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.”

HopStop, a directions portal that competes in the segment against an ever-building Google Maps, today announced its plans to fight the Big G, including new markets, content partners and features. The 20-person site, which gets about one-third of its traffic from destination and SEO traffic, and one-third from affiliate partners, has added 20 markets and is now serving a total of 57 markets (including four markets outside North America: London, Paris, Moscow and St. Petersburg).

The company’s partnerships — new and old — include hourly car rentals from Connect by Hertz with integrated driving directions, real-time booking capability via Limos.com, daily deals from Groupon, local events from Zvents and business reviews via Yelp. According to CEO Joe Meyer, the revenue model with each partner varies, and includes CPM, CPC and affiliate sales. The company is operating profitably and not actively raising funds, he adds.

HopStop has also added new social media tools, including a feature that enables users to share travel plans with friends. Other features include walking directions and intercity travel via Amtrak and bus routes. Meyer says that the company’s biggest defense against Google and other competitors is its passionate, social media-driven user base, with 37 percent of users using the site 25 times a month or more. Seventy-two percent used the site within 24 hours of their last use. (We provided a full profile of the company in May 2010.)

It’s hard work distilling 20,000 people, hundreds of sessions, droves of start-ups, seemingly endless parties and even a Mike Tyson cameo into a cliffs notes recap of SxSW Interactive. Not that anyone is shedding any tears for me. America loves lists (or so I’ve heard), so here are “the big ideas” that have my brain buzzing post-Austin.

1) The Check-In Gets an Ego Check: Kudos to Gowalla’s Josh Williams, cofounder of a company that has leveraged check-in fascination to fund and fertilize the business, for reminding the location-based services space that check-ins were originally designed as means to greater value, not as ends unto themselves. When misconstrued, badges, passport stamps and other social rewards that fail to tell a more compelling value story (whether tangible, personal, philanthropic or other) can become a hindrance rather than a facilitator. “We’re drinking our own Kool-Aid,” Williams admonished.

So what does “getting real” really mean? Not a lot of concrete nuggets were offered. Perhaps it’s being able to tell a larger, more colorful personal and social narrative around places you’ve been or communities you’ve interacted with (the Gowalla idea). Maybe it’s about social recommendations that blend local places with friends’ activity (hello Foursquare). Maybe it’s gamification for larger social good (see Seth Priebatsch’s grand plan to use game mechanics to fix education). Or maybe its something else. But it’s not check-ins … not long-term, at least.

2) So, This Whole Deal-a-Day Thing May Be MUCH Bigger Than We Thought: Actually, many of my colleagues have viewed group buying as a local commerce game changer since its earliest days. But the deals session at SxSW, particularly a slide from Yipit’s Jim Moran, brought this burgeoning ecosystem into sharper relief.

I’m well aware of the critical places that deals sites, white-label providers, verticals and aggregators hold and can feel the rising demand for data to justify the opportunity for publishers. Exchanges were a natural as the space grew. But there is also real potential in merchant services, consumer services and merchant agencies. These are largely new doors to be unlocked. There may be more opportunity in b-to-b deals as well, where promising rollouts are limited (Business Insiders’ Pipeline, for one).

The next nuts to crack: better merchant care to boost customer retention, self serve that’s truly accessible (Groupon’s merchant center hasn’t exactly caught fire) and, for publishers, tighter integration of deals into brand content (not as blunt ad units).

3) Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: Maybe, if I knew where the neighborhood started and stopped. Much of the future of the mobile-social intersection hinges on definitions of, and ability to utilize, location. Sounds mushy, huh?

To paraphrase NeighborGoods CEO Micki Krimmel, technology has been great for building affinity and interest groups, but can it be equally useful in fostering local connections? Foursquare and others are beginning down this path with their location + social recommendation engine, but the layer that NabeWise CEO Ann Baldinucci says is missing is the one that “sits above property listings and addresses to tell you what a community or neighborhood is all about.” That is the context wrapper that is largely absent.

