PromiseONE concludes purchase of Fathom SEO

Private equity firm PromiseONE has concluded the acquisition of Fathom SEO. Agile Equity, Fathom SEO's exclusive advisor, has posted some information about the transaction on their website.

Some interesting snippets from the Agile Equity release:

• The buyer is actively integrating with the existing management team to sustain and accelerate a supernormal growth rate.
• This is PromiseONE’s first acquisition in the digital media sector.
• AdAge magazine named Fathom SEO among the top 20 search engine marketing agencies in 2007.

Is this the start of a merger and acquisition phase in the search marketing industry?

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Local Focus: CityVoter.com

City Voter is a locally focused social network/media site that helps consumers find the best local businesses in their cities. Registered users can create their own profile, upload photos, add friends, and describe who they are and what they like. In addition to the usual social network profile features, users can bookmark, vote for, and write reviews about their favorite local businesses. Users can also start contests to find out about other local businesses that offer the products or services they are interested in. For example, someone could start a (voting) contest titled "Boston's BEST restaurant wine LIST?", other users can then vote for any business thats already on the list or add one that has not been mentioned. They can also leave comments to support their vote.

Here is a screen capture of CityVoter's Miami landing page. Note: I was directed to the Miami guide page when I entered the cityvoter.com URL, since my IP address is in Miami Beach: (click to enlarge)



Local businesses can also create their own profile for free. Businesses can include all their locations, business hours, special promotions, etc. City Voter encourages businesses and consumers to upload pictures of business storefronts, products, interiors, etc. The site also makes excellent use of Google maps to show the location of a business or set of businesses. The following is a screen capture for the search "night life" in Miami beach. (click to enlarge)


In addition to adding basic business information. A business's profile contains a map on the right side of the page displaying all of their locations. Beneath the map, you'll find a list of all the locations, including address, phone number, and hours of operation. Below the business description, users will see what contests the business is currently competing in and any contests they have won. Just below that you will find user comments about the business. Finally, on the right side of the page below the location information, you will see a highlighted contests section, "people who think we're cool" section, and a "recent votes for..." section. To give you a better idea of what a business profile looks like, I have included a screen capture of Boca Grande's profile. I have eaten at Boca Grande many times while I was living in Boston and I can tell you they have awesome burritos. ;-)



City Voter currently covers the following cities (and surrounding areas): Boston, Washington D.C., Austin, Portland, Seattle, Miami, Raleigh-Durham, and Chicago. Businesses and franchises with locations in these cities can benefit from having a presence on City Voter. Some benefits include:

• General exposure for your business or franchise through your profile.
• City Voter users are opinion leaders. They are eager to interact with businesses and other people to share their opinions of and interactions with local businesses. This presents a great opportunity for businesses to get real-time consumer opinions about their business as a whole, specific product/service offerings, promotions, etc.
  
• City Voter also gives local businesses the ability to see what users are saying about their competitors.
  
• Lastly, City Voter provides a platform for local businesses to interact with individual customers. This aspect of the site allows small businesses and franchises to find out what they're doing right or wrong, how to improve customer service, and what consumers would like to see in the future. Since City Voter (and similar sites) users are very vocal consumers; demonstrating your business's focus on customer service and satisfaction to these users will go a long way in generating positive world of mouth in your community.
  

Are you a City Voter? If so, leave a comment telling us what you think of the site.

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What is OpenSocial? An Explanation Without Code

Google's recently released software development tools made a splash. Articles appeared everywhere with the usual social media and social networking buzzwords. But what does this set of software standards and tools from Google really do? Watch the excellent set of videos below to see the leading OpenSocial partners talk about their development projects. Here is my explanation of the power of OpenSocial:

Think about all of the different social networking websites. Think about the volume and diversity of interactions between users. There are millions of these digital transactions everyday. OpenSocial allows the user generated information on one social networking website to be shared with other websites. All of the stuff people do on those sites: comments, posts, lists, friends, favorites, ratings etc. can be organized, mashed up, and displayed on other sites. OpenSocial makes the process possible. Best of all the presentation of information is completely customizable and flows from its source automatically. Its impact on social networking and the web of the future have been understated.

