Lots of news coming from mobile local app provider WHERE today. Just a week after it opened up its WHERE Ads local ad network, it has launched a new Web site and officially changed its name from uLocate to WHERE.

The company not only provides the WHERE local app but is also an app production house, which my contacts in the publishing world tell me has solid technical chops. It will continue to build this side of its business but the name change reflects a friendlier consumer brand, in line with the familiarity of its flagship local app.

As for the Web site launch, this is similarly meant to solidify the brand and create a more integrated local experience between PC and mobile device. True to the cloud computing trends driving a great deal of online and mobile media, the site lets you log on (or register) to view and manage your local activity, such as the places you’ve checked in from mobile.

Other features, from the press release, include:

• Keep track of all the places they’ve been to in the past, those they want to go to in the future, and their reviews with Placebook
• Record their current location with Check-in
• Share their WHERE activity with their social network via Facebook and Twitter
• Search, discover and review local restaurants, businesses and services
• View nearby concerts, sports games and other events

In terms of creating continuity between the online and mobile experiences, Foursquare has a similar site but it’s not as functional (though we hear Web site updates are coming).

Lastly, some news from our Marketplaces 2010 conference next week. WHERE VP of Product David Chang is joining us onstage to discuss mobile monetization in a segment that caps off our mobile forum. He’ll join MoVoxx, LocalAdExchange and CallSpark in a discussion about the growing area of mobile local ad networks and monetization. We’re expecting a great session.

If you’ve been reading TechCrunch this week, you’ll know (or be annoyed by repeated claims) that this year’s SXSW conference will be all about location-based mobile apps. They’ve dubbed it the “location wars.”

Everyone is doing and thinking about location targeting and mobile. Twitter has been doing it for months with its geolocation API and Friday went live with automatic location tagging (opt-in) on its own domain. Loopt and others in this space have been doing it for years, while Facebook and Google loom quietly.

Meanwhile, usage skyrockets. Foursquare has 500,000 users and had its biggest day yesterday with more than 250,000 check-ins. Anecdotically, I went from being the only one of my friends using Foursquare three months ago, to most of my extended social circle now using it (and fruitlessly competing for my mayorships — yes you, Jen).

But the interesting part is how mobile location apps have evolved. Based on privacy and other issues, the check-in has replaced pervasive location tracking as the catalyst for communication. It’s a clever form of opt in. Realizing this, other leaders in the mobile local space such as Loopt and Yelp have integrated check-ins in the past few months.

For the local space, this is relevant because check-ins revolve in some way around physical places — often a business — rather than a meaningless lat/long reading. The next step, of course, is monetization. How do you create a lead out of someone raising his or her hand and saying, “Here’s where I am, and (by implication) here’s what I’m interested in?”

Foursquare has begun to turn check-ins into leads, as have MyTown and Brightkite. And more check-in services continue to come out of the woodwork (see Causeworld). Many will die in an inevitable shakeout, but the overall trend is here to stay. More importantly, this will be the basis for new monetization structures that take form in the coming months.

Of course, none of this is terribly new; we and other local analysts have been eyeing it for some time. But it’s reaching mainstream awareness (Foursquare’s TV ads don’t hurt). Over the next 10 days, SXSW will cause a bump in usage that will bring it even closer to the mainstream — or closer to the questionable $12.7 billion LBS market that Juniper Research predicts for 2014.

In its evolving product search efforts, Google has been dabbling in “find it in store” functionality over the years. This is a challenging area involving lots of moving parts and point of sale inventory data from retailers. Krillion, NearbyNow, Milo and a handful of others have cracked this nut to a certain degree for their own sites as well as partners.

Google’s latest move came at December’s “Search Event.” Buried among many other announcements, VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled find-in-store functionality in mobile searches. As Google sees greater levels of immediacy, buying intent, and conversions in mobile search, it’s a logical place to continue this effort.

Blue Dot Special

Today the feature goes live, taking the form of little blue dots in mobile search results that indicate product inventory and proximity data. Proximity is determined by the MyLocation feature that must be turned on for effectiveness. It also currently only works on iPhones, Android and Palm WebOS (i.e., Palm Pre).

