A few weeks ago, we covered the launch of DudaMobile and its low maintenance mobile website building tool. Yesterday Duda made more news by partnering with transactional tool provider, Agendize.

The partnership brings Agendize’s signature appointment scheduling to Duda’s mobile websites. This makes sense in mobile where users are often at lower stages of the purchase funnel. Agendize’s offerings come equipped with various ways to charge businesses on a pay-per-action basis.

In our last conversation with Duda, the company spoke about having more mobile-specific calls to action such as click-to-call, directions, etc.. Today’s move gets it closer to that overall goal. This also represents further momentum for Agendize, which last week partnered with Weblocal.ca to power its online scheduling.

The deal a day model thrives on the power of its email 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 likes of Deal Current, Analog Analytics, Shoutback, Matchbin, Nimble Commerce and Offer Foundry.

Going it alone, however, is Gannett’s Republic Media, the holding company of The Arizona Republic, AZCentral.com and 28 other media and vertical sites. Republic’s Deal Chicken has been since Sept. 1, and already has 30,000 emails and 2,268 “likes” on Facebook. It ought to be able to double its email count by the end of the year, says VP of Digital Media Mike Coleman.

The Deal Chicken motif brings with it lots of branding possibilities for social media and daily emails (and has been cleverly executed.) “The Deal Chicken Knows No End” is the tagline. Some of the Facebook posts say things like “The Deal Chicken especially likes Prix Fixe Meals.”

All the writing is done on a freelance basis by contractors, rather than by more expensive newspaper staff. Unlike some of the other deal a day sites, the writers also personally interview merchants and provide feedback when deals are completed. They also receive a cut of the revenue.

“The brand is light and fun on purpose,” adds Coleman. “And we thought it was extremely important to come up with a very memorable brand, especially in light of the many, many similar sites competing for consumer attention. We don’t think ‘PhoenixDeals.com’ would cut through the clutter.”

Coleman said the company looked at its deal a day options, and thought it had plenty of internal resources and didn’t need to give away 5-10 percent of its earnings to a vendor. It also didn’t need to form a partnership with a major deal a day site. In the end, vendors and/or partners will inevitably squeeze tighter, he says.

As a standalone site, Deal Chicken can also establish its own pricing, which has been ambitiously set at 50 percent of the deal price, minus 2.25 percent for processing. That’s definitely at the high end of the deal a day range, which is typically 30-50 percent. But still, it is a relative bargain compared to other local media offerings. Rapid payment is also promised: 30 percent within five days, and the remaining 70 percent within 30 days.

Ultimately, Republic’s independent position is a brave one. Other newspaper companies have settled on partners to ensure that deal a day didn’t get in the lost in the shuffle of day to day operations, or sometimes, in acknowledgment that leading deal a day companies have successfully established a local beachhead.

But Coleman says that when you get past the credit card processing, daily deals are actually among the simplest of the 30 products the company produces. Republic is also ideally poised to push every button it has to make deal a day a success, he notes.

In addition to newspaper and website promotion, Deal Chicken is being promoted for five to ten seconds on the noon news show of KPNX-TV, the local Gannett NBC affiliate. The needle moves a lot after every on-air mention, he says.

In case you didn’t see these, here are links to some of the more important posts from the past week on our Global Yellow Pages blog. Be sure to submit your e-mail address to “Subscribe to Our Blog.” You will then be updated whenever we post something new about the rapidly changing directory industry.

DexOne, SuperMedia in Cross-Distribution Deal

SuperPages.com Reveals its IYP Overhaul

DexOne Names New CEO

Eniro Replaces CEO

PagesJaunes Groupe, Seat PG Deny Merger Reports

Speculation Surrounds Yell Shares Hike

In addition to announcing one billion users per week, You may have heard about Google’s new “Instant” search feature launched today at its Search event in San Francisco.

The new search paradigm will serve results in real time as users type their queries.  Combined with the predictive text it previously rolled out, this will adjust search results as users scroll up and down lists of suggested queries (see video after the jump).

Essentially, this is all about speed and volume. For users, it’s a good way to quickly know if you’re on the right track with a search term and adapt queries on the fly. This will also be a good instant feedback loop to improve overall search behavior and effectiveness.

