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.

Courtesy: Engadget

Steve Jobs might be as adept at captivating a live audience as he is at innovating game-changing media products. For nearly the first hour of Apple’s “September event” in San Francisco, Jobs made nary a mention of Apple TV. And then, just as the invite-only crowd suspected that the festivities may be ending, Jobs pulled his latest, famed “one more thing” trick, quipping that the final “hobby” (his notorious description of the company’s philosophy toward TV)  was on the agenda — a $99, rental-centric upgrade of Apple TV that streams movies and TV shows in HD and is compatible with portable devices. 

ABC and FOX are already on board as partners, and Netflix and YouTube streaming are also available. Jobs announced that commercial-free TV shows are 99 cents for a 48-hour rental, while first-run movies cost $4.99. The 99-cent price point is in-step with the iTunes song pricing model that has radically disrupted the music industry. 

Also, because all premium content is rented and streamed (rather than downloaded), there are none of the storage capacity or management concerns that have weighed down iTunes video files in the past.   

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Online scheduling vendor Agendize has bolstered its fleet of local media partners through a deal with weblocal.ca, a leading Canadian local search site. Weblocal.ca will utilize Agendize’s Online Scheduling as an implementable feature for clients that are using its business search platform. The ultimate goal: to “bring users and businesses together” through the search portal in order to convert traffic into transactions.

Businesses listed on weblocal.ca can simply integrate a “book an appointment” button. Customers can access the scheduling function anytime to book directly, and subsequently receive confirmations and notifications. Agendize outfits participating advertisers with a dashboard that manages all customer conversations and appointments and provides a history of these interactions.

BIA/Kelsey’s Peter Krasilovsky has extensively researched the amplified role that online scheduling is beginning to play in SMB marketing. Companies such as Agendize are ideally suited to service businesses that rely heavily on appointment booking, and many local business categories — medical, health and beauty, recreation, repair – fall into relevant scheduling verticals.

With online scheduling as an assumed “next step” for many SMBs, competition for local merchants and the requisite partners to deliver them is ramping up. Maxipage, Full Slate and BookFresh are among a host of general scheduling sites that compete directly with Agendize. Additionally, several specialists have emerged in specific verticals.

The online scheduling category faces a number of key hurdles. One is motivating new customer adoption, which means clearly articulating a need for these services. Further, technology platforms must integrate quickly and seamlessly with existing SMB systems to be effective.

Two freshly released viewer surveys underscore the fragmentation of the TV marketplace, the surging demand for online video and time shifting, and the changing consumer attitudes toward traditional, live television. 

The most recent Morpace Omnibus study reveals that while 52 percent of viewing is live (linear broadcasting, whether prerecorded such as a TV series or movies, or actual live programming like sports and news), more than a third (36 percent) of viewing is now on-demand. In addition to VOD services, 41 percent of consumers use in-home or network DVRs for additional “on-demand,” non-linear viewing.

Meanwhile, the migration online continues, with results from an Altman Vilandria & Co. survey declaring that broadcast TV consumption on the Internet doubled over the past year.

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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 since been engaged in several entrepreneurial efforts.

The basic idea for MerchantCircle’s Local Content Studio, and the others, is to create optimized content that can be used to economically and efficiently spur local traffic to its directories and profiles, while driving ad impressions. Presumably, MerchantCircle will have an edge over rivals via 1.3 million SMBs that have claimed profiles on the service, covering 95 percent of U.S. communities.

The SMBs may be seeking to build attention for themselves (i.e., real estate agents), and/or earn awards or make a little cash — $1 or $2 per article. The cash can eventually add up: Some SMBs, in early testing, are already being sent checks for $300 and up.

The Studio, in fact, may be seen as an extension of MerchantCircle’s Answers division, launched last September, in which members are encouraged to provide their expertise on a wide range of subjects (where to fix, how to fix, etc.). Both efforts are part of a broader effort to broaden MerchantCircle’s identity and engagement with consumers and businesses beyond the core directory.

At the heart of the Studio is an online authoring and publishing system which can support thousands of simultaneous content development projects. The projects can be claimed by local merchant members or other writers remotely, submitted, reviewed for approval or corrections, and published to local and topical “Expert Pages.”

MerchantCircle VP Darren Waddell says the creation of the Studio does not alter the company’s extensive and successful relationship with Demand Media, which includes syndication of MC’s Answers, domain registration for MC members, and expert articles and other content to MC profiles for $9.95 per month, among other activities.

MerchantCircle’s efforts to launch more local content is not occurring in a vacuum. We have watched with interest as Yahoo has been developing local news and information via the hiring of writers in New York and San Francisco, and recruitment of writer/editors in San Jose, Chicago and Denver, per reporting in paidContent. Their written and edited material will likely be paired with material from Associated Content, which Yahoo purchased this spring. It represents a very different take from Patch.com, which is hiring journalists for hyperlocal reporting in up to 500 communities.

Earlier this month, mobile video platform MobiTV released findings from its delivery of the 2010 FIFA World Cup suggesting that the larger the screen, the longer the time spent viewing.  No surprise there, as total average minutes viewed for 5-inch screens (118) nearly doubled those of 2-inch screens (61). 

While MobiTV and its counterparts — FloTV, Verizon VCast and Sprint TV, among others — see consumer adoption and usage rates surging, their media offerings are singularly national. All the essential TV food groups are on the menu — sports (ESPN), drama (USA), news (most prominent brands) and lifestyle programming (Oxygen, TLC).

Unaddressed is local programming, which raises the question, “Where is the mobile opportunity for local broadcasters?”

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