Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, …

Yelp launched its local review site in Australia today and cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman traveled to the country for the occasion. Since 2004 the company has accumulated a database of more than 22 million reviews, none of which has included Australian businesses until now.
Yelp’s revenues have come from the sale of online ads on its review …

Yelp is heading down under to Australia via a partnership with the directory company Sensis where it will integrate Sensis’ local business listing data into its site. In turn, Sensis’ local sales force will sell Yelp.com.au to Australian SMBs.
Neither company has revealed the financial details of the partnership, but Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst did discuss …

Rating and review sites for things like dining, nail salons and events (i.e., Yelp) are inevitably going to battle it out with Google. CityGrid Media’s Insider Pages wants to go in a different direction.
Since last year, the site has steered most of its energies into building up a health specialty, with deep ratings and reviews …

Local media brands continue to look for ways to populate their sites with local bloggers and Twitterers. In return, they provide them with a bigger platform.
The latest to jump into the game is NBC Universal, which paidContent reports has developed “The 20” to highlight selected Twitterers in all 10 of the markets where it has …

Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head to head against Angie’s List, Everydayhealth.com and dozens of others that view doctor ratings and …

MerchantCircle is joining the ranks of companies creating local and vertical content, including Demand Media, Associated Content, Examiner.com, AOL’s Seed and Patch, Perfect Market, Helium, Brafton Media and others. MerchantCircle’s new Local Content Studio is being led by Andy Halliday, who many of us remember as former head of e-commerce at Excite@Home and who has …

Center’d’s The DealMap, which serves up more than 350,000 “live at any time deals” from over 150 daily deal and offer/coupon sources, has released an iPhone app that “mobilizes” the service’s top features, including game mechanics, real-time discovery, crowdsourcing and user-generated content.
The app, much like the Web site, utilizes a location-sensitive “relevance algorithm” to select …

The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington, D.C., area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it will grab hold of the D.C. audience in the same way that its Politico has …

Yelp has added to its international portfolio, following up on its May launch in France with a launch in Germany. Berlin and Munich are Yelp’s first German markets. Fifteen additional German markets have been seeded with “scout” reviews, but won’t be fully turned on for a bit.
These markets include Bielefeld, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, …

Everyone is fighting for a better, more cost-efficient way of producing content for Web sites. But is the so-called “content mill” search optimized approach of a Demand Media, Associated Content or Examiner.com the only way to achieve this?
Whether you agree or disagree with the characterization of these companies (we largely disagree), alternatives are out there. …

Praized Media, recognizing that social-based media has largely moved from the blogosphere to social media sites during the past two years, has now rolled out “Needium,” a new semantic search site that crawls Facebook and Twitter for specific leads.
“A lot of the conversation in blogs now occurs on Twitter and Facebook,” says cofounder Sebastian …

ReachLocal has continued its efforts to add sticky usage for small businesses and diversify beyond reselling Google with the launch of “Bizzy” in New York, San Francisco and Dallas. Bizzy itself, which has a 21-person team, was launched by ReachLocal in early 2009 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is being held separately …

8Coupons, the two-year-old New York-based coupon aggregator, today announced that it has launched The DealBot, which crawls the Web for specific deals.
Deals found by The DealBot are added to 8coupons’ geolocated “MoneyMap” showing deals and merchant locations. Users can weigh in on coupons by affirmatively voting on a section called “Is this deal …

As my colleague Mike Boland has reported, OpenTable has opened its network a bit, allowing registered Yelp users to directly make reservations from Yelp — whether they have registered with OpenTable or not. Users who have registered with both services will automatically get the benefits that OpenTable provides (i.e., dining credits). But they don’t have …

From the “why didn’t that happen years ago?” department, Yelp announced today it will integrate OpenTable reservations. According to the Yelp Blog:
Logged in Yelp users are now able to easily book a reservation using this feature and you don’t need to have an OpenTable account. Already have an OpenTable account? Groovy! If you used the …

Local consumers are presumably in buying mode when they are researching where to have dinner, attend an event or go to the movies. How about when they are researching directions to get there?
In fact, mass transit directions in themselves represent a host of opportunities for local services and advertising (along with parking garage info). Companies …

I recently attended a webinar hosted by SalesBlogcast that featured social media company BizBrag. My reason for attending was to learn how small and medium sized-businesses can take advantage of social media. Based on our Local Commerce Monitor research, 32 percent of SMBs said they plan to use a social site, while 31 percent indicated …

Center’d, the local/social events and city guide site, has consistently reported growing traffic. But in its three-year existence, the site has never really found a niche that would set it apart from the competition.
The site, however, has kept on hammering away at local/social trends, with a strong emphasis on sentiment analysis and local mapping — …

If you do a search on a doctor, you may come up with five or six spammy, ad-supported links. But now Insider Pages, a property of IAC’s Citysearch, has launched DoctorFinder, a new service that hopes to simplify the complex task of finding good medical recommendations. Revenue-wise, the service is hoping to get the high …