A Look at Local.com
I was over at AdTech last week, trying to scope out the latest and greatest happening in location. Unlike a few weeks earlier at the search engine marketing conference SMX East, where local search was quite a hot topic, permeating many booths and break out sessions. The local emphasis among the larger internet marketing community seemed much more subdued. Folks like Quova, who have provided geo IP targeting oriented solutions for websites for years had updated their offering to include mobile location aware targeting through a third party partnership with Navizon, which was a nice extension but nothing too exciting.
A company called HelloMetro was busy trying to build up city oriented sites to compete with Citysearch… although it sounds like they’re still a long way off for the moment in terms of size.
The biggest booths seemed reserved for folks trying to create local business directories for consumers like Local.com and Localpages.com and also ReachLocal.com which is trying to create a platform for buying and selling local ads across the existing and search, directory and display ecosystem.
In the current age of search and with all the innovations that the existing search engines are doing to infer local intent (Google 10-pack), the idea of going back and creating a local directory seems so old school, but there they are.
Here is a drill down on what I picked up about Local.com
There are a couple of different components to their business: Read more
AdTech – Location Based Mobile Services
Mobile Marketer has a nice recap of a panel at AdTech NY this week where folks from uLocate, Useful Networks, Placecast and others discussed location awareness and marketing in the same breath… but couldn’t utter the word Iphone or Google under penalty beer consumption.
