Multiplied Building Out Local Search Partners

Canada’s Multiplied Media continues to do deals with a range of content providers and publishers in local. Most recently the company added the ability to purchase movie tickets through its IM-based Poynt application. I spoke to CEO John Lowe the other day and he described a long list of deals in the US, Europe and Latin America in the pipeline.

Using Poynt takes a little getting used to but here are what some of the results look like:

The service will also be available in mobile at some point.

The idea is that IM is a medium that serves well over 300 million people on a global basis and that it is a neglected but potentially very effective entry or distribution point for local search content. The challenge will be to get people to add the service to their preferred IM client (as a contact) and then get them off their “search” habit.