I’ve just spend two days attending the Yellow Pages Today event in Milan, Italy, where publishers engaged in a very compact program that focused on “Repositioning the Yellow Pages.” The event was really about how directory publisher have to transform their organizations in order to have viable businesses in five years and beyond.

It was clear that different publishers have different senses of urgency based on conditions in their markets, and perhaps based on their own internal culture. I spoke with Yellow Pages Group-New Zealand CEO Bruce Cotterill whose focus is currently on improving basic execution and improving customer satisfaction. From there he will turn his sights on longer-range strategic objectives.

Cotterill’s market is not seeing as dramatic a shift to online as some of the others represented at the conference, though he understands that eventually it will. Other markets, like Belgium, the Netherlands and the Nordic markets, are experiencing a very dramatic shift. Cotterill’s challenge, nine months into his tenure, is to make a legacy monopoly culture much more customer focused. He also is committed to defending his print business, while others at the conference have moved beyond defending print to focusing on creating a much stronger online business. None of them are necessarily wrong, they just face different conditions on the ground.

Mathias Hedlund, who leads all online efforts at the Swedish publisher Eniro, spoke Wednesday and outlined how his company is building more products that extend the brand further and further away from the Yellow Pages core, into search, social media, B2B and so on, with an emphasis on building a robust database and driving transactional revenue. Eniro is making a clear transition from a print dominant business to one where print is an increasingly secondary distribution channel.

One of Eniro’s many initiatives is a new online Yellow Pages platform that combined “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” components. The evolutionary element focuses on making search more relevant by category, for example, using map based search for hairdressers but not for plumbers. The “revolutionary” piece involves building a different kind of directory on a much richer content database that brings together reviews, products and brands, and is far more intuitive than the current model.On the second day, Eniro’s Oscar Berg made some notably revelations about how far Eniro has moved down the path of discreet mobile monetization. This year, the company began selling discreet mobile profile pages to advertisers in Norway (they had previously been bundled with online), and will expand that program to Sweden in January. Berg, mobile manager for Eniro Initiatives, said that 20 percent of the online customers adopted the new discretely priced mobile profile pages, and the company was able to increase the rate in August after launching it in the second quarter.

Berg also made a case for why so much development effort has gone into the iPhone, versus yhe broader mobile internet market. He said that iPhones account for nearly 40 percent of Eniro’s mobile search traffic, and weekly sessions among iPhone users are almost three times those for mobile Internet users.

Simon Greenman from European Directories followed Hedlund and similarly outlined how EDSA will focus on a broad range of products and distribution points and monetization methods.

EDSA has been making a number of alliances and investments built around extending well beyond the Yellow Pages brand. These include Tupalo.com, a social media site; and Werkspot.nl, which handles requests for bid for home repair and improvement projects in the Netherlands.

Greenman detailed a pretty complex ecosystem that publishers have to engage in. But he boiled the challenge down to three simple categories — do you have the right product mix, can you make complexity simple to the advertiser, and can you demonstrate value?

Copenhagen based mobilepeople has been making moves throughout North America over the past year, starting with its deal to power the DexKnows suite of mobile products for directory publisher R.H. Donnelley.

It’s latest deal, announced today, is to power the mobile apps for Canada’s Trader corporation. Trader is the top publisher of classifieds advertising in Canada, known best for its AutoTrader property. It also has 160 publications and 20 websites — a rich base of content on which to build mobile local apps in different verticals.

In the near term, it looks like they’ll start with AutoTrader and include iPhone, BlackBerry and mobile web versions. From the release:

As more people embrace mobile as a primary source of information while on the go, with 4.3B worldwide users, mobile presents a natural touch point for AutoTrader to meaningfully engage with customers. AutoTrader is addressing this expanding trend in mobile use by tapping mobilepeople to develop native search applications that will allow users to find vehicles and dealers that meet their specific search criteria.

