Following the success of eBay Motors with special classic and custom car restoration verticals, other sites have pitched their own tents to get a piece of the $2 billion annual business, including AutoTrader and The New York Times.  Now comes Angie’s List.

Angie’s List, based in Indianapolis and boasting over one million members, actually has some street cred in the auto world by sponsoring the Indy 500. It says the classic/custom car restoration category is worth $2 billion a year.  “Custom and classic car owners will go to the ends of the Earth to find the one person who can bring their baby back. We’re going to make that trip easier,” says company namesake Angie Hicks, in a press release.

What is especially unique about the new Angie’s List service is that it isn’t locally oriented. While the site has some national and regional categories, such as bathtub restoration, Classic and custom car restoration is Angie’s first full scale national vertical.   It is also the company’s second standalone vertical, following Health, which launched in March and now has 200 categories.

“There are tons of forums, classified ads everywhere you look, and lots of talk in garages around the country about individual specialists and companies that focus on restoring vintage vehicles,”  said Hicks. “We’re going to do what we do best and gather that great consumer experience at a site where anyone can easily find just the person they need for the specialty work they need done.”

November 6th has been highly anticipated within gadget geek circles over the past few weeks, as the public release of Motorola’s Droid.

It is made by Motorola, runs on Verizon’s network, and is the first to be powered by the newest release (2.0) of Google’s Android operating system. And by the way, it looks pretty sleek. I haven’t touched one yet but plan to get my hands on it soon. Meanwhile, I’d recommend TechCrunch’s review which calibrates itself to a familiar point of reference: the iPhone.

Speaking of which, there has been the requisite load of “iPhone killer” speculation over the past week, which is the wrong way to look at it. Android is an open platform that can be used and modified by any device manufacturer — and recently in Verizon’s case, carriers as well.

The iPhone conversely is a single device that runs a single operating system, notwithstanding iPod touch and other rumored portable devices on the way.  This comes with the disadvantage of reach and addressable market, but an interface that is better equipped to meld hardware and software in very elegant ways.

So instead of iPhone Killer claims, the comparison should be between Android and Windows Moble. Winmo is the correct apples to apples comparison in being available for device manufactures to build into their phones. This comparison is nothing new but maybe a reminder for reporters and bloggers who love to throw around the old “______ killer” designation.

That said, for those of us always looking for the local angle, the Droid certainly has one thing on the iPhone: built in GPS navigation. This will become a more standard feature of Android based phones once v. 2.0 rolls out to other devices (read: holiday season). It looks to be a very slick navigation interface but it signals a death knell to standalone GPS devices — not the iPhone.

“Deeper dive” to come.

Village Voice Media, the large media company that includes 14 alternative weeklies, is rebranding its national network, which represents 50 alt weekly titles, as the name shifts from Ruxton Media to Voice Media Group. As part of the rebranding, It is also refocusing national advertisers on its cross media appeal, which delivers  entertainment-centric young urbanites via its  print properties,  100 online destination sites and verticals, email and txt messages. It also provides advertisers with local reps that can appear at fairs, special events etc.

Village Voice Media COO and President Scott Tobias, who is appearing on the  local/social networks panel at ILM:09, says that cross-media efforts are more essential than ever. “National web efforts have been decimated by the digital networks,” he says. That makes  it hard to leverage the strong demographic appeal that targeted media sites still do better than anyone else.

Media buys have also become out of whack, with print’s value sometimes underestimated. While Voice Media Group is doing well with its Web properties, and expects they’ll get stronger and stronger, the print numbers continue to be “very  strong,” says Tobias. In fact, print is responsible for 70 percent of spending in the network, with the various online components representing 30 percent.

Beyond print and online, a third leg of Voice Media Group is “Voice Street.” Essentially, Voice Media Group leverages its  local presence in its markets, rounding up local college students and others to work fairs and other local events on behalf of national advertisers.  The events are also heavily publicized online. Voice Media Group’s street network  is being used by many local events, among them The Big Pour Beerfest in Phoenix, Artopia in Houston , and next years’  South by Southwest in Austin.

A flurry of business lead services have cropped up, each a variation on the model that has been successfully developed by ServiceMagic and others. They basically provide a directory, information, leads and marketing services.

One of the new crop of lead services is HelpHive in Seattle, which recently launched and was profiled here. It provides a basic directory. It also provides several tiers of SMB services (including customizeable home pages, leads, SEO, multiple ways of contacting businesses, and free video).

HelpHive, however, has inadvertently brewed some controversy by putting in a dedicated phone number for EVERY business listed – not just those that opt-in to its system.  Evan Conklin, who owns a plumbing and heating service, is absolutely furious at the practice, and has been venting at the company via calls for class action suits, letters to government officials and bloggers like me.

