Day: February 28, 2007

Business Week calls it a MySpace for Local Businesses:

Using data obtained from public records and a proprietary Web crawler developed by cofounder Yamamoto, the eight-employee MerchantCircle builds the listings, then relies on merchants finding listings through word-of-mouth and search engines. MerchantCircle optimizes each entry in the directory, so that it gets good placement when it is picked up by major search engines such as Google (GOOG). “We make it easy for people to link to your site, make it easy for merchants to create new content, and tag it in a way the Web loves. Google wants people to be able to find stuff that they’re interested in. For a small-business man to do that himself would be impossible, but we’re applying that [technology] across lots and lots of merchants’ pages,” says Yamamoto.

MerchantCircle also hopes to appeal to small-business owners by aggregating every review and consumer-generated posting about a specific business on the Web in one placein essence, providing a way to manage a business’s online reputation. Whenever a comment is posted anywhere on the Web, the business owner can read about it almost instantaneously on the free online dashboard provided to each of the businesses with entries in the directory. It’s an effective way for the “merchant to understand what’s being said about them anddecide how they want to manage it,” says MerchantCircle cofounder Smith.

Simeon Simeonov suggests: “Linux as the OS, Java as the middleware on the phone and Flash/AJAX as the presentation tier.”

Business 2.0 writes:

unlike the first Internet boom – where dumb, old banner ads were slapped up with zero regard to effectiveness – this time around, the programmers and analysts are taking center stage, helping to create new forms of display ads that not only do a better job of getting your attention but also can be tracked with laserlike precision. The new breed of supersmart, supertargeted display ads, says Usama Fayyad, Yahoo’s head of research and data, is “just so much more powerful than search.”

This is Web advertising 2.0, where machines play as big a role as the copywriters and designers. In the midtown Manhattan offices of Ogilvy North America, co-CEO Carla Hendra and her team run online campaigns for blue-chip clients such as Allstate, American Express, IBM, and TD Ameritrade. The agency’s Interactive division is one of its fastest-growing operations, says Hendra, and most new hires come with a deep understanding of analytics.