As most of you know, back in January we launched the second version of the CityGrid API suite. Updates to the platform included:

• increased query volume
• box and circle additions to region search
• histogrammed results, grouped by category
• impression tracking and improved reporting
• more enhanced place page content from new premium partners
• additional national and local advertisers in more cities
• and more

We’ve been very happy with your adoption of version 2, and we’ve gathered good feedback from you along the way for upcoming and ongoing improvements. As we make these continual improvements with your help and input, version 2 will evolve to support the changing needs of your applications and business.

Which is why we’re announcing the close of version 1 on April 30^th. All remaining publishers calling v1 APIs must migrate to v2 APIs by 11:59 ET on Saturday evening.  Read the rest of this entry »

This week, we announced that one of the most trusted radio and TV brands, CBS Local Media will be partnering with CityGrid Media through a custom reseller program. The CBS Local Pages offering includes giving local business advertisers the opportunity to appear on the hundreds of premier websites and mobile apps across our CityGrid® network. Further, the listings will appear on CBS’s two dozen co-branded television and radio websites in major markets across the country. CBS will leverage its extensive sales force in dozens of major markets to sell its Local Pages product.

CBS joins User Friendly Media, the first private label reseller to join the CityGrid® and expands our journey of connecting businesses and consumers everywhere local happens.

Click here to learn more about becoming a CityGrid® Reseller. You can also read more about the news at MediaBistro , Kelsey Group, and Broadcasting and Cable

This morning, our very own Jay Herratti appeared on CNBC’s Worldwide Exchange to discuss the local online advertising market and how CityGrid Media is helping small businesses advertise online.

SXSW, here we come! CityGrid Media is heading to Austin, with all-new CityGrid APIs in tow. We’re thrilled to be participating in Mashery’s fun, all-day every-day developer lounge, Circus Mashimus. We will be demonstrating our CityGrid APIs for local advertising and content on March 12th, 3-3:30pm, March 13th, 3-3:30pm and March 14th, 1:30-2pm. And we’ll be showcasing our new Deals by Citysearch mobile app, which was built with the new CityGrid Offers API.

And we’re awarding $1K to any developer that participates in the AppCircus SXSW Developer Contest that utilizes our CityGrid API and places in the Top 10. Learn more at http://bit.ly/goYx6X. The entry deadline is March 2nd so enter now!

We’re also thrilled to have Urbanspoon’s GM Mani Dhillon leading a SXSW panel on Sunday, March 13th entitled “Dining Out in the Digital Age.” Come check it out!

See you in Texas, ya’ll.

Today, we re-launched our developer platform featuring V2 of all CityGrid APIs. Our newly designed developer center provides Web and mobile application developer’s better access to local business data and locally-relevant advertising. Our simplified offering now features:

Content by CityGrid — Now gives you access to richer local business listings to enhance your existing user experience or create a new local application. Our new APIs include:

• Places API – Provides functionality for information on local businesses, including search, detail, user content submission, and predictive text.
• Offers API – Provides coupons and special offers from businesses based on geographical location and category
• Reviews API – Displays customer reviews based on listing IDs for certain geographic/category attributes

All APIs have been instrumented with impression tracking feeding our new beta reporting dashboard.

We do all the heavy lifting to aggregate enhanced places and monetization, letting you innovate on the fast growing local market.

It’s that simple.

Happy New Year and Happy Developing.

Last night, CityGrid Media was awarded a 2010 Los Angeles Business Journal and Patrick Soon-Shiong Innovation Award in the Media category. CityGrid Media was listed among 15 of the top and most innovative companies in the Los Angeles area making this a great achievement. We were selected by a panel of esteemed local Los Angeles professionals from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, USC’s Marshall School of Business, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Los Angeles Chambers of Commerce, Abraxis BioScience and leadership at the Los Angeles Business Journal. Click here to see a quick video from the awards ceremony.

This award recognizes the tremendous work and innovation that comes out of our CityGrid Media family including our leading network, CityGrid and consumer properties including Citysearch, Insider Pages and Urbanspoon. I want to thank all of our great employees for their daily contributions to making this a great place to work. You truly make it a pleasure to come to work every day.

Today, we unveiled our new CityGrid Media private label product offering enabling sales organizations to sell CityGrid Media’s advertising products under their own branding. The new program was created for regional print yellow pages, newspapers and others who currently do not have an online advertising product or want to expand their local product offering. User-Friendly Media is the first partner to launch the product offering and we are excited to welcome them to the roster of CityGrid® partners. User-Friendly Media will now offer its customers new online advertising products giving them the ability to distribute their GoLocal247 profile across CityGrid®.

This new program represents another crucial step in our strategy to be “everywhere local happens”. Now with great reseller partners, we will connect more businesses with consumers across all markets.

Click here to become a CityGrid® reseller. You can also read more about the news at AdWeek, Adotas, and Greg Sterling’s blog, Screenwerk.

We are excited to welcome Mani Dhillon, as  the new GM of Urbanspoon and member of the CityGrid Media family. Mani comes to us from Electronic Arts, where he built and managed its online and mobile businesses, and brings deep product development, business development, and marketing expertise to the position. Before EA, he held positions at Cisco’s consumer technology group, as well as Price Waterhouse Entertainment Technology Group and Verizon Wireless.

Mani is well positioned to continue Urbanspoon’s rapid growth and product innovation, including cutting edge products like the new Rez application. We’re lucky to have Mani at the helm, and look forward to making him part of the Urbanspoon and CityGrid Media teams.

When Citysearch.com was born 15 years ago, it was established with one goal in mind: to help consumers answer basic everyday questions, like “where should I eat tonight” and “what time is my nail salon open ‘till?”. Over the decade that followed, Citysearch.com overcame many obstacles to deliver on that mission. We managed to survive in a category where others have not been so lucky and we’ve been there for 25 million consumers each month, answering billions and billions of their questions about daily life.

But in the last couple of years, even as our audience was growing, winds of change started blowing again in Local: search giants stepped into the mix, social media became a core driver of the online local experience, and mobile technology spawned a long list of tiny but highly innovative geo-locate start-ups. Suddenly, local became sizzling hot again and, as our space was changing around us, we too had to change. To borrow from Steve Jobs, we had to “think different” about Local in order to continue to lead for the next 15 years.

Since I joined Citysearch three years ago, we’ve worked hard to re-define the business model for our future. We acquired Insider Pages, then Urbanspoon, and we made investments in MerchantCircle and OrangeSoda. And during that time it became crystal clear to us that the biggest opportunity for us was to become a local platform. We understood based on our own firsthand experience, that web and mobile publishers needed two things to be successful: content and monetization. So we took all of our content and our advertisers, packaged them up through feeds and APIs, and opened them for all to use. We called this platform CityGrid®, and since we unveiled it in January of this year it has become the largest local content and advertising network. Things have heated up even more since that launch, and we’ve added many more publishers and resellers since then. The CityGrid® network has grown so rapidly and has been received so favorably, that we have decided to anchor everything we do around it –and so today we announce CityGrid Media as the new name for our company.

CityGrid Media is born out of the success of our CityGrid® network, but it is also built on the foundation, history, and knowledge of Citysearch.com. CityGrid Media will make it possible for Citysearch, Insider Pages, and Urbanspoon to thrive and grow, and they, in turn, will help the CityGrid® network improve its content and refine its publisher tools. It is a beautiful circle that includes our legacy business, younger siblings, and platform for future growth. This is all supported by our many wonderful partners and the talented employees who are the cornerstone of our business today. Together, we will work to make the next 15 years as exciting as the last, and to fulfill CityGrid Media’s new mission: to be “everywhere local happens™”!