, especially, need seamless roaming of information. He notes that some local services will just use the Zillow API. And it works well for start-ups. But Zillow only has 7,000 neighborhoods, he notes. “We have 160,000. Zillow has 100 cities. We have 2,300 cities.”

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 that several of the largest Patch sites will be in the black in 2013 and that the site remains a definite “go”).

Meanwhile, the dream lives on, and lots of independent and regional hyperlocal initiatives, in addition to Patch, are still going at it — and should be. Main Street Connect, a Northeast site, has raised $7 million of new funding and added a new CEO. Many newspapers have launched various hyperlocal sections. The Boston Globe’s YourTown, for instance, has 50 town sites.

Local Thunder, ShopCity and American Towns also have hyperlocal products that emphasize hyperlocal commerce as much as hyperlocal journalism (arguably, an equally important part of a community buzz). A new venture is GoLocal24, which launched GoLocalProv in Providence in 2010 and is launching GoLocal Worcester.

As an article in today’s Boston Globe points out, GoLocalProv was founded by Josh Fenton, a former advertising executive who grew up in Providence. His cofounder was Paul Krasinski, a Newton native and executive with Arbitron (and brother of John Krasinski of “The Office”). The website employs 10 reporters, including a well-known local TV personality.

The article notes that the Providence site became profitable after seven months and closed a second round of financing in December from Angel Street Capital and local investors.

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 a platform that provides enhanced listings, transactions and social media tools for SMBs.

Two former Gatehouse digital staff, in particular, have taken out new ShopCity sites: Emily Lowry, who launched Magic City Post’s ShopBirmingham after working on ShopBuffalo last year, and well-known journalism blogger and executive Howard Owens, who today launched ShopBatavia. The sites make me want to go out and use ShopCity to launch a shopping site for my own town.

The sites are new for ShopCity, which now has 30 local sites around the U.S. and Canada. The company has also launched ShopLocally, which is kind of a networked “greatest hits site” comprising the best of ShopCity sites.

Owens notes in today’s The Batavian that “ShopBatavia.com isn’t just another ‘hope they find us’ business directory with nothing more than a picture and a few words about your business.

“With ShopBatavia.com merchants can actually sell online, offer specials, discounts, coupons, daily deals, product information, set up newsletters for direct marketing, integrate with Facebook and Twitter, answer customer questions and do it all in an environment that is professional and backed by same-day phone support.”

Owens adds that “ShopBatavia.com is bolstered by the marketing power of The Batavian, with its thousands of daily local readers and thousands of Facebook fans.”

O’Hare tells us that the New Canaan, Connecticut-based company has already signed up 200 blogs and community papers in the New York DMA and is getting checks from advertisers that he’s got lined up. There is also some activity in the Bay Area. The network is seeing 3 million page views per month, and expects to have 10 million by the end of September.

The development of the network currently relies on self-serve, but Local Yokel will ultimately have three sales channels, adds O’Hare: Self-serve, direct sales and on a limited basis, “the right resellers.” “We don’t want to turn this into ReachLocal, he says. “We are more of an inventory specialist.”

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 has 4,300 customers: mostly local retailers, shopping malls and credit card companies. It recently launched a beta in the U.S., setting up shop in San Francisco. It claims 7.8 million total users.

Business owners can run unlimited promotions sent in via the Web-based dashboard, Twitter or SMS for a flat fee, which starts at 99 cents per day. Services are also being embedded in apps, including Friendly for the iPad, a popular Facebook app.

The average business can make up to 11 changes a month (although we know from experience that most won’t make more than a few, at least initially). Mobile is a special emphasis, as consumers can be targeted to within one mile, or one kilometer, of their location — a feature that retailers have already gotten to know via JiWire’s NearByNow. The site enables promotions to run from 140 to 300 characters, letting businesses say substantially more than they can on Twitter, which is limited to 140 characters.