More specifically, mobilepeople has a forward looking philosophy behind its mobile technology that expands the traditional local search model to include discovery components. This moves beyond the “what” and “where” boxes that represent the first generation of mobile local products inherited directly from the desktop.

The idea is that mobile local product evolutions should better capitalize on the unique aspects of the hardware: It’s portable, location aware and users don’t want to do a lot of finger tapping. All this points to discovery aspects of mobile products that are beginning to come out through the work of mobilepeople and others we’ve profiled.

Expect to see this trend continue and expect to see more deals formed by mobilepeople in the coming months. In the meantime, buy your ticket to LA to join us for the Interactive Local Media conference next month. mobilepeople VP and GM Jeff Porter will join us on stage to talk about these market developments and what the future could hold.

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Related: Our mobilepeople report has more (sub. req.).

The ILM:09 conference Dec. 9-11 in LA is now  just around the corner.  We’ve handpicked 60 cutting-edge speakers, and we think we are onto something that is really important. I can tell you that signups have been great, too.

Recent adds to the speaker roster include Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji and AT&T Interactive’s Greg Issacs,  who will be joining Facebook’s Tim Kendall and Citysearch’s Kara Nortman on our “Social/Local” panel.

We’ve also added Trinity Ventures’ Patricia Nakache,  who joins Canaan Partners’ Warren Lee and Comcast Interactive’s  Michael Yang on our “Money” panel.

Also,  U.S. Local News Network’s Chris Jennewein joins USC Annenberg’s Geneva Overholser on “the Future of Local Media” session. And  European Directories’ Simon Greenman joins Skype’s Andy Sims on “Skype’s Local Revolution” (especially interesting!)

My colleague Mike Boland also has added several top execs to the Mobile Superforum and our Pre-Conference on Local Search — a very useful “hands on” session for state-of-the-art local search tips and best practices.

Here’s the final lineup for the Mobile Superforum:
Sanjeev Agrawal, Aloqa
Surojit Chatterjee, Google
Steve Espinosa, Appetizr
Alistair Goodman, Placecast
Greg Hallinan, CMO, Verve Wireless
Meredith Papp, Google
Claudia Poepperl, adaffix
Jeff Porter, mobilePeople
Gleb Shaviner, Amdocs
Rahul Sonnad, Geodelic Systems

Here the final  lineup for the Local Search Precon:
Panos Bethanis, DirectoryM
Jeff Ferguson, Local.com
Sivan Metzger, Kenshoo Local
David Mihm, David Mihm Inc.
Andrew Shotland, Local SEO Guide
Chris Spanos, AOL.com

Here‘s the registration info.  IMPORTANT: Beat the Friday night price increase.

One of the often asked questions we receive regarding sales from all local media sectors “is multi-product selling by a single sales force really possible.” The natural follow on question invariably is what would be the benefit of a single sales force as opposed to specialized sales teams for each product area – traditional media products and online/digital products. 

I will go on record as saying I am a strong believer in the ability of a core sales team selling multiple products combining both traditional media and online media. Solution selling is what is being demanded by the local business owner. Our Local Commerce Monitor survey has indicated over the last several waves that SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) are trying desperately to figure out how all of their media choices fit together. Subdividing media choices into separate sales channels invariably confuses the customer and empowers individual sales force to sell against each other. PaidContent.org recently reported on this very scenario in a recent story about Hulu the online partner of NBC Universal, Fox and ABC. “Hulu, which is under increasing pressure to prove its value as a business in its own right, the battle over ad revenues (with its TV broadcast sales channel) has become more acute as its competes for ad revenue.” Channel conflict is often the case when competing sales channels within the same organization compete for ad budgets. It is rare that an online rep will rein in their recommendation so the next internal sales force has the opportunity for budget. Every sales channel has an objective and every sales person is paid on maximizing every selling situation. 

