Mike Blumenthal

Several interesting and developments last week from Google in the Local space. Google declares the end of Panoramio and the rise of Google Views: With the release of Google Views, the new Map integrated photo application, Google has declared that they will wind down Panoramio as they wind up Views. Of course there is an …

Googler Jade has announced in the forums that they are now going to allow instant verification via webmaster tools for many businesses. From the announcement: Good news — starting today, if you’re verifying a page for your business, you may be instantly verified on Google My Business if you’ve already verified your business’s website with …

Brian Alaway of Brian Alaway Consulting has spotted what appears to be a new YouTube Video Knowledge Graph direct answer type inserted at the top of the serps. Google has been rapidly adding these direct answer knowledge graph results to top of the search results over the past few months. They have added Menus,  Geometry Answers, …

Update: Google has confirmed that the new bulk upload uses the same “one claim rule” as the new Places Dashboard and Plus. This means that once an account has been upgraded that the listings will not be able to be claimed into either Google Plus/Places Dashboard or another bulk account (at least not one that …

Last week Yahoo announced their Yelp review partnership with a great deal of fanfare and bravado. Putting on a happy face is standard fare in these sorts of situations and Yahoo is no exception. The press ate it up and we saw headlines like: Yahoo-Yelp Partnership Another Bold Move for Marissa Mayer But the reality is that Yahoo …

Amazon to Offer Kindle Checkout System to Physical Retailers was the headline in an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.  I have long thought that POS and other similar integrated services delivered via a combination of hardware, software and web was the key to cracking the holy grail of SMB marketing services. In The Future of …

The driving directions market, while more fragmented than search or social, is continuing to see consolidation. Google maintained their leading share and Apple gained share while the GPS and other web providers are seeing steady and large declines in usage. Over the past year, I have continued to survey consumers as to their preferred choice …

Google+ has recently implemented the ability for a Google + post to be embedded on a page with comments on a different domain. It is simmple to implement requiring a small snippet of javascript (<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>) be embedded in your header and then simply copy the embed code from the post at + and embed …