Things continue to heat up in the mobile ad network space. One week after the Google/AdMob news broke, top mobile ad network Millennial Media has announced a $16 million funding round led by NEA and existing investors.

The company says it will use the money to accelerate international growth (with emphasis on Europe), beef up engineering and sales divisions, and improve its technology for ad placements.

Though it doesn’t have the footprint in the smartphone app space that AdMob has, Millennial has the greatest reach of all ad networks (in monthly impressions), according to Nielsen. The company says its ad network reaches about 80 percent of the roughly 64 million U.S. mobile Web users.

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

New TKR Advisory: ‘The Multiple Layers of the European Directories-Skype Partnership’

We published a new Advisory today in The Kelsey Report that examines the recent deal between European Directories SA (which publishes print and online directories in eight European markets) and the VoIP giant Skype, with its 480 million worldwide users. (read more…)

Jeff Jarvis’ HyperCamp on New Business Models for News

A “hypercamp” dedicated to New Business Models for News was held yesterday in New York City by The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, led by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. We weren’t there — wrong coast — and nothing is on the site yet. (read more…)

Deloitte Research Supports Mobile Holiday Shopping; NearbyNow Gears Up

Deloitte released a report indicating this holiday season will see a bump in shopping search performed on mobile devices (in addition to social and other online media). Specifically, 19 percent of survey respondents claim they’ll use mobile search for gift shopping. (read more…)

Recommended Reading: The Smartphone Blue Sky

The New York Times’ Bob Tedeschi has a neat column today (thanks for the link, Peter) that speculates what smartphone technology will look like in two years. This comes from his recent conversations with researchers at MIT, SRI, and the iconic Xerox PARC. (read more…)

Twitter Continues March Toward Local Relevance

Twitter is getting closer to the promise of bringing location into the equation as a key component to status updates. Its geolocation support is rolling out, and it recently announced a new local trending topics feature. (read more…)

Sacramento Press’ Model Blends Hyperlocal With Social Media Management

Hyperlocal models continue experimenting with ways to make it work on a standalone basis. Networks, e-commerce and other revenue streams have all been tested. Backfence vet Mark Potts has even set up GrowthSpur as a consulting firm and national network specifically to leverage the clout of hyperlocal sites. (read more…)

HelpHive Shifts: SMBs Must Opt-In to Have HelpHive Number

HelpHive, the new Seattle-based leads provider for service SMBs, had made some changes after running into real PR problems last week from Evan Conklin, an angry (and persistent) plumber. He was irate that the company was taking SMB phone numbers and trademark info, and funneling them through its own system so it could take credit for leads. (read more…)

More on Google/AdMob: A Big Deal

Following up on this morning’s “just the facts” post about Google’s AdMob acquisition, here’s a bit more commentary. First off, this is a big deal — both in size and in what it could mean for the two companies. Google is clearly keen on replicating its online dominance to the mobile world as growing smartphone penetration drives the growth of the mobile Web. (read more…)

‘Oodle Pro’ Launches: Tying the Self-Serve Sensibility of AdSense to Social

Its not just about advertising anymore. Social media is important too. Accordingly, a number of vendors and network providers have developed tools to help them see where there best placements are and how their reputations are unfolding online, and to simplify and automate their processes for listings and other information. (read more…)

Ad:Tech/New York: Digital Marketing Is Promising, Hard to Execute and Headed Toward Mobile

Ad:Tech/New York, “the event for digital marketing,” ran Nov 4-6 at the Javits Convention Center. This event was predominantly focused on national advertising. There was some attention to international advertising and even less on local advertising. (read more…)

AT&T Interactive Chief Product Officer David Yoo resigned last Thursday, Nov. 12. He has been replaced by Spot Runner vet Will Hsu, who had been recruited by Yoo to AT&Ti.

Yoo came to AT&Ti from TellMe after helping sell that company to Microsoft for $850 Million. While at AT&Ti, Yoo led the relaunch of several mobile and online properties including Yellowpages.com, YP.com and the soon-to-be-relaunched buzz.com. He also led the company in its mobile and new ad strategy initiatives.