AdOperationsOnline.com revealed a recent IAB Bain & Company study providing further support for an integrated sales approach saying, “Marketers want integrated campaigns instead of platform-specific media programs.” While the IAB/Bain & Company focused primarily on brand advertisers, the same thinking certainly applies to the SMB marketplace. One of the key findings was, “Ultimately, marketers are looking for media companies to offer a true triple-play service model from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement.”  Advertisers are already multi-media buyers, it’s just that the sales process hasn’t yet caught up to where the advertiser is at the moment. Our ongoing survey of SMB, Local Commerce Monitor, indicates that SMBs use on average 3 or more local media to market their business with much higher numbers in categories such as retail, restaurants, and professional services.

Yes it is easier to segment the sales force from a management stand point, and it is more challenging to train a sales force in a new method of selling, but ultimately it comes down to what the advertiser wants and needs. Multi-product selling is about providing a solution to support the advertisers’ business objectives, shows how each media offering supports and relates to each other, and it demonstrates the value of the sales force to the advertiser by educating and demonstrating how the solution meets or exceeds their goals at a price that makes sense. For the organization it maximizes the investment in the core sales force, eliminates channel conflict and focuses on increasing the overall customer value. Let’s make peace with our advertisers and our sales operation. 

Mobile Social app Foursquare is getting lots of attention and growing quickly into new cities throughout the U.S. and Europe. For those unfamiliar, the app lets you check in at local establishments to alert friends where you are.

The value exchange involves gaining “mayorship” of places where you check in more than anyone else. This gaming element keeps people engaged through a sort of competitive spirit among friends (and strangers). There is also competition on a weekly leaderboard of check-ins, and the ability to acquire badges for your status as a local socialite.

The app has been a media darling and an urban necessity among mobile mavens in places like New York and San Francisco (I’m hooked). But the business model question has been asked many times in the analyst corps, and has been a source of doubt over the product, like many popular local search players before it (i.e.Yelp).

But over the past few months there have been implications that a revenue source could come from local businesses interested in driving foot traffic. This plays out as businesses bring the gaming element into their doors — offering freebies to mayors or anyone that checks in.

This of course requires the buy in and participation of the owner — something that sounds good on paper but comes with the scalability challenge often faced in self provisioned local advertising. But it’s an interesting concept that’s starting to rear it’s head in a few different ways.

Today, I saw it for the first time; I’ve heard people talk about it but haven’t seen it yet firsthand. Below are a few screen shots that show the call to action on the check-in screen and the resulting click through. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to go “find Schlomo” (nor start drinking at 3:31 pm).

No definite indication whether or not Foursquare is directly monetizing these ad units yet or just getting the ball rolling. Either way, expect to see much more of this — and other flavors of this concept — emerge in social local apps that are building foursquare-like features, such as Loopt.

National Public Radio has been recently getting more aggressive  in promoting sponsorship packages in advertising industry trades. Indeed, NPR has positioned itself as an advertising alternative to other news outlets – positioning that hyperlocal sites such as Sacramento Press are also assuming.

How far can NPR and the local public radio affiliates go as an alternative news and advertising source? Former Knight Ridder Exec Ken Doctor has an excellent take on it, inspired by last week’s “Future of News” summit held by  Minnesota Public Radio.  Doctor talks to MPR head Bill Kling, who notes that “Everything you’d need to start an alternative media company, we’ve got. What’s missing is the leadership.”

Kling tells Doctor he hopes to provide that leadership in his region, partly by bringing in reporters and others who have been downsized from local dailies. Doctor also notes that the dollars are there for public radio to continue the expansion at the local and national level. MPR, with 70 news staffers,  recently got a $5 million individual grant to boost its news operations, to be matched over time.

Separately, NPR has announced a $3 million grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and The Knight Foundation to  fund “blogger/curators” in 12 cities.  Doctor notes that this is in addition to a major effort run by top NPR execs Vivian Schiller (ex New York Times)  and Kinsley Wilson (ex USA Today) to “weld together” a true national network from its affiliates and other sources.

In addition, Doctor notes that CPB has announced a $5 million fund to  allow for the creation of four or five regional, multi-state centers, with a handful of staffers each, to help local public radio stations do better origination, editing and sharing of stories of regional concern, both on air and online.

