local Archive

Yesterday Brooklyn-based Outside.in announced that they have partnered with NBC to power the neighborhood pages for nine local city sites. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed and NYConvergence has more info on the deal.

Mark from Outside.in noted regarding the deal, "In order to deliver the “most local” site they could, NBC turned to Outside.in and our Neighborhood News Pages.  Outside.in’s Neighborhood News Pages  leverage our automated platform to aggregate tens of thousands of sources (blogs, news, traditional press, twitter tweets, etc…) and organize them by discrete geographic neighborhoods."

It’s a smart move for Outside.in as it brings them both revenue and visibility via the large NBC network.

Here’s a video I captured last year where Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson explained how Outside.in works and why "place matters" and why things near you matter.

This following column was provided by Matt Ackerson. Matt is the author of Venture Kid, a blog about entrepreneurs and start-up advice. He currently works at Scrimple, Inc, a firm that creates products and services for the benefit of the local economy.

The future of the internet will become more locally focused. There are four major reasons why this will is the case.

1. Everyone in the U.S. is aware of the internet and computers are becoming ubiquitous. Local business owners, even those who are older, are becoming more familiar and sophisticated in terms of internet technology and how to employ it to their advantage. According to Opus research, over 40% of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) are advertising online. In the same survey, taken in October, 2008, slightly over 30% said they would be shifting more of their marketing budget online.
2. Companies have gradually adapted to the market and are successfully producing web-based services molded to the needs and desires of local businesses. Reach Local is an example of this.
3. The volume of users performing local searches on the web is growing significantly. While search query volume grew 20% between February 2007 and February 2008, search queries with local intent grew 76% in the same period of time. Overall, Kelsey Group estimates that 20% of all searches performed online have local intent. These are important numbers for the local economy because it shows that more consumers are shopping or pre-shopping online while usage of traditional media is declining.
4. The proliferation of smart phones with embedded GPS technology.

Two subtle factors worth mentioning that are likely to contribute to the growth of this trend are the recession and a growing movement for a sustainable economy (e.g. living and relying on resources closer to home).

These facts demonstrate great opportunity for start-ups and established players to profit, as well as innovate. Plenty are already profiting, fewer are doing much that is truly innovative.

Internet Yellow Pages (IYP’s) are a perfect example of this. Take a large database of contact information, skin it with a slick design, do a bit of SEO and online marketing, and then, presto. It is a common play nowadays, common because it can work reasonably well.

Reach Local (mentioned above), Web Visible, and Yodle take the middle ground on this issue by bringing to market products that show incremental innovation: take the search marketing API’s that are out there, plug them into your site, build some landing page templates, use Adwords and lots of phone calls to get distribution, and presto (Clearly I am over-simplifying).

The same goes for online delivery websites: take orders from customers online and send them through to the business via a fax line. Both online ordering and search engine marketing resale programs are already crowded with competition, but the leaders of the pack are making some nice bank (supposedly Yodle pulled in $30 million in revenue for 2008).

The question remains whether there is the possibility for disruptive innovation in this space. Is a company like Reach Local or Delivery.com the epitome of profitable innovation on a large scale? Are they the "Google" of the local markets? Is it possible to create more innovative, valuable products and services for a market that has been quite slow to adopt internet technology in the first place?

The answer is a yes–we will see more innovation in this space in the future. Why? It is only a guess, but it a guess based on research, personal interactions, and time spent talking with numerous local business owners. In addition, recall the four points above: the progressive and continued blend of the internet and offline commerce is a logical prediction.

Gazing into the future we should remember that web technology’s major benefits will be is the automation or assistance of lab and the potential for cheap and wide distribution (the long tail).

New solutions may disrupt the market by turning online ordering sites or local SEM brands into commodities or make them irrelevant all together. How? Pricing models may be changed (perhaps making such services free somehow), operating costs may drop yielding cheaper and easier integration of SEM / Fax technologies. New competition to the space may address other problems that affect local brick-and-mortar businesses such as weather or seasonal changes. Others may change jobs that humans once had to do in person, such as answering the phone to take orders, and distributing them via a virtual call center.

The possibilities are nearly limitless for the local internet and we have only scratched the surface thus far. The hope is that whatever new web technologies come about in the next few decades, those that target the local economy should do so with more than profit in mind. They should consider the impact their products / services will have on jobs and on the overall quality of life in the local economy.

Thrillist is a daily newsletter for men offering a nugget of information each day. The newsletters are short and to-the-point and are offered in a variety of cities including New York, Boston, Las Vegas and San Francisco. This morning they have announced that Atlanta will be the next city for the men’s email magazine. Apparently the launch will come in, "a few short weeks".

