The latest from TechCrunch
- Yext Organizes The Anti-Google Local Advertising Alliance (Screenshots)
- Thanks In Part To The Northeast Blizzard, Online Holiday Spending Surges To Record $30.8 Billion
- Drag2Up Lets You Drag Images Into Text-Only Forms
- TextualAds Raises $650K For Facebook-Fueled, Targeted SMS Campaigns
| Yext Organizes The Anti-Google Local Advertising Alliance (Screenshots) | Top |
| Google, as you may have heard, is making a big push into local advertising. It is currently offering $100 million in AdWords credits to new small businesses that sign up and promotes Google Places results for all local searches. Quite frankly, this is scaring the shit out of competitors like Citysearch, Yellowbook, SuperPages, WhitePages, and Yelp. They all rely on Google search results for people to find a good portion of their listings, and if Google displaces them collectively for local business listings, their businesses will be destroyed. In local, Google is already a big snowball getting bigger and bigger. So how do they fight back? They enter into an anti-Google alliance, of course. The company organizing this alliance is Yext , a New York City startup which specializes in pay-per-call advertising for local businesses and dashboards to help them manage their reputations and listings online. On Monday, it will launch a new feature called “Tags” which will let small businesses highlight their names with a little tag and customizable message across about a dozen local listings sites. Launch parters for this “Tag Alliance” (I like my name better) will include MapQuest, Citysearch, Yellowbook, Local.com, SuperPages, White Pages, MerchantCircle, and Topix, with more to come. If these tags sound familiar, it is because Google also offers similar sponsored tags to small businesses for $25 a month. Whenever a local business advertising with tags comes up in an organic search result or on Google Maps, a yellow tag with a line of text appears beneath its listing to help it stand out. Now, Yext is offering basically the same product across all the other major local search and listings sites on the Web for $99 a month per business location. Yext will end up splitting that 50/50 with its partners where the tags will appear. But from one dashboard (see screenshot above), small businesses will be able to create tags, activate them across all the partner sites, and change them or take them down at will. And this is just the first step. Since launching its reputation management system , Yext Rep, last May at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, the company has signed up 30,000 local businesses for the free product with no marketing. Tags will become a new tab/feature on Yext. Eventually, businesses should be able to update their tags not just on Yext but from any of the partner sites, and with one stroke update all of their tags universally across all the partner sites. And while it is starting with tags, Yext hopes to convince its partners to share more data and allow businesses to change their listing information or upload new photos in one place and see the changes replicated everywhere else. Below are a couple examples of what the tags look like on SuperPages and MapQuest: CrunchBase Information Yext Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Thanks In Part To The Northeast Blizzard, Online Holiday Spending Surges To Record $30.8 Billion | Top |
| Online holiday spending continues to set records. comScore is reporting that retail e-commerce spending in the U.S. for the first 56 days of the November to December 2010 holiday season has reached a record $30.81 billion, which is an 13 percent increase versus the same period last year. The past week before Christmas saw $2.45 billion in spending, an increase of 17 percent versus the corresponding week last year. As expected , comScore reports that the massive snow storm that hit the Northeast region of the U.S. over the weekend helped push post-Christmas spending to record levels. The company also reports that in terms of specific products, Computer Hardware ranked as the top growing category for the holiday season with a 23 percent increase versus last year. Interestingly, handheld devices (such as iPads and e-readers) and laptop computers have driven much of the growth in this sector. Other areas showed healthy growth as well. Books & Magazines ranked second with 22 percent growth, followed by Consumer Electronics (up 21 percent), Computer Software excluding PC Games (up 20 percent) and Toys (up 16 percent). Other categories in the top ten included Jewelry & Watches (up 11 percent) and Apparel & Accessories (up 8 percent). Record e-commerce spending this holiday season has been written in the cards for some time now. Over the past few weeks, online retailers have seen fairly strong results, with total sales up 12 percent to over $28 billion so far. And there’s still more spending to do, as many retailers are advertising New Years sales as well. Total sales for the full holiday season (through New Years) are expected to reach $32.4 billion this year, up 11 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if consumers surpass this number. CrunchBase Information comScore Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Drag2Up Lets You Drag Images Into Text-Only Forms | Top |
| Drag2Up is Google Chrome and Firefox extension that allows you drag and drop image and other files into any website input box. The extension streamlines the file uploading process by uploading your file in the background and then adding a URL link to the input box of your choice. This saves a boatload of time says the extension’s creator, a 15-year-old developer who goes by the name Antimatter15 : “Instead of the trouble of opening a new tab, navigating to your favorite file provider, waiting for it to load, pressing the browse button, navigating to the folder with your image, pressing "Open", then hitting the submit button, waiting for the upload to finish, copy the link, find the original tab among the mess of tabs that fills your tab bar and finally scrolling down, selecting the box and pasting the URL. All to share a three megabyte file. drag2up streamlines the process into a single, swift gesture where you drag the file onto the text entry field.” Drag2Up also supports multiple files and has support for a multitude of URL shorteners. Depending on the type of file and whether you’re using Chrome or Firefox, files can be uploaded to hosting services Dropbox, Cloudapp, imgur, Imm.io, Imageshack, Flickr, Picasa, Github Gist, Pastebin.com, Mysticpaste, Chemical servers, Dafk and Hotfile. You can find the extension in the Chrome Web Store or as a Firefox Addon here. | |
| TextualAds Raises $650K For Facebook-Fueled, Targeted SMS Campaigns | Top |
| Facebook holds a trove of information about its hundreds of millions of users, and many of them are more than happy to hand over some of that data — like a list of their personal interests — so that they can connect with their favorite companies or play a new game. Thing is, despite the targeting opportunities afforded by this data, many businesses have still failed to take advantage of it. TextualAds is a firm that’s changing that for text messaging campaigns, by allowing businesses and large brands to push highly targeted SMS messages to their customers. The service launched in September , and today it’s announcing that it’s closed a $650K seed round. The round’s investors include Dave McClure (500 Startups), Peter Boboff & Chris Redlitz (Transmedia Capital), Marcus Segal (Zynga), Shawn Simpson (former Googler), and Erik Moore. TextualAds currently offers a signup application that SMBs can install on their Facebook Pages, prompting users to enter their zip code, age, gender, and telephone number. Once businesses have collected this data, they can use the TextualAds platform to target text message campaigns at specific buckets of users (say, women over the age of 30). Text messages are obviously a very powerful channel for businesses and advertisers, and the ability to target them makes them even more appealing. So far TextualAds has 1,200 businesses using it, but there’s much more to come. In the next month, TextualAds will be launching the 2.0 release of its product, and it’s got several major household brands lined up as clients. The new version of the TextualAds application will feature a one-click signup — the service will better make use of Facebook’s platform and collect the user’s gender, age, and other content from their Facebook profile as opposed to making them enter it manually. In addition to the streamlined form, TextualAds will be giving clients access to a sophisticated analytics dashboard, which will include data on users’ Facebook Likes, wall posts, and other content that many companies haven’t taken advantage of yet. The service will charge based on the amount of customization companies need, and large clients are paying six figures a year for whitelabeled versions of the product. There are obviously other solutions for targeted text messages (we’ve covered Adenyo before) but TextualAds founder Craig Davis says that he hasn’t seen any other services tap into Facebook’s wealth of data. CrunchBase Information TextualAds Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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