While news development is being meticulously planned, there is precious little information about public radio’s efforts to win more local and national ad/sponsorship dollars . Obviously, as a nonprofit institution that is supported, in part, by government dollars, it can only go after such dollars with major constraints.  We’ll undoubtedly hear more about both news and sponsorship efforts from NPR’s Kinsley Wilson when he speaks at ILM:09 Dec. 9-11 in LA.

One of our favorite mobile products is ShopSavvy, the Android based app that essentially turns your phone into a bar code scanner. It now joins the 100,000-deep library of iPhone apps.

Technically, what the app does is overlay a horizontal scanline on the camera’s viewfinder to scan an image and then scrape its product database and pull up pricing, specs and reviews. It also recently integrated local inventory data from Krillion to tell you that the Best Buy down the street has the same item for $20 less and they have 4 left.

This is a pretty powerful position if you think about the ability to drive and track conversions where buying intent is high — literally, when someone is standing in front of the store shelf. The app was among the winners of the first Android developer challenge and we think it represents an area of innovation we’ll see explode in mobile over the next couple years.

It will also grow to include other data sources such as promotions coupons and sponsored links. See the conversation we had with ShopSavvy developer Big In Japan, where they discuss the revenue model that includes affiliate revenue but also a Google-like bid marketplace that treats scans as search queries.

The reasons it wasn’t previously available on the iPhone involve some development roadblocks and the fact that it doesn’t work as well on pre-3GS models that don’t have an auto-focus lens. This is a downside for non 3Gs owners like me - it’s tough to get a scan. But still i’m happy to have it.

A similar iPhone app was recently released called Red Laser. It works better without auto-focus in the tests I conducted, but it doesn’t have the local inventory data that ShopSavvy has. Oh yeah, and it costs $1.99. ShopSavvy is free.

We’ll see a lot more competition bubble up in this area, and we’ll provide a more thorough comparison of what’s out there, once we get our hands on the optimal hardware (upgrades forthcoming).

Following in the footsteps of ESPN Local and CBS Sports, Comcast will develop local sports sites on the back of its existing TV  properties. Comcast has already launched Comcast SportsNet News England, which it calls “the most comprehensive and dedicated online local sports destination.” The site features local media celebrities and has added 40 new positions – a remarkable investment. ESPN and CBS have only added a few new positions at this point.

The New England site is acting as the template for similar upgrades in San Francisco, DC/Baltimore  and Chicago.  Philadelphia, which upgraded earlier this year, is being run with a different look.

The overall effort is being lead by Comcast Sports Net Chief Digital Officer Eric Grilly, former head of Philly.com and longtime leader of Media News Group’s digital efforts. Grilly told Sports Business Journal, which we saw via Paid Content, that the sports effort is “the single largest investment outside of making an acquisition in the business.”

Grilly also said that Comcast will start “with beat writers for every professional team in the market, then expanding to local colleges and high schools.” Later, it will add lifestyle and entertainment sections. Some of the Web programming is likely to migrate to TV, he added, such as post game shows. The sports upgrade is likely to be further enhanced if Comcast succeeds in its pursuit of NBC-Universal, and its owned and operated stations.

ESPN Local SVP Jim Pastor is a featured speaker at ILM:09 December 9-11 in Los Angeles.

Following up on the previous post about BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Market View study, the big jump in smartphone penetration deserves a closer look.

Specifically the data show smartphone penetration to be 29 percent of U.S. adult mobile subscribers (up from 18 percent last year). This will immediately strike many as too high, as it did for me at first. Indeed, recent data from comScore put U.S. smartphone penetration closer to 20 percent of mobile subscribers.

But a few variables come into play to reconcile this difference and put these figures in better context. First, MMV’s sample includes ages 18 and up, while many other surveys such as comScore measure ages 13 and up. Higher smartphone penetration makes sense with greater purchasing power and proclivities of an adult sample. Teen use conversely skews toward feature phone-centric capabilities such as SMS.