Yoo’s next steps aren’t known. Although personal reasons were cited, specifically an interest in returning to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, we’d speculate that Yoo plans to join a start-up sometime next year.

We’ve learned that Yell Group veteran sales, marketing and product development executive Paul Plant has decided to accept a retirement package and will leave the company at year’s end. Plant tells us that he’ll take a short holiday, but almost immediately begin seeking new opportunities in the directories and local search industry.

I’ve known Paul for many years, and have always valued his knowledge, broad experience, insight and not least of all his hospitality on visits to the U.K. over the years. Talking shop over dinner with Paul has been among the great pleasures of my career. Paul combines a genuine love for the business with the ability to accept and embrace change. In fact he’s been an agent of change for many years within Yell.

Here is what Steve Chambers, Yell’s chief commercial officer, said in announcing Paul’s departure:

“On 31st December 2009, Paul Plant will be leaving the company to pursue new personal interests, after a career of almost 24 years with Yell, spanning a number of important Sales and Marketing roles.

Paul has made a substantial contribution to Yell’s achievements since joining as a Field Sales Representative in 1986. In the mid 1990’s he successfully led the London Sales Region for five years, & after joining the Marketing team in Reading was a member of the small team that brought about the acquisition of Yellowbook USA in 1999.

He played a key role in both our European Quality Award wins in 1999 & 2004, has contributed to the development & growth of our Yell.com & 118247 products, whilst also championing new printed product development & innovation. Always an agent for change, Paul has more recently been a key contributor to the current programme of business transformation, as a member of the specialist team responsible for delivering our new Sales Model.

Paul’s ‘larger than life’ personality will be missed by friends and colleagues throughout the company, and I am sure you will all join me in wishing him well for the future.”

We published a new Advisory today in The Kelsey Report that examines the recent deal between European Directories SA (which publishes print and online directories in eight European markets) and the VoIP giant Skype, with its 480 million worldwide users.

The deal has the potentially to dramatically increase the number of leads EDSA can drive to its small-business advertisers by making the Skype calls free to Skype users. It also has a quasi-SEO element in that it can help drive more clickthroughs in Google 7 Pack for EDSA advertisers featuring the blue free calling button.

For the past several months, my colleague Mike Boland has been following the advance of Skype’s local search and small-business strategy and its growing involvement with directory publishers as strategic partners here on the Local Media Blog.

A “hypercamp” dedicated to New Business Models for News was held yesterday in New York City by The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, led by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. We weren’t there — wrong coast — and nothing is on the site yet. But the free event had a strong lineup of speakers from all walks of hyperlocal; not only from community journalism, but just as importantly, from hyperlocal commerce.

Jarvis’ opening presentation has a very nice rundown of hyperlocal activities, journalism and commerce. In it, Jarvis suggests there are 10,000 hyperlocal blogs in the U.S., with  a thousand of those in Brooklyn alone. He also says that a community with 60,000 residents seems “optimal” for hyperlocal. Moreover, sites should realistically be seeing revenues of up to $200,000 a year from a wide variety of revenue opportunities, ranging from sponsorships to events to print products. He also lays out some useful business model assumptions in terms of staffing and tech costs, etc.

As for the event itself, Outside.in’s blog summed up one of the panels as a bilateral discussion between bloggers and publishers. “The bloggers said, ‘We want you to give us visibility and traffic. When we scoop a story that you like, we want you to put it on your site and give us the credit.’ The publishers agreed, saying they want the content, and in fact, they went so far as to claim, more than once, that without taking advantage of the great journalism happening on blogs, their businesses will fail. Everyone agreed on this point. The stumbling block was around the How.”

To us, the staging of the event was impressive. But don’t tell your broker to invest in hyperlocal just yet. We’re clearly at the stage in hyperlocal that we were with the spurt of the Internet in the early 1990s, when people talked about Internet users as a separate political class with more clout than either the Democrats or the Republicans. Basically, there wasn’t much perspective.

To be sure, the information about hyperlocal is now coming from all directions; a lot of it is ill-informed and emotional/sentimental. Still, there really are no models for real success. The potential, however, is clearly there. And besides, it’s where a lot of the fun is — especially for journalists looking for their next act. Summits like Jarvis’ hypercamp can only help.

