7 February 2008
Loopt and Google Look Local
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business .
Two interesting “local” stories today…
First, our good friends over at Loopt have teamed up with CBS to deliver geotargeted localized ads through their rich, buddy finding app running on Sprint’s and Boost’s networks. Highly targeted, localized ads are seen as the holy grail of advertising but to-date most of that money has remained offline and targeted at newspapers, yellow pages, local radio/tv music and coupons. Here’s hoping that advertisers are starting to wake up as the ability to geolocate a user is becoming more ubiquitous. Read more over on the deal and Location-based advertsing:
- Are You Ready for Location-Based Advertising? (GigaOm)
- In CBS Test, Mobile Ads Find Users (NYTimes)
Secondly, Google announced local news aggregation as part of their current Google News site. It will be interesting to see how granular they end up geo-parsing and tagging the content — currently it looks like it is done, at most, at a city level. Is it safe to assume that local blog news is next?