Second, if you consider the rapid growth and falling prices of smartphones (especially touch screen devices), the jump from last year makes more sense. The recency of this survey, fielded in October, also put it closer to a current snapshot (albeit smaller sample) than data from comScore and others. In a quickly developing market, recency is obviously important.

To that point, consider other recent data that support a quickly accelerating smartphone market in the U.S. Specifically, Verizon recently reported that 40 percent of its handset sales are smartphones and T-Mobile predicts the same for Q4. If this is representative of the larger U.S. market, it means that smartphone penetration could approach this 40 percent during the hardware replacement cycles of the next 24 months.

Lastly, Nielsen reports we’re on track to see smartphones cross the 50 percent threshold by mid-2011 (yes, 18 months from now). Add it all up, and it makes more sense that 29 percent of U.S. adult mobile subscribers carry smartphones today. Still somewhat surprising, but the data show what they show, and carry strong implications for the direction of the mobile market and its monetization opportunities.

This and other mobile news are further discussed in our podcast this week, if you’re inclined.

BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Market View survey releases today, showing a big rise in smartphone use as well as corresponding mobile Web activity and data consumption.

The annual U.S. consumer survey, currently in Wave III, indicates a surprisingly high jump in smartphone use to nearly a third of adult mobile subscribers (I’ll address in a separate post). Supporting this, many forms of user engagement increased, as smartphone ownership correlates to higher data consumption

Specifically, the data reveal a growing class of “heavy users” of non-voice modalities. The percentage of users making more than 10 mobile Internet accesses per week increased significantly, now representing more than one-fifth of all mobile users. Drilling down, among mobile users:

• 48.2 percent sent or received more than 10 text messages per week
• 21 percent had more than 10 Internet accesses per week
• 20 percent sent or received more than 10 e-mails per week

As for the local angle, we saw growth in the percentage of respondents who are using mobile devices to search for products or services locally. Among mobile users:

• 18.5 percent searched the Internet for local products or services (up from 15.6 percent last year)
• 11.1 percent searched the Internet for products or services outside their local area (down from 14.3 percent)
• 15.9 percent obtained information about movies or other entertainment
• 13.3 percent obtained information about restaurants or bars
• 4 percent purchased a physical item that needed to be shipped (e.g., a book)
• 3 percent used a coupon from their mobile phone

Subscribers of BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Local Media program can log in and access the full report. We’ll also continue to report on many of the findings, including user interest in local coupons and promotions. And we’ll present and dive into all the data at the Interactive Local Media conference next month. We hope to see you there.

The past week has seen a lot of action in the mobile space — Droid release, AdMob acquisition, new BIA/Kelsey mobile data, etc.

On Friday, we sat down to record a podcast to bat around some of these events and what they could mean. This is something we’ve done periodically, but we hope to step it up to a more regimented and frequent schedule given the pace of things.

Check it out here and let us know what you think. We could expand the format to include guest speakers and roundtables. More to come.

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (15 556 ko)

Yahoo News is bolstering its local efforts and building “a staff of editors around the US who will improve the local news experience on the frontpage,” according to a Tweet from Anthony Moor, who was recruited from Dallasnews.com, per Lost Remote. The Yahoo News effort is probably at least partially motivated by revamped local efforts at both MSN and AOL.

Yahoo is building on an area where it has already had some success. Local news modules on the Front Page have been in place for a couple of years, but they are currently automated and based on RSS feeds from local news sites, which gives it uneven results.  Nevertheless, it drives a lot of clicks to local news sites, and likely helps to bring users to Yahoo as well.

At our Interactive Local Media conference in early December, Yahoo’s local efforts will be represented by VP Lem Lloyd, MSN’s local efforts will be represented by Executive Producer Scott Moore and Director Cyrus Krohn, and AOL’s local efforts will be represented by GM Chris Spanos.