Thrillist notes regarding Atlanta, "Atlanta presents a sprawling galaxy of entertainment options in which even the boldest man can find himself sucked into a black hole — sitting alone in his apartment, hoping a buddy will stop by to make the fact that he’s already drunk a little more acceptable."

Check out our video interview with Thrillist founder Ben Lerer.

NY-based private file sharing service Drop.io has announced the launch of geo-location based drops. The concept works like this — you upload files into your drop. Once uploaded you can tag the drop with a location. Users can search on locations and drops that are set as public will be returned. Some examples would include: "Grand Central", "London’s Speaker’s Corner" or "Berlin Ubahn". For this new location service to be effective, they will need a large number of drops to identify their location so searches return actual results.

The Drop.io Location functionality utilizes Skyhook Wireless’ Loki JavaScript API for the location detection services. Drop.io’s CEO Sam Lessin says today’s launch could help drive a "location-publishing platform".

This new location service is an interesting change for Drop.io. When the service launched, everything was about privacy and the private nature of drops. The idea was that the only way to find a drop was to know the specific URL. Today’s location announcement changes that – drops can now be indexed…will they be indexed in Google next?

Check out our video interview with the Drop.io team along with all of our Drop.io coverage.

Update: Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin left a comment which I thought those of you on the feed might be interested in. "just to clarify, drops cannot be indexed by search or otherwise… we have measures in place to block that from http://location.drop.io just as we do on the core site. Users don’t need to set a location, so the total privacy/publicity of dropped content remains 100% at the users control across the full spectrum.

the feature will be live momentarily and a full explanation is at http://drop.io/dropiolocation/

we are very very excited about this new feature and it will become an interesting new flexible way to use drop.io simple private sharing platform"

NY-based Buzzd and Virgin Mobile have announced a new partnership that will bring the buzzd local city guides to the Virgin Mobile customer base. The service is named "buzzd on Virgin Mobile" and will provide event information to major cities around the U.S., Europe and India.

Using the location features of the mobile device, buzzd can provide information about the location you are currently at and find hot events near you. The new service reminds me of another location-based service we covered, Sense Networks. The content on buzz comes from sources including Flavorpill, TimeOut and Zagat.

Standard text and data rates apply when using the Buzzd service. My mother uses Virgin Mobile and her screen is TINY – how she could use a city guide on the phone is beyond me. In fact, if I remember when I picked out the phone for her, all of the Virgin Mobile devices have small screens.

Brooklyn-based Outside.in presented their business updates yesterday and I’ve embedded the video below. CEO Mark Josephson explained how Outside.in works and why "place matters" and why things near you matter. He noted that local hasn’t been done right yet (of course his product gets it right) because you may have multiple communities in the same ZIP code that are very different.

Their "radar" product lets you monitor local items in a FriendFeed-style fashion. Not sure how it knows which Twitter posts are in which area at precisely that moment but hey it’s Web 2.0! Seriously, if they can do this well, it could be a strong offering – especially when breaking news (earthquake, typhoon, lack of hot Krispy Kremes) hits an area.

Josephson ended by showing us some of their secret sauce with regards to their algorithm and how they decide who is local and what content is local. It’s towards the end of the video below if you want to skip to that part.

FYI – Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch was also at the event and has prepared a good review of the VC sections of the event.

Local mobile search provider GeoSpot is out with a new beta of their Mobile Web service today. Ignore the fact that they have an absolutely ugly logo – let’s look at what their service offers. Most local search offerings return results for the search regardless of whether the location is open currently. GeoSpot changes this by only displaying results of locations that are open currently or at a time you define.

With gas nearing $5/gallon, GeoSpot’s search can save you on wasted trips only to find out that the location is closed. Once you find a POI (point-of-interest) that you are interested in, you can drill down deeper into that location (see below) or one-click to call the location if needed. 

This is the first local search that I’ve seen that matches results to available times. How they will keep that database current is beyond me. While I like the idea a lot, what happens when a merchant complains because the system cost the store a sale because GeoSpot had the wrong availability listed? Please note that the service only works in California and Nevada currently and only "really" works in San Francisco which is quite lame.

Local search on mobile devices might be the hottest mobile sector currently. When we interviewed Snooth, they discussed the importance of searching for a wine on their system and finding a local merchant who had the wine in-stock currently. They used GPS and triangulation to figure out where you are and offer you merchant options. With the iPhone 3G soon on the market with its GPS offering, I believe we will see an even greater uptick in applications built for local.