The ability to track retail inventory has been on the retail wish list for years. Retailers advertise goods, and then disappoint customers when they don’t have them in stock. Or they have loads of stock in the store, and don’t know they need to promote it to deplete it. Or they have a lot of …

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 …

During the 72-hour whirlwind that was ILM:10, several other announcements also came down the pike. Among them:
- Group buying giant Groupon continues its flurry of partnerships. The Chicago-based deal a day inked separate deals with the Chicago Tribune Media Group and JiWire. The Tribune agreement calls for Groupon to power local deals each weekday on the company’s recently …

Chicago, the original home base of deal a day, courtesy of Groupon’s Windy City headquarters, has its latest DOD offering through the partnership of a prominent local publisher and white-label provider. Wantsa, a group buying platform that teams with newspapers, online publishers and social networks, is launching a Chicago division across the Sun-Times’ portfolio of properties. 
Sun-Times Media is …

One of the big hopes for local this year is … national. As local targeting tools get more granular, there has been an upsurge in national/local advertisers, especially as they focus on touching consumers on the local purchase level. Gannett Digital and MediaBrands’ Geomentum, for instance, are both riding the crest of national-local activities.
Gannett …

(Image is of Zinio Newsstand for iPad, but you get the idea … )
The release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab will give the iPad some competition. It reminds us that the rise of tablets has been positioned as a savior for publishing, including newspapers and magazines.
Theoretically, at least, tablets can process incremental per-copy …

The competition among white-label “deal a day” providers is increasingly intense. At the same time, local media companies are beginning to verticalize their deal a days to differentiate themselves.
Case in point is The Washington Post, which has rolled out “The Capitol Dish,” a Web site and newsletter offering dining deals to D.C.-area restaurants. The Post …

The future of city guides has been morphing beyond events and features. This was driven home today by the launch of Metromix Deals, a JV between Metromix, the 50+ site city guide chain co-owned by Gannett and Tribune, and Local Offer Network, which separately operates Deal Radar.
The effort is the latest “aggregator” to bundle …

The Las Vegas Sun is focusing on hyperlocal “Home News” neighborhood information that positions it for Yellow Pages-like sales, according to Sun President Brian Greenspun, who was speaking at a recent conference at the University of Las Vegas Nevada.
Greenspun, who works with hyperlocal pioneer Rob Curley, says Home News allows users to tailor the …

The deal-a-day model thrives on the power of its e-mail list, sales channels, promotion, clever copywriting and vendor selection. Newspapers and TV stations should be especially well positioned to leverage these strengths, right? Many, in fact, are diving in to deal a day via partner relationships with Groupon and LivingSocial, or vendor relationships with the …

High school sports have been the centerpiece of many hyperlocal efforts. They bring to the table highly passionate fans, families and players in the hard-to-reach 12- to 17-year-old demo.
But the economics of school-by-school efforts don’t always work, whether for branding, region-wide advertisers and advertising sales, production needs, data and content acquisition, or site infrastructure. Just …

AOL’s Patch gave a progress report today on its $50 million hyperlocal initiative. The site said it now has 100 hyperlocal sites, and will launch 400 more over the next six months. It also said it plans to hire at least one journalist in each community, adding 500 new journalists as part of its growth. …

The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was fully in place by March.
Connect, which is subtitled “best of the local Web,” can …

Gannett’s local newspapers and TV stations will begin selling Yahoo inventory, considerably boosting the size of Yahoo’s local sales efforts. The deal, which involves 81 newspaper organizations and seven of its 23 TV stations, is similar to the efforts of Yahoo’s 800-member Newspaper Consortium.
But Gannett, notably, is staying separate from the Consortium. In part, Gannett …

Michael Zimbalist, who runs R&D at The New York Times Co., told Inman Real Estate Connect attendees in San Francisco yesterday that the rise of social networks has spearheaded a very real shift from “the paradigm of publishing to the paradigm of communicating.”
“The consumer is squarely at the center,” said Zimbalist, noting that there are …

Groupon announced today that it will work with McClatchy, the third-largest newspaper chain, in 28 McClatchy markets. The rollout begins this month in Sacramento and Kansas City. Other McClatchy markets will be added over the next several months, possibly including titles in Ft. Worth, Miami, Charlotte and Raleigh.
Like Living Social’s earlier deal with The Washington …

Newspapers aren’t doing well, but they still represent one of the leading ways to reach audiences, online as well as in print. New data from comScore Media Metrix, apparently released to coincide with Editor and Publisher’s Interactive Media Conference taking place in Las Vegas, showed that 57 percent of Internet users in the U.S. looked …

When it comes to hyperlocal, the problem may just be that the local reporting doesn’t reasonate with the community as much as the old community papers did. That’s the feeling behind Main Street Connect, a new company launched by a team that includes community newspaper publishing vet Carll Tucker; his wife, financial columnist Jane Bryant …

On the heels of Groupon’s $135 million round (and $1 billion valuation), Living Social has stepped up to the plate with a new $14 million C round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution LLC participating. The new money gives Living Social a total of $39 million …

The local and community news “aggregator” space is poised to become increasingly important. Local news staffs, obviously, are being whittled away with the declining economics of local news. But there is more local content than ever, via blogs, pro/amateur content, reviews and other sources.
Already, the aggregator space is well populated by sites such as Topix.net, …