Outgoing CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith, in a New Teevee Live interview conducted by Om Malik, said he continues to have confidence in the future of TV, which is unlikely to suffer the same disruptive fate that many people are assuming for the music and newspaper industries.

“The future of TV is video, wherever you watch it,” said Smith. “Two minutes of CSI [on the Internet] might have more impact than any 44 minutes of CSI on the network or its [local] affiliates.” It’s not the same as a pirated MP3 of a three-minute Beyonce song killing off potential album sales.

The key to the industry’s future success is to make sure that “if you watch it, it counts,” Smith added. “There are 120 million reasons [i.e., viewers] to make this work.”

Looking forward, Smith says the role of interactive remains its superior targetability and return-on-investment tracking. In that regard, it remains highly complementary to the mass market, reach and frequency characteristics of traditional over-the-air and cable/satellite/telcoTV delivery. It is also constantly generating new adjacent programming opportunities, such as fantasy sports.

Things continue to heat up in the mobile ad network space. One week after the Google/AdMob news broke, top mobile ad network Millennial Media has announced a $16 million funding round led by NEA and existing investors.

The company says it will use the money to accelerate international growth (with emphasis on Europe), beef up engineering and sales divisions, and improve its technology for ad placements.

Though it doesn’t have the footprint in the smartphone app space that AdMob has, Millennial has the greatest reach of all ad networks (in monthly impressions), according to Nielsen. The company says its ad network reaches about 80 percent of the roughly 64 million U.S. mobile Web users.

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

New TKR Advisory: ‘The Multiple Layers of the European Directories-Skype Partnership’

We published a new Advisory today in The Kelsey Report that examines the recent deal between European Directories SA (which publishes print and online directories in eight European markets) and the VoIP giant Skype, with its 480 million worldwide users. (read more…)

Jeff Jarvis’ HyperCamp on New Business Models for News

A “hypercamp” dedicated to New Business Models for News was held yesterday in New York City by The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, led by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. We weren’t there — wrong coast — and nothing is on the site yet. (read more…)

Deloitte Research Supports Mobile Holiday Shopping; NearbyNow Gears Up

Deloitte released a report indicating this holiday season will see a bump in shopping search performed on mobile devices (in addition to social and other online media). Specifically, 19 percent of survey respondents claim they’ll use mobile search for gift shopping. (read more…)

Recommended Reading: The Smartphone Blue Sky

The New York Times’ Bob Tedeschi has a neat column today (thanks for the link, Peter) that speculates what smartphone technology will look like in two years. This comes from his recent conversations with researchers at MIT, SRI, and the iconic Xerox PARC. (read more…)

Twitter Continues March Toward Local Relevance

Twitter is getting closer to the promise of bringing location into the equation as a key component to status updates. Its geolocation support is rolling out, and it recently announced a new local trending topics feature. (read more…)

Sacramento Press’ Model Blends Hyperlocal With Social Media Management

Hyperlocal models continue experimenting with ways to make it work on a standalone basis. Networks, e-commerce and other revenue streams have all been tested. Backfence vet Mark Potts has even set up GrowthSpur as a consulting firm and national network specifically to leverage the clout of hyperlocal sites. (read more…)

HelpHive Shifts: SMBs Must Opt-In to Have HelpHive Number

HelpHive, the new Seattle-based leads provider for service SMBs, had made some changes after running into real PR problems last week from Evan Conklin, an angry (and persistent) plumber. He was irate that the company was taking SMB phone numbers and trademark info, and funneling them through its own system so it could take credit for leads. (read more…)

More on Google/AdMob: A Big Deal

Following up on this morning’s “just the facts” post about Google’s AdMob acquisition, here’s a bit more commentary. First off, this is a big deal — both in size and in what it could mean for the two companies. Google is clearly keen on replicating its online dominance to the mobile world as growing smartphone penetration drives the growth of the mobile Web. (read more…)