Conklin raises some important points about the practice of building an alternative directory with proxy phone numbers that might be used as a substitute for “neutral” Yellow Pages. Here is the gist of them.

1-    HelpHive uses an SMB’s trademark without permission.
2-    The customer may think that HelpHive’s dedicated  telephone number is real. “When nobody picks up the phone and they are told we are unavailable they think that we are not paying attention to our phones.”
3-    ”They call you on your real phone number and try to sell you an upgrade to improve your position in their listings or whatever.”

“I have yet to find one business owner or individual that did not react negatively to the idea of some unrelated third party posing their name or business with a false telephone number on the Internet or any other public space,” says Conklin.

I shared Conklin’s comments with HelpHive’s Karim Meghji , who is getting very familiar with Conklin via phone conversations, Web postings and other communications. It is Meghji’s strong belief that HelpHive hasn’t crossed the line in any way at all.  He also says that HelpHive is completely transparent, and emphasizes that SMBs have full opt-out rights.

“Yes, we do have a HelpHive phone number on each business listing,” says Meghji. “We do this so we can provide a low-risk, low-cost, performance-based model to businesses interested in generating referrals and business from HelpHive. Our business approach is ‘we get paid when the business is getting paid.’ In order to do this, we employ a proxy phone number to track and report to business referrals that originated from HelpHive and HelpHive customers. This is not like other approaches where evaluating the return on investment can be challenging at best.”

Meghji also confirms that HelpHive did call Evan Conklin. But it was not a sales call.  In fact, it was “only as a followup to questions that Evan Conklin POSTED via our customer services system about how the contact information on HelpHive works. It was not, nor was it intended to be, a sales call.”

As for misrepresenting whether a business is available to answer phones or not, Meghji says that when a customer calls a business via HelpHive, “the first thing they hear is a welcome from HelpHive and then a request to enter the HelpHive extension of the business they are trying to reach.”

My view: It is kind of harsh  to pick on HelpHive specifically – there is no reason to doubt that it sincerely wants to help SMBs while building its own business. In fact, it has a lot of good and helpful ideas that provide a lot of value to SMBs. But we are living in an era where new directories are aggressively soliciting SMB business, and sometime misrepresenting themselves in order to better engage with the SMB (and sell them). In the interest of consumers and businesses, there probably needs to be strong disclaimers about directory information when proxy numbers are used without specific opt-in. Doing so wouldn’t necessarily hurt the new directory.

Microsoft’s MSN has been a good hodgepodge that gets 100 million users a month. But it hasn’t had a serious redo for 10 years. So the question posed to a new team brought in to redo the site was: How do you make the site stand out and really help users?

Site leader Scott Moore and Cyrus Krohn, a top lieutenant, had previously worked together at Yahoo and even teamed on a business plan for a local news product. Reunited by Microsoft, they looked over their options and one thing always stood out: local.

“Our research shows that local is the No. 1 unmet need, regardless of publisher,” noted Krohn, who previously ran Slate for Microsoft, Yahoo elections and most recently the Republican National Committee’s digital effort. Most local sites are pretty much limited to “event listings and restaurant listings,” he said.

To that end, a new site has been developed in a six-month time frame that has upgraded Local from the increasingly out-of-date and limited “MSN City Guides” to “Local Edition,” a  new curated section broken down into “Local News” and “Local Events” and prominently featured on the home page. The site has been rolled out to 1 percent of its user base this week. The bulk of the user base will get the site within two months.

Even in its early iterations, the site has localized every link for 44,000 ZIP codes. It is also fed by Bing search and maps, as well as local news by MSNBC.com and Bing News. It also includes partnerships with Fox Sports, WDT (weather), Zvents, MSN Autos and Yellowpages.com. Scout, Fox’s high school sports site, will soon be added as well.

It is likely that MSNBC’s recently acquired EveryBlock, a hyperlocal data provider, will be integrated too. Twitter and Facebook feeds will also be brought in to provide live search feeds. Twitter’s live search feeds are being tried out by Yahoo and Google as well. Facebook feeds, at this point, are unique to MSN.

Krohn notes that the development team has been deliberately kept small. “It’s just me and two other people on the media team,” he says. But the team has been working closely with the very large team in MSN engineering and other parts of Microsoft.

In fact, the integration with MSN is seen by Krohn as a major differentiation with other sites. It will let the site broaden categories and let users see all their needs “all in one sitting,” he said. To the best of his knowledge, MapQuest is the only other portal that approaches the same level of integration between search and content.

