TalkLocal

Google API Fees Could Damage the Long Tail Advertiser

The Google Adwords API has apparently begun to charge for calls and usage of their API this month. Ron Drabkin, a contributing editor at VentureBeat sums up the change in direction and what it means for start-ups in this space. Basically Google is saying that they don't want users to be able to manipulate the  high converting, cheap costing long tail keywords that are little nuggets of gold for advertisers and arbitragers. I think this would obviously impact anyone using the API on behalf of a bunch of their long tail clients, particularly in local search. I don't know if this is what happened with TrueLocal.com but it seems to make sense to me, take a look at their Alexa plunge in the beginning of December right around when Google started charging for the API calls:

Skyhook Wireless to Bring More Local Business to the Web

Businessweek.com has an article  worth reading about  skyhookwireless, here is a snippet from their article:

Skyhook Wireless, a small technology company in Boston, is working to target those kinds of prospective customers with a new software tool that—through partnerships with big search engines—will allow advertisers to restrict their ads to Web surfers who happen to be in the neighborhood. The company, which has mapped the 100 biggest U.S. cities, has pioneered a location technology that determines the latitude and longitude of any device with a Wi-Fi antenna, triangulating the location of individual PCs (and eventually other wireless devices), allowing ads to be served within a specific target area.

And Skyhook Wireless provides a software-only positioning system that leverages a nationwide database of known Wi-Fi access points to calculate the precise location of any Wi-Fi enabled device. This is a great development for local search if it works and I think will bring many new advertisers to the web.

 

DayPop is Alive

Daypop.com appears to be coming back to life. The site has been sited up and running in the last few days. It is still almost impossible to get in touch with Dan Chan, that is, if he still owns Daypop.

Upon further investigation there is another site that resides on the same server called Maedge.com

Registered by a person named Ehren Maedge, this URL (At the time of writing this) points to Daypop. Maybe Ehren is the new owner?

(Update)-Now Maedge no longer points to Daypop, it is also hosted on two servers at the same time, Maedge sits on another server with the following domains:

1.	alchemytechnology.com
2.	angelawhite.org
3.	code-visions.com
4.	collectiveanarchy.com
5.	jessicawhite.org
6.	loughmiller.com
7.	peteandmary.com

Scott Loughmiller and  Phil White appear to have worked together in the past with Corvigo, Tumbleweed and Radiant Inc, Mr. Ehren Maedge also worked with these three companies. Perhaps the three are teaming up to re-launch Daypop in a big way, we can only wait to see.

 

PixSense Secures $5.4 Million in Series A Funding for Mobile Photo and Video

Pixsense announced $5.4 million in funding yesterday from ATA Ventures  and Innovacom as the lead investors. From their press release:

PixSense provides mobile media management infrastructure, software, and
services for wireless carriers. PixSense’s technology enables digital media
management and rich-media messaging services to mobile subscribers who
increasingly rely on their mobile phone as their primary media device.
PixSense’s technology also includes patent-pending, on-device media
compression technology and network optimization technology that ensure fast
transfers, and significantly reduces costs to both end users and wireless
operators. 

My take away on this is that our mobile devices are taking the place of our computers and the mobile device will hold the social networks in the future. Also as we start to use the wireless networks more, their exists an opportunity for wireless providers to charge higher fees for the impending greater usage.

DiscoverOurTown.com: The Ultimate US Travel, Tourism & Relocation Guide

I recently became aware of DiscoverOurTown  which provides comprehensive city guides that include travel information, area attractions and restaurant listings for towns across the United States. They have great content if you are relocating or traveling to a new city. Their strength in content is evident in their relationship with Yahoo travel. They have pretty good visibility in Google, but I think they need to develop syndication strategies that limit their exposure to the whims of Google. They are based in Mississippi and have a sales team selling yearly listings in their results for around $179.00. I really like scrappy properties like this that can really be successful with some hard work and a little strategy.

Google Buys Endoxon

Back on October 31st  this year I stumbled across Endoxon and I thought their mapping technology was the best I have seen on the net. Google today apparently thought the same and assimilated them. From the Google Endoxon page:

Google acquired Endoxon’s internet, mapping and data processing business units. Unlike the others, these complement Google Earth and Google Maps technologies and services.

You can see the technology in action at Local.ch

Mobile Carriers And Social Networking

Myspace partnered with Cingular today, here are some of the details from Reuters, "

Media and other entertainment services are expected to be a major area of growth for the wireless and media industries, analysts have said.

MySpace, one of the fastest-growing Internet services with more than 130 million user profiles, is also offered on cell phone service carrier Helio. But Cingular's version will be more expansive, MySpace said.

Users will need to download a Java software application to their cell phones. Initially, about 30 cell phone models will be supported, with another 20 models supported in the coming weeks, which will then account for about 90 percent of Cingular's cell phone user base, a MySpace representative said.

Although online videos from MySpace will not be viewable on cell phones at launch, it is likely to be a service offered some time in 2007, she said.

Media conglomerate News Corp. bought MySpace for about $580 million in 2005. Cingular is a joint venture of phone companies AT&T  and BellSouth."

Also take a look at a report from ABI Research on The growth of mobile social networking.

Wireless Carriers

Do any wireless carriers own or have significant stakes in social networking sites? It seems like everybody is after the wirless user and trying to get them to create content and push it up to social networks/local sites. Just Curious.

The CitiesOf.com

Don't be fooled by the look of TheCitiesOf.com , or the apparent lack of traffic to that domain. They have hundreds of sites with the Citiesof in the domain such as TheCityOfOrlando.com. Taken as a whole the traffic across their network is not bad. This domain network of city domains has been around for a while as has had time to develop some strong organic rankings in google. They started in a basement and are now in an office with an active sales team with some background in selling yellowpage ads for the front cover of the yellowpages. They sell yellowpage type ads across their platform at around 35.00 a month. I think they will eventually realize that Pay Per Click may be a better model to grow revenues and it allows for XML distribution/syndication of their listings to other local sites in revenue share deals. Look at their backfill data, it looks like it was just copied and pasted in there, they should be feeding something paid in there.

Local 2.0 Where Local Meets Social

Sebastien Provencher  has launch a new blog called Praized  that talks about the intersection between social and local. Take a look at his Portal/Platform post. He still works part-time for Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada. (Why do all my roads lead to Canada lately). I think he is pretty sharp and I really believe there is a great opportunity for blogging and local search or hyper local search to mesh together nicely.