‘Oodle Pro’ Launches: Tying the Self-Serve Sensibility of AdSense to Social

Its not just about advertising anymore. Social media is important too. Accordingly, a number of vendors and network providers have developed tools to help them see where there best placements are and how their reputations are unfolding online, and to simplify and automate their processes for listings and other information. (read more…)

Ad:Tech/New York: Digital Marketing Is Promising, Hard to Execute and Headed Toward Mobile

Ad:Tech/New York, “the event for digital marketing,” ran Nov 4-6 at the Javits Convention Center. This event was predominantly focused on national advertising. There was some attention to international advertising and even less on local advertising. (read more…)

AT&T Interactive Chief Product Officer David Yoo resigned last Thursday, Nov. 12. He has been replaced by Spot Runner vet Will Hsu, who had been recruited by Yoo to AT&Ti.

Yoo came to AT&Ti from TellMe after helping sell that company to Microsoft for $850 Million. While at AT&Ti, Yoo led the relaunch of several mobile and online properties including Yellowpages.com, YP.com and the soon-to-be-relaunched buzz.com. He also led the company in its mobile and new ad strategy initiatives.

Yoo’s next steps aren’t known. Although personal reasons were cited, specifically an interest in returning to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, we’d speculate that Yoo plans to join a start-up sometime next year.

We’ve learned that Yell Group veteran sales, marketing and product development executive Paul Plant has decided to accept a retirement package and will leave the company at year’s end. Plant tells us that he’ll take a short holiday, but almost immediately begin seeking new opportunities in the directories and local search industry.

I’ve known Paul for many years, and have always valued his knowledge, broad experience, insight and not least of all his hospitality on visits to the U.K. over the years. Talking shop over dinner with Paul has been among the great pleasures of my career. Paul combines a genuine love for the business with the ability to accept and embrace change. In fact he’s been an agent of change for many years within Yell.

Here is what Steve Chambers, Yell’s chief commercial officer, said in announcing Paul’s departure:

“On 31st December 2009, Paul Plant will be leaving the company to pursue new personal interests, after a career of almost 24 years with Yell, spanning a number of important Sales and Marketing roles.

Paul has made a substantial contribution to Yell’s achievements since joining as a Field Sales Representative in 1986. In the mid 1990’s he successfully led the London Sales Region for five years, & after joining the Marketing team in Reading was a member of the small team that brought about the acquisition of Yellowbook USA in 1999.

He played a key role in both our European Quality Award wins in 1999 & 2004, has contributed to the development & growth of our Yell.com & 118247 products, whilst also championing new printed product development & innovation. Always an agent for change, Paul has more recently been a key contributor to the current programme of business transformation, as a member of the specialist team responsible for delivering our new Sales Model.

Paul’s ‘larger than life’ personality will be missed by friends and colleagues throughout the company, and I am sure you will all join me in wishing him well for the future.”

We published a new Advisory today in The Kelsey Report that examines the recent deal between European Directories SA (which publishes print and online directories in eight European markets) and the VoIP giant Skype, with its 480 million worldwide users.

The deal has the potentially to dramatically increase the number of leads EDSA can drive to its small-business advertisers by making the Skype calls free to Skype users. It also has a quasi-SEO element in that it can help drive more clickthroughs in Google 7 Pack for EDSA advertisers featuring the blue free calling button.

For the past several months, my colleague Mike Boland has been following the advance of Skype’s local search and small-business strategy and its growing involvement with directory publishers as strategic partners here on the Local Media Blog.

A “hypercamp”  dedicated to New Business Models for News was held yesterday in New York City by The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, lead by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.  We weren’t there – wrong coast-  and nothing is on the site yet.  But the free event had a strong lineup of speakers from all walks of hyperlocal; not only from community journalism, but just as importantly, hyperlocal commerce.