Joe Stump from SimpleGeo noted that the demand for neighborhood-level data is fervent, but limited in its application if no social context is connected to it.

4) Twitter Saves Linear TV!: Well, maybe not singularly save it, but it certainly can provide a boost. Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s Director of Media Partnerships, shared anecdotal evidence that integrating second screen activity with live, linear event programming can enhance the real-time appeal of a show (i.e., DVR can’t replicate the dynamic social experience users have when connecting over a live show).

Interestingly, Gavin Purcell, the supervising producer of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” foresees a new job title growing around second screen experiences. Essentially, this person will extend the role of the community manager cross-platform to connect big screen and second screen interaction.

Many local broadcasters are already effectively utilizing Twitter in their newscasts by soliciting audience questions and surfacing story ideas. Now, can they extend the experience to a second screen to create more dynamic conversation?

In the “Field of Dreams” “if you build it, they will come” spirit, when Marissa Mayer takes the stage, thousands are sure to follow. Google’s VP devoted much of her keynote at SxSW Interactive to evolutions in Google’s mobile mapping products (Maps Navigation, route-around traffic and Latitude, among others).

Mobile mapping shares close synergy in the product suite with Google’s aggressive advances into local business and social channels through Places and Hotpot, and Mayer came armed with data aplenty to support progress in both. Among the highlights:

- 6 million Place pages have now been claimed by business owners.
- 20 percent of desktop search is local (a fact we already know). That share spikes to 40 percent on mobile, underscoring Google’s Maps-Places-Hotpot reviews marriage.
- Hotpot now sees more than 1 million ratings/recommendations each month and has 3 million total user submissions.

We had heard that Hotpot was catching fire quickly, but consider that number: 3 million is already one-fifth of Yelp’s 15 million reviews, and Yelp has a six-year head start (Hotpot debuted last November).

However, Mayer noted that recommendations only take a consumer so far…luring them in the door, but then what? The next step for business owners is cultivating a sustained consumer relationship. This is where “loyalty offers that cause me to come back and spend more and become a repeat customer” enter the picture through Latitude, which is testing rewards-based check-ins here in Austin this week. The problems that Mayer and team are trying to solve with check-ins are “what do I get?” and “how can it save me money?”

Speaking of problems, Mayer acknowledged that while all the mobile innovation is exciting, Google realizes that it has “too many features, and we need to condense them into products.” In other words, simplicity is the objective, both for users and especially for small businesses. This is expressly why the company has released Tags and Boost (three-click AdWords campaign generation) through Places, and has deployed SMB sales forces to test direct selling in Austin and Portland.

Google today announced a rather significant change to its local search results and ranking algorithms. Dubbed Place Search, this provides more detailed information about places that match your search query and location (inferred or explicit).

This means a few things. First, it’s the official end of the famed 7 pack (formerly 10 pack) that Google launched at the beginning of 2008. Second, it’s aligned with Google’s goals for the growth of Google Places as a trusted, frequently used and frequently updated information source.

To the latter point, pushing Places front and center in local search results will further solidify its position or “put it on the map” (bad pun) for merchants and advertisers. The information will mostly come from Google Places listings, including details like items served or hours of operation.

The presence and density of these terms is hoped to surface listings for specific things that people search for, rather than just business names (i.e., “Belgian ales”).  There will also be a new “Places” Tab in the left-hand SERP navigation that lets users more directly search the Places database.

This is significant in that it gives Places its own home, from a user-facing standpoint. This was sort of the case with Google Maps, but this is decidedly more location-focused, rather than mapping and navigation. The specific real estate it’s given (along with “video,” “images,” “news,” etc.) is huge.

Beyond Google’s goals for pushing Places more front and center for users and merchants, it appears to be a more intuitive and user-centric SERP design. It will take users a while to get used to, but it will ultimately lead to more effective local search and train users to search differently.

