This deal - Local Matters + Mobile People - will be of interest to people in the local search and IYP space. The deal had been rumoured for months now and so no surprise to see it finally announced. The combined company should be able to provide a more comprehensive solution to new and existing customers. There are no details on the value of the deal. If anyone has any info on the deal size or wants to speculate please comment… Note: Local Matters are a fairly significant partner with FAST in terms of using the FAST search platform for as a core element of LMI’s solution. It will be interesting to see how this relationship evolves once FAST is part of MSFT.
Local Matters and mobilePeople Merger Provides Unique Offering to Directory Publishers
Copenhagen/London, NN March, 2008 – Local Matters, Inc., a Denver, Colorado based Media Technology Solutions provider, and mobilePeople a/s, a Copenhagen, Denmark based local mobile search and advertising provider, have entered into a Share Purchase Agreement on March 21, 2008. Under the terms of the transaction, Local Matters will acquire all of the outstanding capital stock of Mobile People in exchange for a combination of cash and Local Matters stock. The combined company would provide directory publishers, media publishers and directory assistance providers with media technology solutions that connect consumers and advertisers across digital channels including the internet, wireless and voice.
There are now more than three billion global mobile users, and local search ranks among the top content categories that consumers utilize on their mobile phones. Publishers are increasingly extending into Internet and mobile to capture users and local advertisers.
Local Matters’ CEO Perry Evans said: “We chose mobilePeople because we believe they have the best technology to create a mobile distribution presence for publishers. Its expertise, its track record and its innovation cycles set them apart from the many other companies in this space. Our aim now is to be the preferred one-stop shop for directory publishers and directory assistance providers for outsourced media technology solutions online, on wireless and on voice.”
The two companies formed a business partnership in 2006 and have several joint initiatives in progress. The closing of the transaction is subject to additional closing conditions and is currently expected to close in the second quarter of 2008.
AOL re-org - looks like more stuff that creates opps for the likes of G, M and FIM
And this from Looksmart today - about time they got geo sorted!
LookSmart is excited to announce that Geo-Targeting is now available in the AdCenter. Login to your account now and take advantage of this new feature.
Targeting Down to the City-Level Take your LookSmart camaigns further with a spectrum of Geo-Targeting options: Country, State/Province, Metropolitan Area, and City-level targeting help you hit your desired targets.
Reporting, Regardless Whether or not you implement Geo-Targeting right away, you have the ability to see where your clicks are coming from in the AdCenter reports. Take advantage of these reports to gain valuable insight into your campaigns AND customers.
Geo-Targeting Explained Geo-Targeting is a tool that allows advertisers to focus PPC advertising campaigns on the geographic location of their desired customers. Furthermore, advertisers who focus on local advertising can buy popular, head of the query stream keywords and have them displayed exclusively in the local regions they do business in.
Here’s Google’s logo for the 1st day of spring. In London today the wather sucks, so lets hope PT is better. Have a great Easter and Happy Spring!
Well, its only the middle of the work week and there has been a lot of interesting stories and posts already. More stuff than I can keep up with. Here are some of the tidbits I think are interesting…
No, Google Won’t Buy the NYT. But Google.Org Could - I like this mini-post form John Battle’s search blog. I completely agree, lets put and keep the best news organizations in a trust. Living in the UK you sort of take it for granted, but I gotta say the BBC rocks and papers like The Irish Times and The Guardian also very cool and not run to make a profit for share holders.
Search Stocks & The Stock Crash: GOOG, YHOO & MSFT - this post is over on SEL. My opinion is all 3 of the majors are solid. I’ve got to think ad dollar$ continue to go into search during a down turn year, but that probably display gets hurt… This means Google could fair a bit better overall but they still have to finish the DoubleClick deal and they are still way over valued. I would sell GOOG short, hold YHOO or buy if it dips under $17 and buy MSFT all the way its cheap :-). Disclaimer: do NOT trust my stock tips. This is just fun.
The parent company of WordPress - Automattic - secures B round funding - this report from the NYT. Great news. I love WordPress! Related to this is a post by Greg Sterling - Harnessing Blogs for Local - this one has got me thinking about new micro-publishing mash-up business ideas… More on that after a few more beers.
Enteprise search provider Endeca closed funding from SAP and Intel - this over on TC. This interesting in light of the MSFT FAST deal and the Sun MySQL deal. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but lets see what happens with Endeca. I keep wondering when will someone do a “redhat” version of open source Lucene?
This is a brief wrap-up of various news and stories for the past week. I’ve included a few comments.
Sun is buying MySQL - interesting news indeed. MySQL is a big piece of the backend of many Web 2.0 applications and is here to stay as a mainstream database. Maybe Google buy Sun one of these days?
Google acts fast with a MSFT smackdown move in the enterprise search space and there is more commnet on this here at CMS. This relates to the MSFT FAST deal from last week. Google is definitely being a bit cheeky on this sales effort. Apparently they are even offering a free spa day to customers?! See below, I think the person who sent this to me toke some poetic license on the last line…
Offer details To make it easy for you to switch, we’re offering existing enterprise search customers some exciting benefits when they replace their existing solution with a Google Search Appliance by March 31st, 2008. You can choose from one of the following options:
· FREE website search.
· FREE training.
· FREE jumpstart package.
· Spa Day at Googleplex – Alleviate all your worries and come enjoy a paid trip to sunny California, including round trip airfare, hotel, a gourmet lunch from our 5 star chefs, and, of course, one full hour of massage therapy. OK, we’re just kidding about this whole Spa Day at Google, but we know the recent events will only represent more work and stress for you. We’re here to help!
Semantic Wave 2008 Report - free interesting report available to RWW readers. Worth getting this if you have time.