At BIA/Kelsey, we’ve kept a close watch on hyperlocal and we’ll continue to study it closely. We certainly have a lot of key players that touch on hyperlocal at ILM:09 next month in L.A. — both in terms of community journalism and hyperlocal commerce (i.e., Yelp, Outside.in, Twitter, BargainBabeLA, MSNBC/Everyblock, NBC Local, Pegasus News, Citysearch, Village Voice Media and Facebook). Let’s figure this out together.

Deloitte released a report indicating this holiday season will see a bump in shopping search performed on mobile devices (in addition to social and other online media).

Specifically, 19 percent of survey respondents claim they’ll use mobile search for gift shopping. The breakdown within this sample is 55 percent for store locations, 45 percent for price comparisons, 40 percent for product specs, 32 percent for coupons and 31 percent for reviews.

This bodes well for local shopping engines — particularly those that offer real-time inventory and pricing, such as TheFind and ShopSavvy, and the “magazine apps” of NearbyNow.

Media Bundles of Joy

Speaking of which, NearbyNow has announced that it will aggregate many of the data from its magazine apps into one uber holiday shopping app. For those unfamiliar, NearbyNow powers shopping apps for retail-centric consumer magazine such as Lucky, Seventeen and Runner’s world.

As we’ve examined, this is a great way for magazines to continue the engagement levels with their magazine readers and push them further down the purchase funnel. This is underscored by NearbyNow CEO Scott Dunlap’s claim that some of these apps have seen more downloads than the magazine itself has subscribers. That’s huge.

This all has implications for magazine advertisers — at a time when advertiser retention is vital for traditional media. The appeal lies in bundling a measurable component with what was otherwise an impression based media. More bang for their buck in other words.

This also happens at a time when the term of the day in mobile marketing is “cross media integration.” Lots of talk about this at mobile conferences from ad agencies and networks. NearbyNow is one of the few companies pulling it off from the publisher end.

Will It Work?

One downside is that the app’s usage ramp has the potential to be lost after the holiday season, when its holiday-centric branding falls out of context. The company could, however, channel this usage into its other magazine apps with strategic branding and linking.

This reminds me of speculation I’ve made in the past, which hasn’t fully panned out in any way that I can prove, but I stand behind its logic: The holiday season has the potential to drive people to mobile shopping products where they’ll see the benefits and return for non-holiday uses.

In other words, this time of year can cause a bump in mobile usage that accelerates overall adoption curves we see in the market. Lots of possibilities here. I’ll give the NearbyNow app a thorough test drive and report back. Download it for yourself here (link opens iTunes).

The New York Times’ Bob Tedeschi has a neat column today (thanks for the link, Peter) that speculates what smartphone technology will look like in two years. This comes from his recent conversations with researchers at MIT, SRI, and the iconic Xerox PARC.

It’s a timely piece, amid all the (ill-founded) talk of iPhone killers and Droid. The article, in fact, starts off in reference to the bar that’s been set so far by the iPhone.

A few interesting facts and tidbits from the article:

Today’s smartphones can do almost anything a PC could do in 2007, but in a couple of years smartphones may have enough computing power to enable much more sophisticated applications that truly take advantage of the device’s portability.

Just imagine a device with an 8-inch fold-out screen, a big virtual keyboard for easy text input, numerous sensors to detect your surroundings, and software smart enough to anticipate your needs and sharp enough to respond to conversational commands.

I mostly agree; however, “fold-out screen” sounds woefully analog for something that is supposed to be a look into the crystal ball. Where I think smartphones and portable technology will head is toward projection technology — ability to project big, high def images without adding to device bulkiness. First, the economics of projection chips have to improve (cue Moore’s Law).

Tedeschi also gets into some local applications, mostly alluding to the much talked about (but little realistic application so far) area of augmented reality. I agree that this will be a key feature of smartphones in 24 months’ time, but lots of non-sexy issues need to be solved such as comprehensive data (common problem in local).

Open up the device, point it at the street and ask it to show you what the place looked like 200 years ago, and it offers a photo or video. Ask it where to eat lunch and it highlights a restaurant that suits your tastes. If you are heatedly debating food choices with a companion when someone of marginal importance tries to call you, the phone will know better than to interrupt.