Google claims it cuts search time by 2 seconds on average. This is a common theme for Google lately — including the launch of Instant Search. The idea is less time searching means more hours saved for users, and more searches performed (read: more money for Google).

From the official Google blog:

One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place. In our new layout you’ll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you’ll get to the sites you’re looking for with just one search. In our testing Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.

For advertisers and publishers – particularly vertical directories or YPs — this means they will have to scramble once again to figure out how new ranking algorithms affect strategies to acquire organic traffic from Google.

That’s something they’re used to by now, starting with the bomb that was dropped on the local search world with the aforementioned 10 pack. Since then, Google has been walking a fine line between satisfying publishers, users and its own bottom line (not in that order).

This should ultimately be a good thing for users though. TBD on exactly how it affects publishers (Andrew Shotland has some good early thoughts and screenshots). It will be rolled out over the next few days and we’ll be watching closely.

Before

After

Sorting content by neighborhoods and ZIP codes can boost usage considerably, as HelloMetro recently discovered. The 10-year-old city guide gets more than 6 million monthly unique visitors and has 1,500 local sites. In a case study published today, it said it received a 10 percent jump in traffic after it started using a neighborhood and ZIP sorting service from Maponics. Twenty-five percent of that boost, or 2.5 percent overall, was directly related to pages organized around neighborhoods and ZIP codes.

The site says its problem was that it had too much content coming in from its 50 writers and various news feeds. But it didn’t sort enough by neighborhood. Searches for subjects, names and points of interest could only be done on a metro-wide basis.

The Maponics technology for sorting neighborhood data essentially solved that. Now, searches can be conducted by neighborhood and also include such features as city resources, shopping, theater, communities, schools, jobs, and other categories. Altogether, 90,000 fully optimized neighborhood and ZIP-specific pages have been developed. There are roughly 45 neighborhoods per metro, it noted.

As the demand for dependable call-tracking tools intensifies in the SMB marketplace, WebVisible — the Irvine, California-based local online marketing provider — has unveiled upgrades to its portfolio of services to enable more focused ad geotargeting and greater call-tracking capabilities for businesses.

WebVisible has boosted its Geneva Platform to serve locally targeted ads for its clients across all search engines. CEO Kirsten Mangers told BIA/Kelsey that not only will SMBs be able to calculate their advertising radius across an entire city or ZIP code, but they can also “drill down to individual blocks within the radius to focus their marketing efforts on high or low penetration areas.” 

Enhanced geotargeting feeds into call-mapping features provided by the company’s Merchant Center 1.6, giving clients smarter tools to distinguish “bona fide leads” from peripheral ones. 

Mapping shows advertisers exactly where calls are originating from within their radius. The platform is interactive, so SMBs can then grade calls in order to earmark effective leads and block unwanted calls. They have the autonomy to say “what is a good call and what isn’t.” WebVisible then can apply its algorithm on the back-end to adjust marketing campaigns for more efficient bidding and targeting. And, as dictated by its SMB partners, it can also create alerts tied to their call blocks.

The entire suite is designed to, as Mangers put it, address “the elephant in the room” for call tracking and pay-per-call providers: distilling qualified leads from irrelevant ones. Easier said than done, she reminded us, because what is “bona fide” to one business may not be to another. Only when this issue is definitively resolved can SMBs, resellers and agencies all evolve to true transaction-based, performance-based models. 

Yext has already introduced voice recognition and processing technology to help merchants better understand their leads, a developing sweet spot for WebVisible, too. Mangers said it would enable the company to scan voice recordings for a deeper contextual understanding of how to handle these calls, which is pivotal in addressing online churn. 

Mangers also updated us on new partnerships that WebVisible is brokering. The firm has several deals brewing in Asia and is redoubling efforts outside the U.S. because “publishing partners are 18-24 months behind us in creating viable online products” (though many are ahead in mobile). It announced a partnership with McClatchy Co. in April in which the newspaper conglomerate plans to fully integrate WebVisible’s marketing platform across its 29 markets by the end of 2010 to bolster local sales.