Xobni launched its beta last week - thanks to my buddy at Razorshine for pointing me to this new app. I’ve got to get it next week when I move back to Outlook for my work emails.
Last night I attended the mashup event here in London and the theme was ‘local.’ First off I applaud the organisers of the mashup events for continuing to put together these generally very good events. The mashup events are filling a useful niche in the London online business community. So, please keep organising the mashups… However, last night’s event was very much ‘local search 101′ and I didn’t find it particularly valuable (that’s my view anyway). What I did notice was the significant number of investor types lurking around. I’ve got to think there isn’t much room for any more local Web2.0 start-ups - at least not in the UK. There are too many. There is too much local UGC that’s just not user friendly (more on this in thread in a future post). So a note to Investors: before you invest anything in the local space, contact me first I’ve got some valuable insight to share (I mean sell you).
Nothing new in this post. This is just a list of some of the interesting things I noticed over the past couple of weeks and want to dig into when I get some down time over the X-Mas holiday…
Ask.com’s Top Real Deal Searches of 2007
1. MySpace 6. Cars
2. Dictionary 7. Weather
3. Google 8. Games
4. Themes 9. Song Lyrics
5. Area Codes 10. Movies
Apparently total measurable ad spend is slowing, this is interesting has having spent time blogging and exploring the social media side of the Web over the past couple of months I can see that smart advertisers and marketers will be doing other types of activities that support advertising. This is meme that ties into the global microbrand idea and what Buzzmachine posted as well. This requires some digestion.
The small invite only Local Search Summit we held last week in Dublin was a success - phew… In some ways is ways better than I expected and in other ways it left me wanting more for the next summit. I am still digesting and will report later this week with some feedback and small insights.
We had 16 people representing 10 companies from 7 countries. The publishers print on-line or offline in more than 20 markets world-wide. The event was truly global. Everyone wants another event - tentatively already pencilled in for Apr-may 08. Watch this space or contact me if you are interested.
I’ve been following some of the reports and post from the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media: 07 conference being held out in LA this week. The Local Onliner, Screenwerk and Praized should give you a good flavor of the event.
The Kelsey Group Conferences are high quality and always worthwhile. They are great for business, learning and networking. However, I was reading this post on Screenwerk and it struck a cord with me. I’ve been to a few ILM and other TKG conferences over the past few years but agree that perhaps more on how than why would be good. As someone who has grown up online (vs. coming from a more traditional or offline publishing background) I would even push that statement a little further and say there needs to be more detail into what is working, what is not working and what are the challenges in the local space.
So, I had a thought that maybe it’s the size of the event? I mean no disrespect – TKG events are premier conferences, please attend if you can. However, a bit like social networking (ie, once to big or to general, people look for smaller more elite networks etc) maybe some smaller or even off the radar events are where more in depth and serious discussions are happening and the firmament is starting to brew up some new ideas and innovations? I am sure many of the offline discussions and smaller side meetings at ILM are truly interesting.
I am helping to organize a small but high caliber Local Search Summit here in Europe next week. This will be the 2nd event this year (the 1st one was in Munich in April, perfect place great weather and of course beer gardens) and so far they have been largely self organizing. I can’t list the participants at the moment, but can tell you we are meeting in another city famous for beer and that we have 7 top tier publishing groups joining.
The groups attending are generally multi-national and diversified in terms of owning yellow pages, newspapers, classifieds, TV, radio, online and mobile properties. The geographic coverage is more than 20 countries in EMEA and Asia-Pac. The unifying theme is all these companies are committed to online/digital and are using local search to help drive and unify their online strategy. Here is a draft list of topics to be discussed (below) and as you can see there is a significant focus on advertising.
Local Search Summit – draft agenda:
Local Advertising: what’s working and what’s a challenge
Advertising: the network oppportunity, ad exchanges vs. ad marketplaces
The future with mobile and pay-per-call
SEM Platforms for Local Media
Mapping
Semantic Search and Contextual Search
Local audience. Global language. How Search is extracting context out of confusion.
The role of directory companies in local search
The impact of UGC and social networking on Local Search
I will report back from the Summit with some observations and hopefully some new insights in mid-December…
Docoloco is a new entry into the user generated local info space with a couple of unique features and a fresh approach. btw - I did a previous post on Docoloco when they launched back in July - which didn’t deserve to live (=lame post) so I deleted it.
Now let’s try to explain what this site is all about - it is an innovative twist on user generated content (UGC) meets social networking meets local search (as in a business directory, IYP)… My initial take is that the site is some combo of: UGC + social network + a pinch of yahoo answers + a pinch of yelp + Google maps (of course) + lists (some secret sauce) + ajax/ruby-on-rails UI = Docoloco!
What I like:
Site creates lists of related entries based on folksonomy
the look and feel of the user interface
the design and look (nice logo!) of the site
presentation of the data and maps
asking questions
global coverage (not just one country, but in theory world wide coverage)
post to blog feature
what I didn’t like:
not very intuitive to navigate around
some parts of the UI hard to follow, input validations tricky
not much help or FAQs
geo data validation is funky for UK
search and navigation could be improved
I am sure the founders have a ton of changes and improvements planned, so this is just an initial view [not a full(er) view]. I definitely think they are onto something here. The list feature and global coverage is sweet. I will watch and continue to use the site see how it develops. The founders have significant experience in local search, so I would bet some money this site does get better. Johnny Cussen one of the founders, who I know personally, has worked for both Looksmart & Sensis). The other founder, Chris Mander has a serious web design background, we used him to help with UI deisgn while I was working at FAST.
I hope to see Docoloco get some traction. If I were a VC or angle investor I’d be contacting them for sure.
I plan to do a follow-up post or update to this one with a little bit of a deeper dive into key features and a profile on the company when I get a chance.