OpenSocial Developer Interviews

OpenSocial Interview Post

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Follow-up: Verizon Wireless to open up in '08

BusinessWeek's article, Verizon Embraces Google's Android, discusses the sudden shift in Verizon Wireless's business model, from tightly restricted to an open-access network, and how Google's Android helped facilitate this shift. The article details how the open movement at the company was spearheaded by CEO Lowell McAdam.

Some highlights of Lowell McAdam from the article:

[Verizon Wireless's] surprise embrace of an open-access model and of the Android software culminates a dramatic yearlong evolution in the company's thinking. The effort, championed by McAdam, involved meetings with the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and late-night bull sessions with the top two executives at Verizon Communications, which owns Verizon Wireless in partnership with Vodafone.

McAdam was more amenable to shifting gears thanks to time spent during the 1990s in Europe and Asia, where the wireless industry is more of a free-for-all. ...[he] says he was impressed that European and Asian mobile carriers backed technologies that allow subscribers to switch to rivals with ease.

The BusinessWeek article goes on to discuss how the open-access move could help reduce Verizon's costs and help to combat market saturation in the US. The upcoming FCC wireless spectrum auction is also covered. Particularly, how the auction (and lobbying from Google and other tech companies for open-access) got McAdam to consider that a move to an open-access business model was necessary.


According to McAdam, Android was the final key influence in Verizon adopting an open-access business model. This is, of course, why Verizon is now "embracing" the Android platform. However, when Google first announced the release of Android, Verizon (along with AT&T) were absent from the press release. According to McAdam, the reason they did not sign on and support Android from the beginning is two-fold, "To get into that press release really didn't do anything [for Verizon]...We needed to understand the details of that operating system."

As I mentioned in my previous VZW open-access post, Verizon's new open initiative will offer increased flexibility for VZW's customers by allowing them to choose between VZW's full service offering or going with a third party device and mobile applications. It was clear to me at the time of my previous post that "These innovative [third party] mobile web applications will initially be developed through the Android Open Handset Alliance." McAdam also sees the potential in the Android Platform by saying, "Clearly the Android system gives a lot of developers the opportunity to develop applications for a wide range of handsets." Clearly, if a lot of developers start developing applications, we are bound to get at least a few very innovative and useful applications from Android. Right? I can't wait to see how much the US wireless market changes in the next few years.

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Gmail Chat Can Now Use AIM

Recently Google rolled out some upgrades to its mail platform Gmail. This is a great one. Up until now the chat functionality within Gmail has been limited to other Gmail and Google Talk users. Now Gmail users can reconnect with their friends on AOL Instant Messenger, AIM. Thanks for opening up Google!

10 million AIM accounts were resurrected from the dead today as a result! That's a guess but I'm sure it was a lot. Thanks again Google.

Source Article

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Online ad spend to leapfrog radio and magzines by 2010

AdAge is reporting that a new ZenithOptimedia forecast predicts total ad spend in North America to increase by only 4.1% next year, with global ad spend growing 6.7%. According to the forecast newspapers, magazines, and radio ad spend will decline over the next two years with TV ad spend remaining flat.

Online ad highlights from the AdAge article:

It's only online, of course, that the media business looks both fun and easy. Worldwide internet ad spending will climb to $44.6 billion from about $36 billion, increasing its share of the market to 9.4% from 8.1%.

"We predict internet advertising to pass three milestones over the next three years," ZenithOptimedia's forecast said. "We expect it to overtake radio advertising in 2008; to attain a double-digit share of global advertising in 2009; and to overtake magazine advertising in 2010, with 11.5% of total ad spend."

Other interesting ad spend topics covered in the AdAge article:

• The quadrennial year: ad-boosting events such as the Olympics, a presidential election, and a European soccer championship all take place in the same year.
• The writer's strike and TV market share.
• The shift in global ad spend from North America to markets "east of Eastern Europe."

Data: Ad Outlays by Medium (pdf) provided by AdAge.

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