This happens in free-form searches where product names or categories will trigger such results (or searches taking place within the “shopping” tab). It could eventually be much more effective with UPC bar code scans where inferred intent or human error is taken out of the equation. Google has already gone down this road.

Local inventory data and mobile bar code scanning have already come together — in the way of chocolate and peanut butter — with ShopSavvy. But for this to really take off, a bigger addressable market is required in the form of more high-end phones with auto-focus lenses and scanning software.

Meanwhile, back to plain old mobile search, there are still moving parts as mentioned. Getting retail inventory feeds requires direct relationships with retailers. Currently Google covers Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn. More will come, and more will indeed be required for a worthwhile user experience.

Better Search, Better Leads

As you might imagine, Google will employ a self-serve approach. As there is more consumer awareness, retail awareness should likewise grow, and they might show up in meaningful numbers to supply these point of sale feeds. Then comes the challenge of the much bigger and fragmented mid-market and SMB (mom-and-pop) retail segments.

A monetization model will follow. Advertiser adoption here could mirror what Google has done with AdWords. It could likewise end up creating the same reseller market among local sales channels. It would seem that a trackable way to drive foot traffic into physical stores would resonate more with a typical mom-and-pop than would the concept of buying clicks.

If Google can solve this problem, it will be a major boon for the local search and overall product search market, and a major source of revenues. It will also be great for consumers, the mobile market, etc. But one step at a time.

This week so far has seen a few notable news bits from the quickly evolving world of mobile ad networks.

ULocate announced that it will extend its location targeted ad network to a small batch of third-party publishers. Known as WhereAds, they’ll include locally targeted inventory on Geocade, Jambase, MocoSpace and Superpages.com. The location targeted and presumably more relevant ads are seeing CTRs up to three times greater than comparative mobile ads according to the press release.

Next, Jumptap has announced it has launched a self-serve tool for mobile app and Web site publishers to join its ad network. This is very much in line with the strategy previously expressed in talks we’ve had with Jumptap CMO Paran Johar. The idea is to maintain a core business in premium mobile ad placements but also begin to move down the tail with self-serve offerings to smaller publishers and advertisers whose hunger for mobile continues to grow.

Lastly, Todacell has announced it will likewise expand, though its growth comes in the form of $1 million in funding and geographic expansion. The latter will include sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay. Like uLocate’s strategy above, its publisher partners will be limited to about a dozen, allowing it to focus on a premium and limited crop of inventory. Funding comes from current and former employers of Amdocs.

Coupons are hot in a down economy, and printable online coupons — and even mobile coupons — are gaining share in the coupon business. But local SMBs aren’t always in on the game, as coupon sites frequently gravitate toward one-stop national accounts.

Now, Analog Analytics, a San Diego-based vendor, is pushing a clever mobile solution that allows online local publishers to feature display ads that have SMS promotion codes built in. Consumers show the coupon on their phones to retailers for conversion.

Use of the mobile coupon provides complete analytics (impressions, clickthrough rates, texts, e-mail and conversions). Among the 850 publishers currently working with the solution are MediaNews Group, Village Voice Media, Local.com, Wick Communications, Freedom Interactive and The San Diego Reader. More than 25,000 ads are being supported, and the company has just expanded beyond the U.S. with a new Australian operation. Chinese operations are currently being eyed.

Company founder Ken Kalb, a longtime search vet, says the mobile coupon solution is the natural successor to low click display campaigns. The engagement of a local promotion typically boosts clickthrough rates by 2 percent to 10 percent — 10 times higher than national online ads. Revenues might see a 20 percent to 30 percent boost within six weeks of launching.

Kalb notes that the coupons are sold via local sales forces, or alternatively, via a self-serve platform. Affiliate marketing programs from other online coupon companies just aren’t a good alternative, he says. They typically pay just three cents per click. They also don’t offer much support for local advertisers in terms of analytics or upsells.

In fact, Analog’s self-serve platform also offers an upsell gift certificate program, which brings in immediate revenues for advertiser and publisher alike, as well as the “Bigger, Better Deal,” a daily promotion special. It also encourages frequent updating of ad copy and promotions. The platform also enables the development of opt-in marketing lists.

