Haaretz made its announcement with the upbeat proclamation of “the start of a new era,” adding that it “will enable us to provide you with accurate and comprehensive news coverage, analyses and commentary on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.”

The revamped site, which went live on Monday morning, is slightly more content heavy than its predecessor, but not enough to warrant such a rosy declaration, in our opinion.

Haaretz’s new digital subscriptions pricing plan mirrors that of The New York Times – no charge for access to a limited number of articles per month (only 10 vs. 20 at The Times) with the front page always free and the rest nestled behind a pay wall. Print subscribers will get access to the whole kit and kaboodle. A subscription will cover all digital platforms: web and mobile (both smart phones and tablets).

Also, as with The Times, savvy users can bypass the access limitations by typing the name of an article of interest into Google.

Haaretz’s aping The New York Times makes sense: its daily English language edition is bundled with The International Herald Tribune, The Times’ version for Europe and the “rest of the world.”

While we are all for newspapers trying out ways to better monetize their offerings in tough times, sequestering content for paying subscribers works only if you’re the undisputed leader in your space: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist have all succeeded. Other attempts to cut free access have too often failed.

So, is Haaretz the clear king of the Israeli news space? Their Hebrew edition certainly has elements of The New York Times, particularly in terms of its writing, columnists, features and investigative reporting. It also has the fastest news coverage, making it the go-to site after a terrorist attack or midnight coalition re-alignment, But the online competition – in English, in particular – is fierce in Israel. The Jerusalem Post’s website has far more readers than Haaretz; indeed, it’s the web’s number one English language site on Israel and Jewish subjects in terms of traffic.

More recently, a new paper – The Times of Israel – has come on the scene. Launched earlier this year by the former editor of The Jerusalem Post and backed by an investor with pockets deep enough to cover the first two years of operation, the writing is uniformly excellent, superior even than to Haaretz (which consists of direct translations from Hebrew). The Times of Israel also borrows a page from The Huffington Post, making liberal use of (unpaid) bloggers.

Haaretz has one thing going for it that the other English-language online Israeli news sites don’t, though: a top-notch mobile app. The Times of Israel’s David Horowitz says that a smart phone app is on the newspaper’s development horizon but, in the meantime, a browser version optimized for mobile will be out soon.

Will Haaretz succeed where others have faltered? The company has high hopes, ending its announcement on a decidedly cheery note:

As we approach our first centennial, we hope you will join us as we embark on a new chapter in our history, one in which will pledge our allegiance to maintaining the standards of journalistic excellence and integrity that are the bedrock of Haaretz as we explore the new frontiers of the modern digital age.

AutoTrader.com and dealer software provider DealerTrack appear to be planning an early-2013 collaboration to somewhat change the face of online consumer auto-loan search.  According to Automotive News, AutoTrader.com will provide a car shopper with auto financing access specific to her or his preferred vehicle. An AutoTrader.com spokesperson told AutoNews.com that dealers will control the loan process, sharing with consumers only what they wish, and still profiting from the new finance service.

Whether this is an important addition to the auto listing giant’s services to consumers  and / or dealers remains to be seen. According to AutoNews article comments, however, the service is not unique. There representatives from OfferLogix [PDF] and DriveItNow both claimed to have similar features in place.  AutoTrader.com’s differentiator, however, might well be that neither OfferLogix nor DriveItNow offer these financing features on their own consumer-facing auto listing site. Regardless, it’s solid information for auto-listing publishers about the workings of the auto-loan finance world, and the online options available to consumers.

Edmunds.com just signed with Contact At Once, joining AutoTrader.com and Cars.com in adding live chat to its dealer listings, with the goal of increasing sales communications between consumers and dealers

“Today, according to Dealer Chat Market Share, nearly 20 percent of all dealers use live chat on their own websites and that number continues to rise,” Contact At Once director of marketing Aaron Hassen told us by email. “As the major automotive listing sites have embraced live chat, dealers have increasingly begun integrating live chat into their processes and are selling more cars as a result.”

