The scheduling space is heating up, with a number of key vendors competing for SMB business, companies such as Groupon and Merchant Circle acquiring and integrating scheduling companies into core activities, and new companies such as MyTime attempting to aggregate all the players.
Bozeman, MT-based Schedulicity is one of the key players in the space, selling …

Photo: CNN
Online restaurant ordering and discovery giants GrubHub and Seamless have agreed to merge their operations, creating a single company. Chicago-based GrubHub currently serves more than 20,000 food ordering establishments in 500 cities, while New York-based Seamless serves more than 12,000 food ordering establishments in 400 U.S. cities plus London.
GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney, …

Seven years ago, in 2006, we began evangelizing a vision of local media driven by vertical specialties. These would drive high value leads with better, more relevant searches. In this light, Google was seen as a “perpetual vertical machine,” driving every query higher and higher up the food chain.
The vertical revolution never happened — at …

Solocal Group CEO Jean-Pierre Remy offered directory publishers a vision for print to digital transformation built on a strong focus on building content, vertical segmentation and a relentless focus on execution. Remy was the keynote speaker at the Local Search Association annual meeting in Las Vegas.
Remy has been at the helm at Solocal (formerly PagesJaunes) …

Chip Perry, the visionary who was asked by Cox in 1997 to facilitate its own disruption with the launch of AutoTrader –going right after its print classified revenues — has resigned as President and CEO of Cox Enterprise’s AutoTrader Group. Manheim Auto President Sanford (Sandy) Schwartz will now take the helm …

In keeping with tradition, BIA/Kelsey released its annual “Picks and Predictions” report this week, offering a collective view on the events that will drive the 2013 agenda in our local media coverage areas — directional, interactive, mobile, social, vertical and video.
This year’s predictions are an eclectic collection, covering everything from mobile ad revenues to cloud based …

The French search and directories firm PagesJaunes has expanded its presence in the dining vertical by acquiring Chronoresto, a site that allows consumers to order takeout food online. The acquisition follows the company’s strategy of building deep content and transaction capability in key verticals, including home improvement, hotels and restaurants, classifieds (real estate, auto, employment),  and health …

Hurricane Sandy forced millions of North-easterners out of their travel routines, closing down regular transit routes and services. It also spurred a boomlet in online and mobile searches for alternative transit, as well as weather.
HopStop, a 20 person, four-year-old site, says its traffic for “non subway” searches was up over 800 percent. Biking, …

Increasingly, a lot of the mobile discussion is oriented towards ecommerce. But what does a major vertical site do with mobile when it doesn’t sell anything online?
AutoTrader, the leading auto site, doesn’t sell cars online. “We basically sell advertising,” notes Jose Puente, AutoTrader’s Director of Product Strategy, Mobile/Affinity Brands, who was speaking Oct. 22 at …

A few years ago, it became apparent that IAC’s ServiceMagic had stalled. While the 1,200 person company has continued to show growth, and had expanded to several international markets, it was clearly vulnerable to new challengers, ranging from Angie’s List and Yelp to new companies, such as Repair.com and RedBeacon (now owned by Home Depot.)
Part …

Retailers own the local experience with customers. But the brands they sell have a stake in local targeting, too, typically supporting it via coop advertising. Other methods to get in front of local customers are less dependent on their retailers.
Brands can work with sales-related promotional media that rely in part on feeds, such as ShopLocal; …

Telmetrics and xAd are out with the third installment of their Mobile Mobile Path to Purchase report administered by Nielsen. As the first two reports focused on travel and overall results, this one looks at consumer mobile habits around finding a local restaurant.
We’ll continue to unpack this in the coming weeks but there are a …

Before too many days pass in travel recovery mode, I wanted to get some of my thoughts down from BIA/Kelsey’s sessions at the EASDP Congress in Toledo Spain on Friday.  As background, we programmed and ran the second day of the two-day event.
We were able to recruit a quality lineup of speakers from different geographies …

Pay for Performance is the Holy Grail in SMB advertising. SMBs only want to pay for leads that their advertising programs deliver. But moving SMBs from inclusion to performance has never been easy. Recent progress in lead quality assessment has been critical in moving performance media closer to the mainstream, as has the movement toward …

Rounding out the first day of our SMB Digital Marketing Conference in Chicago was a panel well versed in the realities of working with local and regional advertisers.
Darnell Holloway, Manager, Local Business Outreach, Yelp
Shawn Riegsecker, Founder and CEO, Centro
Brian Costello, CEO, Maple Farm Media
Though there’s been an uptick in excitement over the past …

In a reflection of the industry’s ongoing interest in developing SMB promotional and loyalty services, Yodle founder Nate Stevens’ venture fund announced last week that it is putting $1.7 Million into Punchey, a new mobile-oriented payments and promotions platform.
The 12 person, Boston-based firm was founded in late 2011 and is focused on SMB “upstream marketing …

Trulia, which provides real estate Web and mobile leads, display advertising and real estate-oriented social media services, has followed in the footsteps of its rival, Zillow, and issued an S1 in preparation for going public and raising $75 Million. Zillow’s IPO has been highly successful – it went out last July at $20 and is now …

Two schools of thought have broken out about loyalty programs. The first is to build a collective currency for points or other loyalty incentives that can be used anywhere in the network. This is the approach taken by players such as Cartera, Edo, Mogl, LocalBonus and numerous others covering the gamut.
The second is to work …

Zillow’s consumer-first approach, which took housing listings out of the hands of the brokerage by posting them on the Web, has since been applied in several local segments: mortgage, home and trade, insurance, recruitment, etc.
Now along comes CarWoo, which has raised $12 million from Comcast Ventures, InterWest Partners, Ventures, Blumberg Capital and Raymond Tonsing to …

Before there were Meetups, Great Courses, TakeLessons.com and online dating services, The Learning Annex held sway. Launched 30 years ago in New York City, The Learning Annex provided classes on everything under the sun, and a way to meet people. Major topics have included self improvement, personal growth, entrepreneurship, wealth building, health and spirituality.
The company, …