The development process, however, hasn’t always been easy. Sports, for instance, has been very complex to assign local feeds too, says Krohn. This is compounded by limited personalization on the site, which really doesn’t go beyond ZIP code. Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers fans, for instance, have moved to other parts of the country; people in places like the Dakotas and Hawaii don’t have professional sports.

Localization has also been tough for ZIP codes where people live closer to a town with a different name. The default on my neighborhood, for instance, was set for the main town, eight miles away. That wasn’t useful. But it was easy to manually override the default with more local store and restaurant listings.

While the site is still in development, Krohn says he thinks it is a good start. The long-term vision, however, is to provide a “true hyperlocal or neighborhod level” site that weaves in social media, tweets from neighborhoods and is blog-centric.

Moore and Krohn are doing a joint keynote on Day 1 at ILM:09, which runs Dec. 9-11.

Self-serve ad solutions aren’t a major part of the ad universe today. A recent BIA/Kelsey survey found few companies selling more than 10 percent of their SMB advertising via online. But self-serve meets the needs of certain online-oriented categories. And for economic reasons, of course — they are far cheaper to execute than premise sales — they remain the Holy Grail for pushing SMB sales.

Marchex, a sales facilitator for local advertising, has read the writing on the wall and today, announced a suite of self-serve products. “Historically, we’ve worked with directory companies, cable and newspapers looking to add search to a suite of products. Most sell via feet on the street,” notes Brooks McMahon, VP for Marchex Connect. But SMBs are now interacting with lots of different kinds of companies. Seventy-five percent of conversations involve some sort of self-serve component, he says. “We are making sure we have products that support different constituents.”

Among categories that McMahon believes will initially use its self-serve solutions are SMB creative services, domain registrars and office supply firms. “Online business services like Staples, OfficeMax and Costco are doing a lot more online,” he says.

One reseller relationship that is especially bullish on self-serve is Dun & Bradstreet. “D&B is actively reselling search marketing to their customers through an online self-serve portal that we have white labeled for them and provide full support for,” says McMahon. The portal works for both online and telesales.

McMahon also expects some of its directory partners, which include AT&T and YPG of Canada, to augment their premise sales with self-serve. “There is room for both in the companies that we serve,” he says. “The cost structures are different than with feet on the street.”

Apple announced its latest app milestone today; crossing the six-digit mark.

The previous milestone was 85,000 during the Q4 earnings announcement last month. It’s clear that app development is accelerating: I just wonder how press-worthy these milestones will continue to be until Apple falls back to the McDonald’s-esque “billions and billions served.”

Apps have done a great deal to open up mobile innovation to third-party development. Though Apple is still somewhat closed compared with other platforms like Android, it was the first to introduce an app marketplace — having a major impact on the market.

But 100,000 apps isn’t necessarily a good thing. From a developer’s perspective, it’s getting harder and harder by the day to rise above the noise and market apps. Still, it seems to be the hot distribution format and something that many brands develop or ask their agencies for as a knee-jerk reaction to the buzz.

We’ll see this excitement scale back. Apps aren’t going away, but we’ll see more prudent thinking from marketers about other platforms like mobile Web and SMS. The latter offers lots more reach and the former is becoming increasingly attractive due to better (HTML-5 supportive) mobile browsers. Not to mention it’s cheaper to build a mobile Web site than an app.

This was a bone of contention during an informative session at OMMA Mobile last week titled “To App or Not to App.” We also have a report (subscription req.) on this subject, and will tackle the topic in greater depth at the Interactive Local Media conference next month in Los Angeles. Hope to see you there.

Segment III. Apps, Web & SMS: What’s the Right Mobile Strategy?: 5:05 – 5:30

Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen an explosion of mobile apps, including 100,000 in Apple’s App Store alone. But for the same reason, it’s becoming more and more difficult to build and market apps that rise above the noise. Similarly, do sub-20 percent smart phone penetration and many platforms further segment addressable audiences for apps? The mobile web, though not as robust, can be a cheaper development platform with greater reach. SMS, meanwhile holds the greatest reach with access to virtually all 270 million mobile subscribers in the U.S.. Where in this continuum is the right place for your mobile product strategy?

Speakers:

Krishna Vendati, CEO, Plusmo

Eitan Ackerman, Executive Director, Marketing & Sales Engineering, Amdocs

Steve Espinosa, Cofounder, Appetizr

ComScore has released data that show smartphones in the U.S. now total 33.8 million units — a 63 percent year-over-year increase. But the highlight of the report was that touchscreen devices outpace even this with 159 percent year-over-year growth to 23.8 million units.