CEO and cofounder Saumil Nanavati tells us that the company is based on the idea that businesses “don’t need graphic designers,” they just need to focus on their promotional message. He says the company has learned there are interesting divides between users who come in via the Web and users coming in via mobile. The Web currently accounts for 60 percent of its traffic.

Categories such as restaurants get much more traffic from the Web-based dashboard, says Nanavati — a finding that surprised us, as the mobile-oriented Instant Deals sites, such as Groupon Now, are especially focused on restaurants for mobile. What does better on mobile are things to do when people are walking around, such as art galleries, he says.

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 3D conference next month). CitiGroup branded MasterCard, similarly, is partnering with Google to offer deals over mobile phones. Groupon is also said to be working on a credit card arrangement.

Now, American Express is revving up “Serve,” its erstwhile PayPal killer. Serve is an online and mobile commerce platform that enables consumers to preload cash on the card and eliminates the need to print out coupons, among other things. A key part of the platform will be local deals, which will be promoted on AOL’s Patch.com, which expects to have more than 1,000 hyperlocal sites by the end of the year. Customers will need a special credit card to participate.

The arrangement kicks in this fall, launching in Eugene, Oregon. Full personalization based on individual customer data will be fully developed in six to 12 months, according to AmEx (via Chicago Business).

It isn’t clear whether Patch will also be sourcing deals. Patch had previously announced a new initiative it calls “Patch eSaver,” which will show all the deals available in town every Tuesday.

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 on a model that reclassifies SMB video. Its partners include Yellowbook and Jivox.

“Combining Backyard’s revolutionary technology with Pixelfish’s software-as-a-service video creation, distribution and tracking application allows us to deliver immense value for local advertisers and consumers,” said Pixelfish CEO John McIntyre, in a release. “We know what video ads work best where for each local business.”

Backyard, a new start-up, has been ramping up quickly. It has 500,000 unique visitors in the suburban Southern California areas of Orange County and Riverside County after just a few months. It acquired Ben Saren’s CitySquares in December, and has launched an intense telemarketing-based effort.

The company is headquartered in Temecula, 50 miles north of San Diego. The new entity will be known under the CitySquares brand (it owns the www.citysquares.com, but not backyard.com. It has been using bckyrd.com, Svngr-style.)

It will have 50 employees, including 20 from Backyard, and will soon be moving into a new 12,000-square-foot facility, says Espinosa. Pixelfish, however, will retain its Torrance, California, office near Los Angeles, and its separate business.

With Pixelfish’s backing in hand, Backyard/CitySquares will be hitting affluent neighborhoods in major metro markets by April, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It will also be launching partnerships with major media companies, initially focusing on newspapers, says Espinosa, who will be the company’s CTO (and a significant shareholder in the merged enterprises).

While terms of the sale were not disclosed, it is said to be in the range of $3 million to $5 million, consisting of cash and stock. Backyard’s angel investors included Dave McClure from 500 Startups, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jason Calacanis.

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 business profiles, adding premium tiers priced at $47 and $97 a month. Businesses can claim them and flesh them out with Facebook and Twitter links, online inventory feeds, coupons, deals, gift certificates, video, event calendars and maps — a very well-conceived set of services. As with other ShopCity partnerships, “shop locally” is a major theme. Merchants are encouraged to promote their own presence via in-store signage. The site also features overall community pages for merchant news and events.

Buffalo News’ Emily Lowrey tells us that ShopBuffalo was developed as a piece of the broader site, which targets 13- to 30-year-olds who are not traditional newspaper readers. She’s not kidding about that. The animated characters that hover in the logo on Buffalo.com’s home page — designed by Hero — could be from a “Star Wars” comic. Another component of the beta is PaperG’s Flyerboard, which lets organizations and merchants post announcements and send additional information on request.

Lowrey notes that the site also has a strong community component. The five-person team that launched Buffalo.com — Manager Ben Kirst, a part-time manager, plus sales and content coordinators/creators — is working with community organizations now to get Neighborhood Goods and a few other really positive projects running.” She adds that site has not had any formal marketing while it is in beta, but will begin a major promotional campaign within two weeks.