And it goes to WPP, according to the press release this morning (here’s the WSJ story). 24/7 Real Media was allegedly being looked at/shopped to MSFT, in the wake of the company’s failed attempt to buy DoubleClick, for $1 billion. The acquisition price according to the release is $649 million. The company does soup to nuts ad buying, serving, search marketing and tracking (including mobile). I don’t have any perspective on the price, but...
Trulia has always been an impressive site to me and it continues to become more feature rich. Today the company relaunched its site with more user-friendly and powerful property filters and community (Trulia Voices). Here’s an example from San Francisco. In many site environments community has a kind of perfunctory or obligatory feel. But in real estate it helps people obtain concrete information about the crime rates, parks, schools and other features of their intended...
John Hanke, Director Google Earth & Maps, announces the new blog: As web mapping (dare I say “the geoweb”?) matures, we’re finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated — not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things...
In a very interesting development, Microsoft has taken a 4% equity stake in number one jobs site CareerBuilder. Here’s the release. That means Tribune and Gannett own just over 40% and McClatchy, which recently joined the Yahoo! newspaper consortium has just under 15%. There are probably a number reasons for this: CareerBuilder wants a strategic alliance with a big Internet player (perhaps as a bulwark against Google and Yahoo!) and the related resources and...
Although spotted last week, SuperPages put out a press release announcing changes and improvements on the site. Here’s a list of the enhancements from the press release . . . City-Specific Skylines – City-specific skylines for 25 of the top searched cities, with more skylines to be added; Two-field Search Box – Simplified two-field search box that allows a user to enter either a business name or category/keyword in the first field, then indicate the...
I continue to be fascinated by Ask and its mix of innovative ideas (Ask X, Ask City) and guts (the “information underground“). I have often put myself in CEO Jim Lanzone’s position and tried to think how one might get consumers’ attention and grow usage. It’s a very challenging problem and I don’t envy him. Today, the Wall Street Journal (sub req’d) writes about the forthcoming Ask ad campaign: The multimillion-dollar campaign, which follows a...
For those that are following the thus far (and hopefully always) unsuccessful attempt by Rupert Murdoch to buy Dow Jones, publisher of the WSJ, here’s a Bloomberg piece (via SEW) that speculates that Google may be in hunt for the paper: News Corp. may have opened the door for other bidders, including General Electric Co., owner of the CNBC news network, Haverty said. Washington Post Co., Gannett Co. and even Google Inc. may...
Today, IAC’s Citysearch becomes the first major local search consumer destination to add video on any kind of scale (note the qualifiers). In addition to video, produced by TurnHere and currently available on the New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles sites, the press release explains other changes and upgrades. The major change, outside of video, is a new “look and feel” that is comprehensive: more images, new profile pages, less...
Coming off the EconSM show last weekin LA, I’ve got social media on the brain. But if the user community is now a “perpetual focus group,” why not take that seriously? AOL’s newly exposed homepage design has garnered criticism for being too much like Yahoo!’s. I’m sure there was a costly redesign process that may have involved outside design firms, RFPs and the like. (It would be interesting to have a window into...
The pace of development of new mapping mashups (mostly using Google Maps) is almost impossible to follow. But it’s one of the most interesting stories going on just below the general technology news radar screen. A great place to keep track of all this is the blog Google Maps Mania, which faithfully chronicles all these mapping developments. Here’s a recent post on 11 great new maps mashups, for example. One of the sites profiled...
Loren Baker
+Ann Smarty
Alan Bleiweiss
David Harry
