Office Depot Teams up with Google to Provide Online Marketing  – Business Wire (press release)

In a tactic to place their critical local products in front of more eyeballs Google is offering Adwords, Apps and the Local Business Center at Office Depot’s small business portal. These types of partnerships are a low cost way for Google to increase small business awareness of their free and paid products.

Google’s Local Ad Targeting Strategies – Greg Sterling, Screenwerks 

Google is introducing a ZIP-code prompt for local queries that will allow for better targeted local ads.

Phone Keyboards and Seachers Using Predictive Query Suggestions – Bill Slawski, SeoBytheSea

Search engines are also paying more attention to the smaller screens, and the more limited keyboards available to people who access the Web by phone. What influence do these constraints have upon the future of mobile search?

Payday lenders likely doomed– Jim Siegel, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Just as Ohio House did, Senate tightens rules on industry after efforts at compromise failed.  House Bill 545 would slash the annualized interest rate charged by payday lenders from 391 percent to 28 percent, prohibit loan terms of less than 31 days and limit borrowers to four loans per year. It also would ban online payday lending.

My question is will Google be held accountable to this state law?

Getting KML into Google’s Geo Search Engine – Frank Taylor, gearthblog.com

As people develop their own content, they might want to make sure Google’s Geo search can find their content. Google has already been crawling the Google Earth Community and looking for KML/KMZ files it finds linked to web pages. But, you might want to tell Google to index your content right away so other people can find it. Google has added a new syntax for “sitemap” files so you can tell it where to look for KML or GeoRSS files. Read more about Geo sitemap files, and the syntax of the files here. According to Lior and Mano, the sitemap will more quickly Geo-index your KML or GeoRSS content if you use the sitemap service. Read more about sitemaps at Webmaster Central. NOTE: as the search index grows, you’ll have to depend on Google to rank its search results so your content appears first. I guess we are going to need GeoSEOs now…

Nascent Demand for Mobile Shopping – Greg Sterling, localmobilesearch.net

In a survey conducted by Lightspeed Research in the UK (n=998), between April 10-14, 17% of respondents said that they would be interested in mobile shopping. According to the firm, “this figure was higher than respondents in France (9%) but lower than in Germany (25%