In a significant development, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com is replacing Yahoo! Local Search for AT&T’s broadband and Internet customers. It is a move that will greatly enhance Yellowpages.com’s position in the space. The company recently told analysts it expects to attract 2 billion searches in 2008 and 3 billion by 2010.
The move is part of a broad …

 has bet heavily on building a voice search platform for telecom carriers, Yellow Pages publishers and other providers of ad-supported directory assistance. Now the 150-person company, partially owned by YPG and just listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, has enhanced its mission with a series of acquisitions. These include BTS Logic, an international directory assistance …

While the other telcos have divested their Yellow Pages units, AT&T maintains that there is real synergy in pursuing a three-screen strategy. Rather than selling the YP unit and using the proceeds to build out its network, a la Verizon, AT&T is betting that there is a home field advantage in keeping its landline, mobile …

Idearc has announced another distribution deal aimed at satisfying SMB demand for performance-based advertising on Superpages.com.

The latest deal involved Findology, a California-based company that operates the Zipcodez.com local search engine. Idearc will now place its PFP advertisers on the Zipcodez.com site. According to the press release, Zipcodez serves “3 billion searches per month.”

This deal continues a …

I was at SES Chicago yesterday moderating a couple of panels, sharing duty with my colleague Mike Boland on the local track presented by The Kelsey Group. My first opportunity of the day was to interview Charles Stubbs of Yellowpages.com. Those who were there benefited from a wide-ranging talk about how YPC is doing, why …

It is hard for me to comprehend, but we are finally finished with ILM:07. We were grateful to have had 650 interesting and enthusiastic attendees from all over the world, 72 stimulating speakers, a full load of sponsors and an excellent partnership with SES.
Our next conference, April 30-May 2 at the Westin in Seattle, will …

Charles Stubbs, president of Yellowpages.com, was a surprise guest this morning at ILM:07. Stubbs came to discuss AT&T’s recent acquisition of Ingenio and its implications for Yellowpages.com and AT&T Advertising & Publishing.  
AT&T purchased all Ingenio’s assets, intellectual property and technology. According to Stubbs, ”The acquisition provides us with the opportunity to create a common business …

Jake Winebaum, president of RHDi and CEO of Business.com, a self-admitted neophyte in the local search space, shared his unique “new guy” perspective of the state of selling local search to small businesses at ILM:07. Now working for a large incumbent directory publisher, R.H Donnelley, Winebaum outlined a number of critical challenges and advantages of …

Interactive Local Media: 07 is ready to roll Nov. 28-30 in L.A. That’s next Wednesday through Friday!
The show, which is being produced in partnership with SES Local, has attendees from all over the world. One exec told me he is coming on Wednesday, taking the red eye to New York that night due to …

As we speculated a few weeks ago, FastCall 411 has officially taken its product portable so it can “live” on other local search sites.
The technology is a twist on click-to-call in preventing users from having to go down a list of providers until someone answers their call. Instead, it automatically calls a handful of them …

The numbers are looking very, very good for the Interactive Local Media:07 conference in L.A. Nov. 28-30. Internally, we think this one is a record breaker. Register and book the hotel while you can. The latter tends to sell out.
In recent weeks, we’ve been putting the final touches on the program. For instance, we’ve added …

On Friday, I had the opportunity to spend some valuable time with Richard Zurawski, president and GM of Telmetrics, a leader in the increasingly important call measurement business. As my colleague Charles Laughlin, program director of The Kelsey Report, said today, “In this highly competitive world, measured value is far more important than perceived value.”
Richard echoed …

FastCall411 streamlines the process of looking for a local service provider by letting you call a handful of them at once. The first one to pick up gets your business, which the company hopes will resonate as a good consumer experience that sidesteps issues of disconnected numbers or unanswered calls.
CEO Richard Rosen told me his …

Earlier today I spoke with Gary Campbell, who runs the new directory operation within CanWest MediaWorks, the Canadian media powerhouse. CanWest just finished distributing its inaugural GoLocal directory in the national capital, Ottawa. What makes the product unique is that it is following a pay-per-call model.
CanWest’s approach goes a step beyond the guaranteed ad program …

While I am in Reston, VA, attending Kelsey’s Directory Driven Commerce conference, I thought it would be a good time to start talking about our next show, which I am co-producing: Interactive Local Media 2007. The show is being done in tandem with SES Local, takes place Nov. 28-30, and is at the Los Angeles …

Marchex continues to expand its local advertising and content capabilities with its acquisition of VoiceStar, the pay-per-call and call tracking company. The VoiceStar acquisition adds more than 100 local advertiser aggregators, including Comcast, The Cobalt Group, R.H. Donnelley/Dex and Yellow Book to Marchex’s current partner roster, which includes AT&T and Yellowpages.com.
Marchex also said it has …

Lawyers will be offered a chance to sign up for pay-per-call advertising via a new relationship formed between Ingenio, the pay-per-call company, and LexisNexis, the legal publisher. Advertisers on the newly created LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Attorney Match service will be offered a chance to target consumers in a number of ways, including locality, legal category and …

Summary
Pay-per-call provider Ingenio and market research firm Harris Interactive released results of a survey (n = 4,123) today that shows interesting data around consumer preferences for mobile devices and advertising. These are important data, as any embryonic area requires knowledge of consumer preferences as a leading indicator of product development. Nowhere is this more appropriate …

Following up on yesterday’s mobile news roundup, we had the chance to catch up with AdStar CEO Leslie Bernhard and others during a call yesterday afternoon.
The company earlier in the day had announced a partnership with Nokia to integrate a private-label mobile advertising platform for any publisher to use to sell ads across Web, print …

MarketingSherpa has a case study of Jenny Craig’s integration of click-to-call. Like many local service oriented businesses, the nationally oriented diet product powerhouse relies on phone calls to drive sales.
This need applies differently in different categories, but many local service businesses in particular can benefit from click-to-call, as suggested by this Nielsen/NetRatings and WebVisible joint …