5 Questions for Mark Josephson of Outside.in

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This is the second in a series of brief Q&As with leaders in the local space.

So who are you?
Mark Josephson

What do you do?
CEO of Outside.in

Describe Outside.in as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this Outside In?”
Outside.in collects news and information from a wide variety of sources across the web (everything from your local weekly paper to your favorite local blog) and organizes it all by neighborhood.  We then take all of these locally relevant headlines and show them on our site, Outside.in, as well as on the sites of hundreds of major media companies like CNN, NYTimes, Tribune, NYPost and more. We cover more than 57,000 neighborhoods across the country, so no matter where you live, you can use Outside.in to find out what’s happening where you are, right now.

If you were not involved with Outside.in which service would you use to satisfy your needs?
If I were unaware of Outside.in, I’d probably still be reading the weekly local newspaper and surfing the increasing number of great hyperlocal sources like AOL’s Patch sites, as well as the independent sites like Baristanet that cover my hometown. Instead, I use Outside.in because we bring all of these sites together in one convenient spot.

At Outside.in, we want to make people’s lives better.  We want to help people build better communities through greater information sharing.

Why should people use your product over, say, watching a ball game or riding their bike?
Well, if you’re not tuned in to what’s going on in your neighborhood, you might not know when the next ball game is, who’s playing (or how you could get there on your bike!). At Outside.in, we want to make people’s lives better.  We want to help people build better communities through greater information sharing.  Knowing what’s going on in our towns or neighborhoods makes for stronger communities.  By using our service—either on our site or via one of our hundreds of partners— people can connect more closely to what’s going on in their communities. They can certainly find out where the next ball game will be held, and if there are any good bike paths they can use to get there.

Tease us with a hint of what’s in your pipeline related to local…
Lots and lots of new partners and new streams of revenue 🙂

What is the future of local + mobile, in 15 words or less?
Mobile accelerates local content, commerce and advertising.  Expect more of each.

Mark Josephson joined Outside.in as CEO in 2008 and has been building new media businesses since 1995.

Most recently, Mark was President and CMO of Seevast Corp, which builds and operates proprietary and publisher ad networks.

Before that, he worked at About.com as General Manager in charge of the creation and growth of the About.com consumer service and later as Executive Vice President of Marketing & Business Development with responsibility for customer acquisition, marketing and distribution for About, Inc.’s three operating divisions: About.com, Sprinks, and About Web Services.

Mark was a founding member of Cone Interactive’s new media practice in the late ’90s, where he managed marketing and communications for some of the earliest internet media businesses, including About.com and iVillage.com.

This post originally appeared on Locl.ly.

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