Today, mobile means local

In case you missed it last week, hyperlocal took center stage at the Techcrunch 50, an unlikely venue for what has previously been thought of as too small a problem for the Silicon Valley elite to get excited about.

Those days are gone. In the wake of acquisitions by AOL (for Patch.com), MSNBC (for Everyblock) and Examiner.com (for NowPublic), hyperlocal is hot and two of the top three entrants at the Valley’s premier technology showcase were hyperlocal focused startups. Redbeacon seeks to build a better alternative to yellow pages or craigslist by matching local service providers with prospective customers, while Citysourced is partnering with cities and municipalities to provide real-time reporting tools to citizens who want to report problems where they live.

Sean Blanda, writing for eMediaVitals, highlighted the obvious irony of this development earlier this week:

Both Citysourced and RedBeacon are profit driven methods of servicing a community, and both ideas could have been revenue generators for a local news outlet.

Mobile, of course, is at the heart of this movement. Half-jokingly, I told my Serra Media co-founder Glenn Thomas that Citysourced is the application that we set out to build in 2006 when we first came up with the idea for Newsgarden, but without an iPhone available, we traveled down a different path than we would today. Blanda sees strength in the mobile movement for hyperlocal as well.

The success of local at TechCrunch 50 might be attributed to Web 2.0 fatigue, but it really is a tribute to the cost and availability of location-based tools on the market. GPS-enabled smartphones are becoming the norm, thus increasing the potential market for location-based mobile applications and web sites.

Adding an iPhone app (and other mobile apps) is critical to any local strategy. (Which is why we’re building mobile into each of our product lines.)

As I often say to audiences during various speaking gigs, publishers should view mobile in 2009 as if they were looking at the web in 1998. Then I ask: “what would you do differently, knowing what you know now about how the web evolved?” Blanda sent a similar caution:

Local community news sites would be wise to jump on the bandwagon before scrappy Internet startups eat their lunch.

Again.