For Google, it means more results pages per query, which of course has monetization implications.

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Universal Business Listing first launched as a “list once, be found everywhere” label to enable SMB listings to comprehensively populate the “fragmented Web.” However, with social media fueling an even more fragmented Web, UBL is now coupling listing enhancement with presence management — a move that puts it in competition with such players as Marchex, MerchantCircle, Yext Rep and ReachLocal (through its acquisition of SMB Live).

It is also expanding beyond the U.S., with operations set to begin in the U.K. and several other European countries. European operations will focus on “business ID management” — not just getting SMBs distributed and discovered, but also enhancing, monitoring and modifying their online storefronts.

Inner Balloons founder Robin Allenson has been recruited to serve as managing director of UBL Europe. He told BIA/Kelsey that moving into the U.K. and Europe represents a natural business extension because of the “awareness of the need” for similar products internationally that transcend simply being found and “encapsulate” the diffuse Web.

The European launch is under way in 10 markets in the U.K., with expansion into Germany and the Netherlands this year, followed by Austria, Switzerland and Belgium in 2011. Further U.K. market penetration will pivot on partnerships, as the majority of UBL’s business comes from white labeling platforms for SEO, CPC and other search providers to utilize for their SMBs. 

While some would believe that UBL competes with listings companies, Allenson insists they are valuable partners with existing advertiser relationships that can build off UBL’s platform to achieve wider distribution for their clients. 

Pricing ranges from 30 pounds ($46) per year for bulk purchase to 35 pounds ($54) for a smaller number of listings to 45 pounds ($69) for a la carte. Partners receive a one-two punch of services that begins with universal platform distribution and widens to presence management. 

UBL CEO Doyal Bryant emphasized that while there is pressing need for presence management, standard listing enhancement also requires more detail and texture than ever. SMB profiles now have numerous rich media and sharing capabilities, from video and photo uploads to blogging to social media connectivity. Mobile and GPS accuracy are also vital for listings to be discovered. Altogether, these features can improve SEO and empower online sellers to use pay-per-action (PPA) models for higher conversion.

Techcrunch reports today that a check-in based deal for Virgin America, run by Loopt, resulted in Virgin’s fifth highest revenue day ever.

Two-for-one tickets from California cities to Cancun or Los Cabos were offered during a four-hour period to anyone who checked in at either SFO or LAX airports, or designated taco trucks in both cities. Thirteen hundred people checked in to one SF taco truck and 80 percent bought tickets.

These are amazing conversion rates and should push the ball forward for general advertiser demand and awareness for location-based mobile offers. The ball is already moving, but it will continue to accelerate as success stories like this come to light.

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A new partnership with Foursquare will give Vlingo (voice search app) the ability to check in to local places by voice. In addition to standard Vlingo features like texting, e-mailing and Web search, users can now prompt check-ins by simply saying “check in at Fred’s.”

There are a number of other functions such as saying “who’s nearby?” to see what friends have checked in nearby. It will also let users tweet and update Facebook status, though there would seem to be lots of room for voice processing errors in such scenarios (vs. a binary check-in).

This will first be available on Vlingo apps on Android 2.0+ devices — fitting for Google’s voice search over the past couple of years. Google’s own  speech-to-text algorithms continue to improve based on its scale, and it recently launched a broad set of voice command features for Android devices.

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BIA/Kelsey has asserted that a logical next step for deal-a-day providers is to target smaller geographical radii and specific consumer preferences to bolster their value proposition. LivingSocial has made a move in that direction by serving deals at the neighborhood — or sub-metro — level.  

New York and Washington, D.C. (LivingSocial’s home base), are debuting the offering. D.C. metro residents, for instance, can select among D.C., Montgomery County and Northern Virginia deals. 

LivingSocial’s latest announcement comes in the wake of Groupon’s personalization program, which allows subscribers to earmark the types of offers they wish to receive.  

Groupon and LivingSocial already boast exceedingly high open rates for their e-mail offerings (Groupon reports 66 percent); these geo- and behaviorally targeted advancements stand to enhance that.  They also enable both companies to roll out more daily deal inventory, allowing them to recruit new merchants or stagger more frequent offerings to existing clients.