“ContactAtOnce! fully managed chat is responsible for a 25 percent increase in our sales, both new and used,” Chris Forsythe, Internet & BDC director at David Stanley Chrysler reported to Hassen. “ContactAtOnce! is the most cost-effective way to sell more cars immediately,” he said.

Here’s the official announcement, from Edmunds.com:

Contact At Once! Selected byEdmunds.com as Dealer Chat Provider

Live chat solution to connect dealers to car shoppers conducting vehicle research on Edmunds.com

ALPHARETTA, GA. April 16, 2012 – Contact At Once!, the leading dealer chat provider connecting online carshoppers to auto dealers, today announced that it has been selected by Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information.  Contact At Once! will provide live chat functionality across Edmunds.com’s consumer-oriented web properties.

“There are obvious benefits to giving car buyers access to real-time text-based communication with dealers as they conduct research online,” said Edmunds.com Sr. VP for Dealer Initiatives Donna Sechrist.“Contact At Once! offers our users a secure, intuitive chat solution that lets them communicate directly and easily to our dealership partners.”

The Contact AtOnce! chat solution is used by over ten thousand automobile dealerships.  Using a single set of tools and processes, dealers can respond to consumer chats originating from anywhere in the ContactAt Once! dealer chat network, which now includes Edmunds.com.  Dealers leveraging thedealer chat software typically experience an increase of at least 25% in the number of online shoppers that contact the dealership.  Shoppers can connect with dealers via icons personalized photo greetings placed on websites.

“Adding live dealer chat to Edmunds.com makes the site more effective,” said Skip Dowd, Vice President of Business Development at Contact AtOnce!  “Choosing Contact At Once! meanseasy to use solutions for dealers.”

Dealers have rated Contact At Once! as the number one chat provider in 2010 and 2011 on DrivingSales.com.  For additional information about dealer chat powered by Contact At Once!, please visit www.autodealerchat.com.

About Contact At Once!

Contact At Once! isthe leading automotive chat software provider and operator of the industry’sonly dealer chat network connecting more than 9,000 auto dealers with thewebsites car shoppers visit most often. Adding Contact At Once! dealer chatsoftware to a website typically increases a dealership’s sales conversations byat least 25 percent. Named to the Inc. 500 as one of America’s fastest growingbusinesses, Contact At Once! is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For moreinformation about the company’s auto dealer chat product, please visit www.autodealerchat.com.  To learnmore about the company, please visit www.contactatonce.com.

Consumers searching for dining deals can, for example, search as specific as cuisine. They can see reviews and recommendations for the various restaurants, as well as contact details and menu. The consumer enters her or his credit card information once and the BiteHunter BiteBuy technology takes care of the rest of the buying process for every transaction from then on.

This is technology worth emulating. We hope they add Android capability soon.

The YellowAPI allows developers to tap into YPG’s database of 1.5 million business listings – still the largest in Canada – to power their apps. There are two components to the API: “Places” which is focused on streaming local search content into apps, and “Deals” which is still under development but that will deliver deals and coupons, albeit from a third party, RedFlagDeals. The Deals API will be available later in 2012, the company says. A beta program is currently underway.

YPG touts its database as not only being the largest but also “curated” so that it is “relevant and clean” and updated on a daily basis. And, oh yes, it’s free.

Among the 35 apps that have already been developed are Poynt (a mobile search app); Dealscanr (it searches for local deals using a police scanner interface); Rendezview (allowing two people to find the perfect place to meet); Reservedly (helps you make restaurant reservations); and a real odd bird – MoodFood that lets you rank what “color” is your hunger.

On a more serious side, YPG has partnerships with both Twitter and Foursquare.

YPG was upbeat as it pushed the re-launch. Nicolas Gaudreau, the company’s vice president of digital and print media, said the API has enabled YPG to “accomplish a great deal in terms of driving digital innovation and in providing greater exposure to our advertisers across multiple channels.”

Hyperbole aside, YPG has unsurpassed content assets. If it can put its attention to a solid marketing program for the API re-launch, it may have what it takes to re-succeed.

