Greg Sterling highlighted some interesting comments. I was intrigued by the comment from an analyst: I know you were doing some testing with some retailers, putting their names in the bullets on the Maps and things. Can you talk about that at all?
It appears that one of the means of monetization is a strong relationship with national companies. This seems particularly true with the restaurants. The result is that you will frequently find chains at the top of the local list. I hope to investigate this phenomenon.
The full transcript is available here (again thanks to Greg).
Of interest from Larry Page: This quarter, we partnered with Intuit to make AdWords Starter Edition Maps and Base easily available to Intuit’s millions of QuickBooks users. We wanted to make it easier for them to advertise and find customers online, as well as make their information and products and services available on the Internet. We also launched coupons on Google Maps, and we hope it will be an appealing genre for our smaller and mid-sized advertisers. We teamed up with Valpak to provide coupons from current Valpak advertisers.
Over half of local businesses don’t have websites yet, based on the estimates we see and our local business center helps those businesses easily create a web presence so they can advertise online.
[...] have had a long a tortuous life at Google. They were introduced in late 2006 and but left to languish for a number of years before seeing some activity in late [...]
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