Is it too soon for mobile coupons on a mass media basis? It might be. As a backup, Analog Analytics does support print-out options. But this solution is an interesting one that might bring a source of renewed interest for local media companies. They continue to bring in more eyeballs than other media on their Web sites, but often have a hard time proving their value.

Analog Analytics CEO Ken Kalb is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010. He’s on the “Back to Square One: Refocus on Revenues” panel with Adicio Chief Alliance Officer Tony Lee and Matchbin CEO Reed Brown.

I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Pastko, CEO of Coupious a Boulder, Colorado-based mobile coupon platform. Coupious got its start when Pastko and his partner leveraged their experience at Purdue University to launch a Coupious iPhone application in Lafayette, Indiana. While the duo did very little marketing, word-of-mouth marketing helped push their mobile application to potential users. Push seems to be the operative word with Coupious since its model does not push coupons to people based on their geography, but rather allows people to seek on-demand the just-in-time promotional offers relevant to them when they want them and where they want them. Many of its initial customers utilize the platform to run multiple promotions or post “just-in-time” offers to get rid of seasonal items or to push specific menu items.

“In order to win over local businesses, the goal was to replicate the print coupon model to help make it familiar and comfortable to select,” says Pastko. However, unlike print coupons, mobile promotions on Coupious can track the number of impressions, what promotional offerings are performing better and most importantly where impressions are taking place. As Pastko points out, “being able to locate where people are downloading or viewing promotional offerings allows advertisers to understand if consumers are looking at the point of sale, responding to an outdoor billboard, or are in areas of town that might offer new potential for the business.”

While college towns in the Midwest have been a successful launching ground for Coupious, traditional media groups such as newspapers have become the major focus in the past 12 months. Pastko has been careful about his growth plans seeking markets where Coupious can gain a high density of coupons and promotional offerings. “One of the biggest success factors is having enough content to make the application useful. Just like directories, if the restaurants and entertainment venues people expect to see are not in the database of offerings, then people’s desire to use the application decreases significantly.” Coupious’ model is not to aggregate coupons or scrape the Web for other offers, but to deal directly with the advertisers in the market. Pastko is quick to point out that “this gives consumers confidence that this is a legitimate offer and will be honored locally.”

When asked if the recent surge in coupons is a trend born out of the slow economy, Pastko said “coupons and promotional offers are in a trend phase now but the space is going through a transformative revolution where offers will not simply be coupons but will become promotions embedded within key messages making them more relevant and highly geotargeted to the users location. The mobile platform is the ideal device to deliver just-in-time offers, reaching people where they are and when they have a specific need. It’s up to mobile coupon companies to continue to innovate and embed offers within other media to further increase adoption and usage.”

The Coupious application is currently available on the iPhone and Android platforms with work under way to broaden to other application platforms.

Multiplied Media has announced that its flagship Poynt mobile search application is available now for the iPhone. The app so far has planted its stake on the BlackBerry with 2 million users — indeed the top mobile local app for the platform.

New features of the iPhone version include:

– Setting a Location: Poynt will detect your current location to begin a search or you can manually enter an address to use as your search location.

– Map View: Rotate the device to map a single or full set of search results.

– Augmented Reality: From within the map view, users can access a directional view of search results.

– Call Gesture: From a search result, hold the phone to your ear to automatically place a call.

– Address Book Integration: Add frequently accessed listings to your contacts for convenient future lookups.

When we talked to Multiplied CEO Andrew Osis in October, he told us there’s considerable expansion on the horizon. This will include smartphone platforms, geography and content sources. The former clearly pertains to today’s announcement and we’ll see more platform launches soon.

New Ground

Multiplied’s challenge will be replicating its BlackBerry success with a different user base and a decidedly more competitive local app marketplace in Apple’s App Store. To do this it will apply the other growth objective above: more content sources.

The BlackBerry app mostly covered local search categories such as business, people, restaurants and movie information. This is fitting to BlackBerry user demos, but as it expands to other platforms, Osis expressed a need to broaden its appeal to more of an uber local search utility.

This will include categories like gas prices, coupons, retail and other verticals whose use is growing among mobile users. But most notable in the iPhone launch are the features that not only fit its user base, but also the technical capabilities of the device itself (touch screen, etc.).