Please note: this update is a correction of a prior version that affiliated the publication with Chicago-based Tribune Company. That is not the case. The entirely separate Tribune Limited organization is based in Nassau, Bahamas.

Prior to the launch of classified listings, the Marketplace product offers ad sales opportunities to auto dealers, real estate practitioners, property managers and service firms through its business directory product. Marketplace enables a directory of local businesses, typically at no charge to the business, with upsells that boost the publisher’s bottom line. Coupon capability, and ad tracking / analytics are part of the package. While not the only Marketplace product for publishers, Mediaphormedia’s Marketplace has a long history of working with media clients that include Ogden Publishing Corp., Amarillo (TX) Globe News, and Fayetteville (AR) Flyer. For what Marketplace can do for classifieds, take a look at WorldClassifieds, the classified home of The World Company’s flagship newspaper, the Lawrence (KS) Journal World.

That may not sound so radical, but consider why today’s group buying sites are succeeding where older services like Mercata and MobShop failed: the latter deterred potential buyers by leaving them “waiting for days before confirming whether or not they had got the offer they had signed up for.”

The Toronto Star adds that consumers felt like “it wasted their time, giving the deal a high opportunity cost. Even though they get their money back, they [still] suffer a ‘psychological loss.’”

In contrast, today’s sites show the number of users who sign up in real time. That eliminates uncertainty and boosts confidence, writes the study’s co-author Prof. Ming Hu. And 24-hour deals lower the “opportunity cost” of participating even more. Hu says the same principle can be applied to crowd-funding sites like Crowdrise and Kickstarter.

For the study, researchers set up two purchasing mechanisms: a simultaneous one – where no one knows how many buyers have come before them – and a sequential mechanism, where a second group of buyers has the advantage of knowing the size of the first group. The sequential model won the day.

The U of T study also compares the strategies of current sites – which successfully focus on such premium-priced services as gym memberships or a discounted day at the spa – and older sites which Hu says failed by offering low cost physical products that didn’t have enough added value to make the wait worth the trouble.

The study also had some other interesting findings:

• Facebook is “nearing” its saturation point in Canada while there is “still room” for other social networks to grow (Comscore points specifically to Twitter and LinkedIn as the services with the most potential).
• Online video views in Canada are up 58 percent with YouTube accounting for half of all online video viewing in Canada.
• Smartphone penetration has reached 45 percent in Canada; daily usage is growing by 50 percent.

In the report, Comscore is understandably upbeat about the direction the digital media industry is moving in Canada. “It’s evolving in extraordinary ways,” Bryan Segal, Comscore’s Canada VP said in a release on the new report. “2012 is poised to be a defining year for digital as consumers grow their engagement with social, video, mobile and other emerging media.”

We’re not so sure. A comment by another newspaper exec on the panel revealed a surprising lack of understanding of the direction digital media is heading, leading us to worry that these big wigs’ positive predictions may be premature.

“I believe there will always be an appetite by people to read a newspaper, to feel it, to touch it, to carry it,” Paul Godfrey, president and CEO of Postmedia Network, said. Good enough. But then he added, “I think to read everything on a digital tablet, people will get tired of doing that 24 hours a day, whether it’s through a computer or their digital device.”

Perhaps he’s never spent serious time with an iPad or even an iPhone. From what we’ve seen (and personally experienced), it’s pretty hard to put one down once you’ve gotten started.

Maybe it’s an age thing. Godfrey admitted that as people get older, they want the paper on their doorstep. Now, we at AIM Group don’t have a digital crystal ball (we went looking for one on EBay but all we found was a next generation Pez dispenser), but it seems pretty clear that such a strategy is inherently non-scalable. The question in our mind, then, is the classic “not if, but when.” It’s one that went unanswered at the panel.

ATLANTA, Feb. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — AutoTrader.com is giving dealers another way to attract shoppers to their new car inventory with the new Price Markdown feature, which enables dealers to systematically subtract the amount of special offers from the price of their vehicles. With this tool, dealers are able to more easily highlight the affordability of their new cars and entice shoppers who may be undecided between a new and used vehicle.