Finally, he warns that two-year predictions are always a bit iffy. A good point and reminiscent of the Bill Gates quote that (paraphrasing) we tend to overestimate what happens in the next few years but underestimate what will happen in the next 10.

This blue-sky, composite prediction comes with a stiff warning: forecasts with a two-year horizon are especially chancy, technologists said, since those making the predictions are often overly optimistic about emerging designs and, at the same time, blind to some of the reasons the current generation of technologies looks as it does.

Without giving away any more, check out the piece here. Lots of other cool James Bond-like portable technology examined.

Twitter is getting closer to the promise of bringing location into the equation as a key component to status updates. Its geolocation support is rolling out, and it recently announced a new local trending topics feature.

The general concept here is that status updates are becoming the standard units of social networking. And inherent drivers of relevence in status updates involve location (i.e., what you’re doing, where you are, and where you’re going).

Location tags that are more automatic (on an opt-in basis, of course) open the door for new dimensions of relevance that are baked into tweets. Lots of implications: see our coverage of the initial geolocation API announcement and speculation of what it means for local search.

Few third parties have begun to build Twitter applications and clients that utilize the geolocation API but we’ll see many more in the coming months. Birdfeed, for example, is a mobile Twitter client that will do just that.

Meanwhile Twitter’s tighter integration with search engines means geo-specific tweets could surface in local search results in places like Google and Bing.

We’ll discuss these and other social media issues at the upcoming Interactive Local Media conference in Los Angeles next month. Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji will join Facebook’s Tim Kendall and Citysearch’s Kara Nortman for a session on the melding of local and social media.

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On a related note, Google Latitude is parading a new feature that tells users where they’ve been — a sort of social travel log that can be saved and shared.

Hyperlocal models continue experimenting with ways to make it work on a standalone basis. Networks, e-commerce and other revenue streams have all been tested. Backfence vet Mark Potts has even set up GrowthSpur as a consulting firm and national network specifically to leverage the clout of hyperlocal sites.

A new approach is being tested in Sacramento, where Sacramento Press is blending its hyperlocal site with reputation and presence management for local SMBs. Owned by five locals with deep local roots, the site has been feeling its way around how to develop a winning hyperlocal model.

First, it ruled out providing a directory, since it was already well handled in town by The Downtown Grid. Instead, it has linked to The Downtown Grid and focused on community journalism, hiring three full-time editors and launching a homegrown CMS that is based on tags instead of categories for both advertisers and content. The CMS lets advertisers pick and choose which content they want to be associated with. For instance, religious groups can blog certain placements.

Since it started selling advertising in February, the team’s two-person sales staff has successfully landed 30 advertisers. Most of the advertisers are on six-month contracts, with many of them sponsoring specific sections of the site.

Now the company is eyeing broader relationships with the advertisers, many of which have expressed the need for deeper online help. Specifically, advertisers can leverage Sacramento Press’ expertise in social media. Six advertisers have already been upsold to broader programs that include Web site help, social media support, reputation management and video.

The company’s intent is not to go so far as to write blog posts for companies, but it will handle Twitter feeds and video content. The packaging of services has allowed average accounts to float upward from an average of $600 per month, and $1,000 is the sweet spot that is eyed. The local iMax big screen theater, for instance, was one of the first of its enhanced advertisers.

In addition to Web support and promotion, the company is also providing Street Team “engagement on the ground” support for local events such as fairs and concerts — something we’ve also just seen introduced by Village Voice Media.

Sacramento Press Cofounder and President Ben Ilfeld, 28 years old, tells us that once the company thinks it has fully developed its base in Sacramento, it will look to expand by bringing the CMS and business model to other markets. He is especially eyeing cable companies as partners.

The company also has partnered with Cox’s Adify, the vertical network company, for tech support to reach beyond its downtown roots to create a broader regional presence.  Eighteen blogs and forums that are “all local and independent” make up the network– much like Next Door Media in Seattle, which comprises five adjacent neighborhood sites. Ilfeld expects the sites’ combined reach to ultimately be comparable to the reach of McClatchy’s Sacramento Bee, which has traditionally dominated Sacramento media.