Chief among these (listed above) is augmented reality. This is becoming more and more of a popular value-add to mobile local apps (see Yelp’s “Monacle”). As we’ve argued, there are lots of moving parts such as local data and device compatibility (iPhone 3GS required in this case), but there is a lot to look forward to.

Foursquare is blowing up in the tech mediasphere. It’s also standard issue for the mobile elite in cities like New York and San Francisco, and I admit addiction. But there is a certain amount of tech media distortion going on — also known as the Silicon Valley effect.

This refers to the coverage bias to focus on things we in the analyst corps and media tend to use ourselves. The mobile social service gets way more ink than its 500,000 users deserve, and it’s something that my parents, for example (and tens of millions of Americans), have never heard of.

To be fair it’s growing rapidly, now up to a million check-ins per month. But more so, the quickly growing list of traditional media deals it’s signing could begin to launch it into the mobile mainstream.

Most notable is last night’s 20-second ad that aired on Bravo — part of the partnership the two companies recently formed. Many will see it and shrug, but the reach we’re talking about in a major cable TV spot could pique mass curiosity. Bravo’s audience of young urban foodies is also on target.

The Bravo partnership itself creates a Foursquare presence with recommendations pushed to any Foursquare user who connects to it. This includes a series of special badges to unlock. These badges — plus competition to become “mayor” of local establishments — are central to the gaming element that drives Foursquare’s appeal.

Driving users to local bars & restaurants is ultimately the result, and the real value the company sits on. It’s already worked with this (no money exchanged) in its “nearby specials” feature. After first seeing this, specials are popping up more and more when I check in to local places on Foursquare.

The uncertain part is how Foursquare will directly monetize the foot traffic its driving. It’s seeing some money come through the door, but we’ll see more revenue models develop soon.

Mobile and online “questions” company ChaCha today has partnered with local search and listings provider Localeze. This primarily involves ChaCha’s Web site (as opposed to mobile), and will insert deeper local business information around questions asked on the site.

Specifically,15 million local listings will be provided through a search bar. Results will come with the standard set of maps, contact info and other stuff Localeze has assembled. A unique site experience could develop if previously indexed questions and answers “map” to these businesses or their categories.

Additionally, if the site can recommend local businesses that relate to new questions asked, it could have something interesting on its hands as an SMB lead source. It’s unclear how this will come together exactly, but it has some unique implications.

“The trend in the local search space is moving towards using business listings as the anchor for local specific content,” Localeze head of Bus Dev Gib Olander told me this morning. “ChaCha does a great job of answering questions and a consistent set of business listings helps hold all of that together.”

Other possibilities include integrating business listings into ChaCha’s coupons site (ChaChacoupons.com). Listings could also potentially integrate with ChaCha’s primary mobile answers service, but this is more of  a stretch, given the SMS format and the way users currently engage the service.

It would seem that this requires training users to see the mobile service as a place to seek local business information in addition to general knowledge. But if it can do this, it will get more mileage out of the Localeze content in potentially monetizable ways. The company is likely thinking in these terms.

Keep Moving

Overall, this represents the latest evolutionary step for ChaCha, which has gone through many since its 2007 launch. It started in the small batch of “human powered” search engines that loosely contain others like Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo.

This entailed humans who sat around and did Google searches for incoming queries. The idea is that human intervention enables natural language searches. The company soon migrated to mobile as a primary access point, using low-cost part-time labor (i.e., housewives and college students) to conduct Google searches from incoming SMS queries.

Human guides got expensive and were a source of flak for the company. But a larger index of previous questions and answers (about 500 million, it claims) has allowed it to begin to automate much of this process. It’s now up to about a million questions a day, through mobile, online and Facebook app.

Other milestones include passing Google as the top SMS search service, according to Nielsen Mobile. It’s also been a darling to the venture community, raising round after round of funding over the past couple of years — now totaling $70 million.

Local content could be a natural extension of a Q&A format, and tie in with the local intent of many online searchers (and even more so in mobile). We’ll see how it comes together and will report back after a briefing with ChaCha.

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Related: See previous ChaCha coverage in our interview with former CEO Brad Bostic.