Groupon Scheduler is an online appointment service that provides merchants with an easy way to manage their schedules and accept bookings from consumers.

OpenCal launched at the end of 2010, so the acquisition was quick, although probably not overly lucrative. OpenCal was co-founded by Shiva and Simon Vallee, who also helped to found Sitemasher, another Canadian web service, which was acquired by Salesforce.

From a relatively unknown player, AdParlor burst onto the online advertising radar when it landed an exclusive deal to handle Groupon’s entire Facebook ad spend. Other high profile clients for the company include Ubisoft, Sega and agencies like Digitas and OMD.

AdParlor offers three ways of working together: a fully managed service for clients spending more than $25,000 a month; a self-service tool called Pulse; and a white label solution. AdParlor bills its clients based on either cost per acquisition or number new fans or app installs: the company claims to deliver some five million Facebook application installs per month. On the ad side, AdParlor serves over 30 billion impressions a month.

Adknowledge has been on a buying spree: in the last three years, it has made eight acquisitions. Its last purchase was the cost-per-action network Hydra Group. It also made a previous buy in Canada when it acquired Vancouver’s Super Rewards in 2009.

AdParlor’s CEO Hussein Fazal (who will keep that title post-merger) said the deal was important for the company to get into places like London, New York City and Chicago where a physical presence, which AdKnowledge has, is needed. Fazal and co-founder and CTO Kristaps Ronka were named to Inc.com’s 2011 “30 Under 30” list.

AdParlor will operate as an independent unit within Adknowledge and will keep its Toronto offices and 20 employees.

SlimCut Media’s new FreeSkreen lets readers decide, when they come across a premium article, whether they want to pay for access, or read the piece with ads for no cost. Readers decide which articles will display ads on a story-by-story basis rather than a blanket up front setting.

If you choose the ad option, FreeSkreen then prompts you to choose one of three targeted ads before continuing on to the content. Once you’ve watched one ad, you receive unlimited free access to that article.

While we always welcome new ideas on how newspapers can better monetize their content, FreeSkreen seems rather cumbersome: would you really want to go through the choose-and-watch-an-ad process for each piece of premium content that strikes your fancy? A blanket requirement to watch an ad once and then have access to all of a website’s content for a specific time period – as we’ve seen on many sites in the past, like the old Salon – makes more sense to us, at least from a usability perspective.

We’d direct you to SlimCut Media’s website to read more about it, but we you can’t…unless you’re in Canada that is. For the rest of the world, the site indicates that FreeSkreen “is not available in your country yet.”

Adicio’s recruitment, automotive and real estate Web platforms are already optimized for mobile. With the new service, Adicio clients can now offer advertisers their own branded mobile classified presence, with custom content, vanity URLS, flexible color themes, instant alerts and more.

Sony's recruitment mini-site in behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The mini-sites maintain the functionality of Adicio’s full-blown mobile platforms. Job-seekers can use them to see an employer’s latest listings and apply for jobs. Home buyers can view properties and contact Realtors for showings. Auto buyers can see an auto dealer’s inventory and schedule test drives.

“Adicio’s Mobile Mini Sites put job seekers, home shoppers, and car buyers in touch with online classifieds from their mobile phones,” CEO Rick Miller said in a release. “With almost 80 percent of the nation’s population using mobile phones and 71 percent of smartphone users searching for products and services after seeing an ad, this solution merges the power of mobile with the power of advertising to customers on the go.”

It’s a premium service to Adicio clients. Price depends on volume, Chief Alliance Officer Tony Lee told us, and whether the request includes a “wrap” – Adicio parlance for indexing listings from specific advertisers’ sites. “It depends on the number of mobile mini-sites we create for advertisers on behalf of the client,” he said. “Some clients will want a few just for their top advertisers, while others we’ve spoken to anticipate selling hundreds of them each month.”

Adicio’s full release is here.