During a late morning panel on Day 2 of ILM West, local video providers batted around the opportunity in bringing video advertising to the “other 99 percent” of small merchants.
“We know it’s evolving,” said moderator Steve Passwaiter of this democratization of video ads. “Once a television-laden experience has migrated to desktop and is now going …

In the midst of ILM West happenings, call measurement ad provider Telmetrics announced today that it’s bringing its m.Call platform to iOS.
M.Call gives local search publishers and app developers the ability to capture data around the phone calls they’re generating. Notably it does this without the need for traditional call tracking numbers.
This works with both …

Day 1 at ILM West came to a close with a session on how SMBs are using Facebook and social media. This most notably culminated with “3 big ideas” for driving social commerce, from Oodle CEO Craig Donato.
These are derived from Oodle’s work powering Facebook’s own Marketplace, and other things the company has done that are tantamount …

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM West conference, prolific Wall Street Journal tech blogger Kara Swisher acknowledged many of the challenges for local media, but was quick to point out that none of these is new.
Some of the sleeping giants moving more and more into local — like Facebook, eBay and Amazon — she argues aren’t sleepers …

In the run-up to any given BIA/Kelsey conference, I’m continually asked about the makeup of our typical audience. This is a good question from both attendees and speakers trying to devise the proper tone for their presentations or prepared panel fodder.
The answer is that it’s a rich bus dev environment with lots of high-level decision …

There’s a growing crop of mobile ad networks specializing in local ad inventory and location-based ad placements. This is a subcategory of larger, more broadly defined ad networks like AdMob and Millennial.
The idea is that this targeting provides better relevance and performance, which lead to higher ad premiums and eCPMs. We see evidence everywhere, and …

As we do every year across BIA/Kelsey’s coverage areas, our analysts put their heads together in cross-disciplinary fashion to handicap the 2012 local media space.
It’s a solid exercise and great preparation for our ILM West conference less than two weeks away. Many of these predictions will come out then, and extensive category-specific reports are …

Amazon has just debuted an iPad and Kindle Fire app that lets kids create holiday wish lists. Known as Amazon Santa, it has intuitive functionality and a fun design to create lists and share them with parents, relatives and of course Santa.
This is really just Amazon’s longstanding wish list, but takes advantage of the tablet …

We’re less than two weeks from our big ILM West conference in San Francisco, and the agenda continues to get stronger.
On day 3 of the conferfence, we’ll be doing things slightly different by devoting the day to discussions about Social, Local and Mobile media (the SoLoMo topic you’ve likely heard a great deal about lately).
We’ll …

I’ve been travelling internationally so I’m late to this news. But it’s worth mentioning that xAd has joined the ranks of ad networks that produce reports on their network activity. We’ve seen these from the likes of Millennial, and more recently from the local networks like Verve and JiWire.
The inaugural report affirms what we’ve known …

Matchbin has spent $10 million to acquire 800 radio and TV accounts from Navteq’s Radio and TV Group (formely Traffic.com). It has also raised $12 million for working assets from Silicon Valley Bank, and is rebranding the combined entity as Radiate Media. The money to acquire the Navteq broadcaster accounts came from Level Equity, Greycroft …

Last week I had the chance to talk to Goodzer founder Dmitry Pakhomkin in advance of the product’s official nationwide launch today. It’s also now available both online and as an iOS app.
The local product search app enters a space that has some solid competition and early movers such as TheFind, Krillion/Local.com, NearbyNow and Milo. …

We keep getting more and more points of affirmation that location targeting in mobile is growing. This is happening as both large advertisers “grow into” the medium, and as it moves down market to SMBs (whose mobile advertising is counted as 100 percent local).
Usage is there: Google last May announced 40 percent of mobile searches …

The apps vs. mobile Web debate rages on in the marketplace, the blogosphere and at tech conferences. But lots of people are coming around to believe that both development platforms have lots of room for growth. ComScore puts them at parity in terms of consumer usage.
We believe this to be true but mobile Web growth …

As we’ve sought to closely cover the inception and growth of mobile local search over the past few years, Poynt has been an important and influental company on our radar.
This has involved a great deal of evolution in broadening its appeal beyond its leading position on the BlackBerry platform (a great diversification move in hindsight). …

During our DMS conference in September, we held a session on the “starting line” tools for SMBs to establish a mobile presence. This is step 1, before the higher frequency discussion of targeting mobile ads.
It’s what I like to call the “art of the landing page”… where does the click “go”? Indeed, fighting to get …

Atlanta-based ScoutMob has cut out the high commissions and has launched as an all mobile site as it prepares for the next wave of deals beyond the world defined by Groupon and LivingSocial.
The two-year-old, venture-funded site has 40 employees. It raised $1.5 million in a Series A round, and is looking at a $5 million …

Google Mobile Ads senior product manager Surojit Chatterjee just posted details on the Google Mobile Ads blog about a new set of ad formats.
They’re listed below, but it’s worth pointing out that many of them are local in nature. Put another way, they are designed to optimize the 40 percent of Google mobile searches that …

I just got finished watching KPCB’s Mary Meeker give her semi-annual data dump at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. As always, it was quite comprehensive and quite good.
And as in the past, much of it focused on mobile connectivity, device sales and the overall marketplace disruption we’re seeing come out of the mobile …

Yesterday, we alluded to some of the developer partnerships eBay announced for its new X.commerce platform. They were paraded out in greater detail following John Donahoe’s keynote, representing the first big functionality injections to the platform.
As background, X.commerce is meant to be the uber platform for individuals and small businesses to create commerce-enabled websites and …