InterActiveCorp strives for local holy grail, with "Ask City"
InterActiveCorp is about to unload a local information and entertainment service, apparently named “Ask City,” and it’s about time.
IAC is an Internet media conglomerate headed by Barry Diller, and it plans to introduce the local site next week, combining Web search, city guides, maps and event listings and tickets, a move that appears to finally combine the company’s assets in a logical way.The new Web-based city guides, scheduled to start Dec. 4, will be followed later in December by a redesign of the Ask.com search service, according to the NYT. This is an obvious thing to do (the company owns Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite and TicketMaster, among others), and we hope it is good. Lots of companies have been biting off little pieces of this strategy (Yelp, Smalltown, JudysBook, BackFence to name a few) but none of them have the same breadth in this area as IAC.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
