MetaCarta Local Alerts Chosen by Lowell Publishing

11 February 2008, 9:01am

Cambridge, MA – February 11, 2008 – MetaCarta®, Inc., the leading provider of geographic information retrieval and search solutions, today announced that the Lowell Publishing Company, a MediaNews Group company and publisher of the Lowell Sun, The NH Broadcaster, Sentinel & Enterprise, The Valley Dispatch and Nashoba Publishing are using MetaCarta Local Alerts Service to inform their web site users about news stories and community events related to their neighborhood. Local Alerts is a registration-based service that delivers users personalized up-to-date news about the neighborhoods in which they live, work or go to school.

“We are delighted to partner with MetaCarta and bring our customers another valuable resource designed to help inform them of the local news and information happenings in their primary areas of interest,” said Mark O'Neil, president and publisher, Lowell Publishing Co. “ We see many applications for this unique service that will benefit our customers, both readers and advertisers.”

MetaCarta Local Alerts offers publishers a fully branded service that creates a sticky environment that is designed to attract new readers and retain existing readers. It is a hosted service that uses MetaCarta’s unique geographic information retrieval technology to hyper-localize content. Local Alerts identifies the places mentioned in free-form content, in real time, making it easy to deliver it to specific users. Local Alerts draws users back to the publisher’s site for repeat visits, substantially increasing user frequency and page views metrics, enabling publishers to better capture local advertising dollars and maximize advertising rates.

“Forward thinking newspapers like the Lowell Sun are adopting the Local Alerts service because it adds value to their already valuable content, and it saves time for their online readers,” said Rick Hutton, Vice President of Content Services for MetaCarta.

www.metacarta.com

Geo: International