CIR 7.02 - NEW YORK – Enthusiasm was high at last week’s Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York City. The attendees included Realtors from across the U.S., leading industry members and panelists, advertising and marketing services, vendors in a variety of areas and a lot of interesting characters. Because the show was in New York, we were treated to several discussions with local flavor and learned about local marketing issues. One fun moment was listening to the crowd gasp when they learned from a local broker that if you make less than $150,000 in New York City you’re considered below the poverty level. Wow.

The other conference highlight was a party hosted at a hip, trendy loft in the neighborhood of Chelsea – that was listed at $11 million – co-hosted by conference host Brad Inman, Craigslist, and Curbed.com. Movers-and-shakers rubbed shoulders, talked business, drank copious amounts of champagne and then talked more business. A good time was had by all.   more »

CIR 7.02 Galaxy.com, the original searchable Internet directory (established in 1994), has begun to beta-test a community classifieds marketplace, with the full launch slated for early February. Bucking the trend toward local search, Galaxy’s description of the new channel claims that “most current online classified sites are too local in their scope, requiring buyers to restrict the range of their search and browse experience to a single location.”

Galaxy will not be aggregating classifieds from other sources into its own listings, but it will auto-submit its listings to Google Base.

The main page for Galaxy’s classifieds looks pretty Craigslist-y, and seems to borrow most of its categories from Craig. But Galaxy applies a more EBay approach for sellers, allowing them to choose how wide or narrow a market (from city to global) they want to reach without having to make multiple placements.   more »

CIR 7.02 - Fast-growing classified-aggregator / indexer Oodle.com now claims to have more than 3 million automotive listings on its site, making it the No. 1 online site in the U.S. in terms of total vehicle listings. AutoTrader.com comes a close second with 2.8 million listings. Cars.com reports 1.4 million listings. But do bragging rights go to the site with the most listings or to the site with the most unique listings? Or does traffic matter more? Oodle’s business is all about indexing listings from other sites. The company has grown rapidly in just the last few months. Faith Sedlin, Oodle’s VP of marketing, told CI that Oodle now has a total of 8 million listings across all categories. (The site itself lists an official total of 6 million.) In addition to automotive (which has grown from 1 million to 3 million since October 2005), Oodle’s second-largest vertical is real estate, which includes 1.5 million listings.   more »

CIR 7.01 - A small Hamilton, Ontario-based startup called MapTheWorld.net is on a mission to help newspapers defend themselves from the Googles and Craigslists of the world. The weapon of choice: a tool that allows newspapers to generate their own interactive maps with value-added local and nonprofit information unavailable anywhere else. With a team of mostly volunteer student cartographers across North America, MapTheWorld.net has already compiled a feel-good smattering of defiantly eclectic data, including the locations of all American Humane Associations in the U.S., various battlefields, cemeteries and war monuments; plus a mash-up of politically correct facilities ranging from food banks to the Red Cross.    more »

CIR 7.01 -- HarvestINFO, the online advertising technology firm specializing in newspaper collaboration, is on a roll – or should we say, a rollout – with numerous products and newspaper conversions recently completed or in the near offing. Established in 1996 CEO Scott Bailey HarvestINFO’s primary focus has been the conversion of newspaper ads into an online format that is searchable and interactive.“That has been the legacy of the company,” said Larry Zimmer, VP marketing and retail products at HarvestINFO. “We’ve built up several hundred newspaper customers in our active portfolio,” he said, including daily newspapers of all sizes, weeklies, and a few alternatives. “We have a wide variety. We work with a number of major groups such as Cox, Gannett, and some Knight Ridder, so we cover the gamut.”   more »