Jarvis’  opening presentation has a very nice rundown of hyperlocal activities, journalism and commerce.  In it, Jarvis suggests there are 10,000 hyperlocal blogs in the U.S., with  a thousand of those in Brooklyn alone. He also says that a community with 60,000 residents seems “optimal” for hyperlocal. Moreover, sites should realistically be seeing revenues of up to $200,000 a year from a wide variety of revenue opportunities, ranging from sponsorships to events to print products. He also lays out some useful business model assumptions in terms of staffing and tech costs, etc.

As for the event itself, Outside.in’s blog summed up one of the panels as a bilateral discussion between bloggers and publishers. “The bloggers said, ‘We want you to give us visibility and traffic.  When we scoop a story that you like, we want you to put it on your site and give us the credit.’  The publishers agreed, saying they want the content, and in fact, they went so far as to claim, more than once, that without taking advantage of the great journalism happening on blogs, their businesses will fail.  Everyone agreed on this point.  The stumbling block was around the How.”

To us, the staging of the event was impressive. But don’t tell  your broker to invest in hyperlocal just yet. We’re clearly at the stage in hyperlocal that we were with the spurt of the Internet in the early 1990s, when people talked about Internet users as a separate political class with more clout than either the Democrats or the Republicans. Basically, there wasn’t much perspective.

To be sure, the information about hyperlocal is now coming from all directions; a lot of it is ill-informed and emotional/sentimental. Still,  there really are no models for real success.  The potential , however, is clearly there. And besides, it’s where a lot of the fun is — especially for journalists looking for their next act. Summits like Jarvis’ hypercamp can only help.

At BIA/Kelsey, we’ve kept a close watch on hyperlocal  and we’ll  continue to study it closely. We certainly have a lot of key players that touch on hyperlocal at ILM:09 next month in LA – both in terms of community journalism and hyperlocal commerce (i.e. Yelp, Outside.in, Twitter, BargainBabeLA, MSNBC/Everyblock, NBC Local, Pegasus News, Citysearch, Village Voice Media and Facebook). Let’s figure this out together.

Deloitte released a report indicating this holiday season will see a bump in shopping search performed on mobile devices (in addition to social and other online media).

Specifically, 19 percent of survey respondents claim they’ll use mobile search for gift shopping. The breakdown within this sample is 55 percent for store locations; 45 percent for price comparisons; 40 percent for product specs; 32 percent for coupons; and 31 percent for reviews.

This bodes well for local shopping engines — particularly those that offer real time inventory and pricing, such as TheFind and ShopSavvy, and the “magazine apps” of NearbyNow.

Media Bundles of Joy

Speaking of which, NearbyNow has announced that it will aggregate many of the data from its magazine apps into one uber holiday shopping app. For those unfamiliar, NearbyNow powers shopping apps for retail-centric consumer magazine such as Lucky, Seventeen, and Runner’s world.

As we’ve examined, this is a great way for magazines to continue the engagement levels with their magazine readers and push them further down the purchase funnel. This is underscored by NearbyNow CEO Scott Dunlap’s claim that some of these apps have seen more downloads than the magazine itself has subscribers. That’s huge.

This all has implications for magazine advertisers — at a time when advertiser retention is vital for traditional media. The appeal lies in bundling a measurable component with what was otherwise an impression based media. More bang for their buck in other words.

This also happens at a time when the term of the day in mobile marketing is “cross media integration”. Lots of talk about this at mobile conferences from ad agencies and networks. NearbyNow is one of the few companies pulling it off from the publisher end.

Will it Work?

One downside is that the app’s usage ramp has the potential to be lost after the holiday season, when its holiday-centric branding falls out of context. The company could however channel this usage into its other magazine apps with strategic branding and linking.

This reminds me of speculation I’ve made in the past which hasn’t fully panned out in any way that i can prove, but i stand behind its logic: The holiday season has the potential to drive people to mobile shopping products where they’ll see the benefits and return for non-holiday uses.

In other words, this time of year can cause a bump in mobile usage which accelerates overall adoption curves we see in the market. Lots of possibilities here. I’ll give the NearbyNow app a thorough test drive and report back. Download it for yourself here (link opens iTunes).