As for location-based mobile services, Mangers personally is an eager early adopter but cautions against putting cart before horse until the market matures to a greater level of standardization in which reach can be gained through more aggregated, trackable distribution. “App-vertising” is an important future initiative, but in the meantime, it’s “back-to-basics” for SMBs, with some handy new tools in their kits.

In addition to the visual enhancements, Yell.com has added “shortlists,” which enable the user to create favorite lists that they can share via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.

Yell.com has also, separately, introduced a video channel. The channel allows SMBs to upload videos for free and is part of an overall effort to promote the use of video as a promotional vehicle. At this stage, the video channel primarily features SMBs in Central London.

The idea of an immersive Yellow Pages idea has been gaining traction, particularly among European directory publishers. European Directories has embraced the concept.

The French publisher PagesJaunes has long featured a highly visual online experience. Seat PG features 3-D images in its TuttoCitta.it mapping product. Boston-based EveryScape is an early innovator in bringing the immersive experience to local online media.

And then, of course, there is Google Street View.

Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures, Local & Mapping, gave attendees at Marketplaces 2010 a glimpse into the direction that AOL is moving in its local strategy, specifically with Patch.com, MapQuest, its content management system Seed, its LocalFund investment arm, the relaunch of CitysBest and the forthcoming launch of Patch.org.

Earlier this year Brod was quoted as saying that local is a “great white space.” He now admits that was a slight exaggeration based on how much has been accomplished by various players in the local space, but he stands by the vast opportunity that local offers. “Local is the largest opportunity yet to be won online.”

Further to that he commented that local is a very large and complex space and that AOL will focus on the areas it has identified but will also look for potential partnerships in areas such as search and social networking. Moreover, he made a statement about the fragmentation about the space: “People look at local as the one-ton gorilla, but really it’s 1,000 two-pound monkeys.”

AOL’s key areas of local focus are content (Moviefone, AOL Autos, etc.); Products (Seed); Acquisitions (Studionow); and Ventures (LocalFund). At the heart of AOL’s local strategy is Patch.com, which AOL acquired in June 2009. Brod hypes Patch’s method of using a scalable technology platform, structured data and low cost, but professional journalists in its markets. Patch.com is available in select markets and states now, but Brod believes that conceivably there could be a Patch in every community in the world. So, international expansion is in the cards.

Brod received multiple questions about Patch.com, including how AOL would avoid the demise that others in the space have experienced such as Backfence, which sought a hyperlocal strategy. AOL has had its own local offering in Digital City, which essentially morphed into CitysBest.com, which AOL had stopped investing in. However, in this new local strategy, CitysBest will be relaunched, with a focus on major markets in the third quarter of 2010, and thus reinvigorating the eight-year-old brand.

LocalFund, part of the ventures arm of AOL, is focused on seed and series A companies with an initial average investment of $50,000 to $100,000. He said although its scope will be global for the investments, much of its focused interest to date has been in New York, California, Israel and India.

It’s also important to note that AOL will relaunch MapQuest in 2010, a unit he admits has been under-resourced. While he didn’t provide any specific details, he said the move wouldn’t include a renaming, but rather a repositioning and would be utilized to drive local content.

EveryScape, a Massachusetts-based company that offers an immersive local search experience, has secured a new $6 million funding round. We see this as a sign of confidence that the model EveryScape is pursuing — creating a virtual local search experience where you can find a local business, walk in the door and virtually browse and purchase inventory — is a significant and immediate opportunity.

The lead investor in this round (EveryScape has raised $16 million to date) is SK Telecom Co., South Korea’s primary carrier and a major Web portal. The venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated.

EveryScape operates in a space that is increasingly on the radar of local search and directory players. In Europe, publishers that include PagesJaunes, European Directories and Seat all offer various flavors of immersive search, often using internally developed solutions.

EveryScape has deployed its solution with a number of partners to date, including such local search or tourist destination sites as Philly.com, HarvardSquare.com and others.