With services that make it easy for users to share their location—like FourSquare and Gowalla—gaining buzz and usage, Facebook is finally set to fire back with its own move into the hot location-aware space. The NYT reports that the social network will release a new feature in late April that…

Plancast, a startup which lets users share their plans, has raised $800,000 from SoftTechVC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Zelkova Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors. On Plancast, users post what they plan on doing later; users can track each others’ accounts and also indicate publicly that…

IAC-owned local guide network Citysearch is expanding its local listings ad service CityGrid through a partnership with search marketer OrangeSoda. Citysearch is also providing an investment in Utah-based OrangeSoda, the amount of which is undisclosed. The move is part of a more aggressive effort by Citysearch to attract more ad…

In a speech before the Real Estate Board of New York, Rupert Murdoch finally acknowledged that WSJ will launch its special New York metro edition in April. The other part everyone already knew—but has gone otherwise unsaid, publicly at least—is that the section is being aimed at challenging the NYT’s…

Here’s the rare geography-based startup that apparently isn’t doing so well: Platial, which billed itself as the ‘people’s atlas’ and let people aggregate stories, reviews and multimedia on maps, which they could embed on their own sites, is closing down its service. The company had raised at least $2.4 million…

Small biz-focused online marketer ReachLocal has acquired corporate image manager SMB Live. The three capital letters in the Reston, VA.-based company’s name stand for the market it serves: small- and medium-sized businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The WSJ has been targeting the NYT’s luxury retail advertisers for over a year, but with the expected debut of the News Corp-owned paper’s NYC metro section in April, the ad war will officially begin, AdAge reports. While the NYT has expressed confidence in its ability to maintain its long-standing…

The NYTimes.com’s latest community news site is centered in the East Village, a few miles downtown from its own midtown headquarters. The East Village site will be part of The Local,  the hyperlocal project it started last year. The project will be run by New York University’s journalism faculty and…

Online lead generator Reply wants to raise $60 million in an IPO, according to an SEC filing. The startup runs an auction-based online marketplace that lets companies buy information about people who have indicated an interest online in buying a certain product; advertisers can target their lead spending based on…

For the past several months, analysts have been predicting the local online advertising is likely to remain hot. As new numbers from BIA/Kelsey show, local online media is gaining not so much because it can tap smaller marketers that have tended to be overlooked by major media, it’s because traditional…

EveryScape, which provides “eye-level” images of major towns and cities around the world, has raised $6 million in a third round of funding. The company charges local businesses in order to build 3D, photo-realistic panoramas of their physical locations which are then featured on EveryScape.com and can also be embedded…

LikeMe, an online service that provides personalized recommendations, has raised $3.1 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. On LikeMe, users enter basic information about themselves and can then rate various establishments and events; when users search for a recommended thing to do, LikeMe returns a list of results…

With Facebook’s Beacon ad targeting debacle a distant memory for most, Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tried a soft sell on publishers and marketers at Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference. The social net is bent on growth—it just reached 400 million users—and Kendall’s message is that small local…

Taking the podium during day two of Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference, McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt described his mixed feelings of ease and discomfort standing there. On one hand, he was happy to be wearing jeans instead of the suit he usually wears for appearances…

Location-based social net Foursquare is on a roll when it comes to netting high-profile media partnerships. The latest is restaurant reviews guide Zagat, the NYT reports. By hooking up with Foursquare, Zagat may be hoping to bid up its own cool cache. The reviews site’s image suffered a bit among…

Even with all the focus on local online ads by newspapers and directories sites, large parts of the space remain untapped. One of those spots is quick serve restaurants, otherwise known as fast food. In his role as a moderator on a Borrell Associates’ Local Online Ad Conference panel on…

Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis opened Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference with an extensive report about the revenue possibilities presented to hyperlocal sites. Amid an flurry of stats that aimed to show that hyperlocal sites can attract thousands of dollars in revenue with just a s small support staff, his primary…

Several broadcast companies that reported earnings in the past few weeks have pointed out that TV station revenues were down due to the lack of political ad spending in 2009. Since 2010 is a banner year for major Congressional races, local media researcher Borrell Associates expects that TV broadcasters will…

Victor Wong is CEO of PaperG, an ad-tech company that provides online advertising platforms for local/hyperlocal publishers. He blogs at I am victorious Most companies working on solving “local” have so far focused on ways to provide more and better-targeted local news. But by defining “news” in such a narrow…