The report separates the two — so touchscreen devices aren’t counted as a subset of smartphones. All together, they total about 58 million units. If you consider that they’re all essentially smartphones and generally considered to be, these data put smartphone penetration above 20 percent (using 270 million subscribers as a denominator) for the first time.

Our own Mobile Market View consumer survey has just been completed in Wave III, and offers a glimpse into users’ mobile buying patterns. I can’t talk about the data just yet but I can say that we saw a similar increase in smartphone ownership — surprisingly high in my mind. More to come on that.

Bottom line is that smartphones correlate to mobile Web usage and the growth of data consumption. Touchscreen devices skew data consumption to even greater levels, led by the iPhone. All this bodes well for local categories of content, which themselves are growing in app and mobile Web formats.

This will be the topic of a session during our mobile “Superforum” at the Interactive Local Media conference taking place next month in Los Angeles.

Segment II. Location & Monetization: Ad Targeting in a Mobile World: 4:40 – 5:05

Smart phones are getting smarter and data plans are getting cheaper. As more users carry mobile computers, what are the implications for local search and discovery, given portability and location awareness? As users flock towards the mobile web and advertisers follow, what strategies, opportunities and pitfalls await location based ad targeting?

Speakers:

Meredith Papp, Director, Product Marketing, Google

Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast

Rahul Sonnad, Founder, Geodelic

Fresh off its monthly SMART report, mobile ad network Millennial Media released a report today that reveals advertiser sentiments towards mobile marketing.

Based on a survey of ad agencies; CPG, Retail, Entertainment, Travel and Restaurant categories are expected to be the top sources of mobile ad spending in 2010. Respondents also reported that “engagement” (a wide-reaching definition) is the number one driver and form of ROI for mobile ad spending. More specifically, “opt in” and list building were named as the most common goals for Q4 mobile ad campaigns.

Other highlights from the report include:

The largest cohorts replied that they will spend less than $100K in mobile advertising in 2009; however, that number jumps significantly in 2010.  With 60% of non-mobile marketers planning to employ mobile advertising in 2010, the increase in mobile spend is among the leading highlights:

• Mobile spending is expected to increase next year, with 31% of agency respondents stating that they will invest between $100K and $249K.
• More than 15% plan to invest more than $1M and 2.6% projected spending of greater than $5M.
• More than ½ of Q4 mobile campaigns will represent between 1% and 10% of their clients’ total spending, but, for a few, that number will be 40%-50%.
• Nearly 75% of the 100 leading agency respondents stated that they have developed mobile campaigns for themselves or a client.
• As an average value, brand respondents forecasted at least a 15 percent increase in spend in 2010.

Mobile advertising performance meets expectations and remains valuable. Among those who have executed mobile campaigns:

• 78% of respondents said the medium met their campaign goals, and an additional 9% said mobile performed “beyond our wildest expectations.”
• For 89% of agencies, the mobile facet of a campaign is just one portion of a multi-platform buy.
• Nearly a third (30%) of agency respondents said mobile has become an “indispensable” part of the media mix. Another 67% ranked mobile as “somewhat valuable” and only 2% said it was not valuable in their overall media mix.

Millennial is a quickly growing ad network and now sits among the top mobile-only ad networks (AdMob and Jumptap). Lots of data are coming out of these networks as they continually release “proof points” to evangelize mobile marketing. AdMob’s monthly reports are another example, though they measure network activity (not survey data).

Millennial separately is making some interesting moves that I’ve recently spent time talking to the company about. More to come on that front.

The global directory publisher Yell Group has succeeded in its effort to convince lenders to go along with a plan to raise 500 million pounds through a rights issue and restructure its 3.8 billion pound debt load. Debt restructuring has become an increasingly urgent concern for Yell as the year has progressed and results in many of its key properties sagged under the weight of a global economic slowdown. Easing the debt burden has been a particular focus of company Chairman Bob Wigley, a former Merrill Lynch banker who assumed the post in June.

According to Bloomberg, the deal with creditors calls for extending maturity of its loans to 2014 and reducing borrowing by 300 million pounds.

Yell Group is the leading directory publisher in the U.K. and also owns Yellowbook, the leading U.S. independent publisher. Yell also operates Yell Publicidad, with market leadership positions in Spain and in the South American markets of Argentina, Chile and Peru.

Many global directory publishers have made deleveraging a priority this year, as investors and lenders grow increasingly skittish over high debt-EBITDA ratios on businesses with declining core revenues. The Swedish publisher Eniro, for example, conducted a rights issue earlier this year that raised 2.4 billion Swedish krona to reduce that company’s debt. At the end of Q3, Eniro’s leverage ratio was reduced from 4.8X at the start of the year to 3.6X, with a total indebtedness of 7.1 billion krona.