'Discover Our Town' City Guides go Mobile With Verve Wireless

VICKSBURG, Miss. and ENCINITAS, Calif., March 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Discover Our Town (DOT), one of the nation's most popular online local city guides, is now available on mobile handsets in a partnership with Verve Wireless, the companies announced.

DOT has up-to-the-minute information on lodging, restaurants, activities, attractions, and community organizations from more than 2,000 towns and cities across the United States. It averages more than 1.5 million unique visits per month, ranking it as Google's third most popular local guide relied on by travelers, vacationers, and people in the process of relocating.

DOT's intensely local information is focused primarily on medium and small-market communities. It is available free to all cell phone users and is easily searchable based on users' location or interest at the time.

"Local information is the most important content category for mobile users," said Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence and Program Director, Local Mobile Search. "However it's often hard to get good, accurate local information, which is why sources such as Discover Our Town are invaluable."

To insure accuracy and relevance, DOT uses its own staff to gather, edit and continuously update its local information.

"That's why people come back to us. We make sure the information is useful," said CH Wilson, VP of Product Development of Discover Our Town. He added, "Everyone has data on the top tier cities but our success is built on the second and third tier cities like Helen, Ga., and Lewistown, Pa."

Verve Wireless, based in Encinitas, is the nation's leading provider of mobile publishing services to local media companies. The company works with thousands of daily newspapers, alternative newsweeklies, city magazines and broadcasters to provide news, entertainment guides, event listings, community calendars and more.

Verve's publishing partners' content is available on the Verizon Wireless's Mobile portal and is also available on all other major carrier networks.

"Partnering with Verve makes a lot of sense for us and adds a valuable access point to our local directories," states Jo Wilson, President, CEO and Founder of Discover Our Town. "We have always sought to provide the most accurate and useful information for communities in a simple-to-use format. The ability to work with Verve and bring our City Guides to leading mobile devices makes it even more beneficial to our users and local businesses."

DOT Mobile is free to end users and accessible on all carriers via any mobile phone that has mobile web access including Motorola RZR, Blackberry Devices, and Apple's iPhone. Users can either type http://discoverourtown.mobi or text the keyword "DOT" to 21321 to receive the link to their phone. Current information on DOT includes lodging reviews, restaurant listings, entertainment options and local event listings, along with transportation, business directory, maps, local attractions and classifieds.

"We're very excited to be working with Jo and her team at Discover Our Town. They've put together one of the most popular and useful directories of local city information available anywhere," according to Tom Kenney, Verve's President. "Our strategic focus has always centered on the fact that mobile content is only as good as the local information. DOT has assembled and maintains the most accurate directory of hyper-local information in the country, and is a perfect fit for the active mobile user."

About Discover Our Town:

DiscoverOurTown.com provides comprehensive city guides that include travel information, area attractions and restaurant listings for towns across the United States.

About Verve

Based in Encinitas, CA; Verve Wireless, Inc. and their proprietary Verve Local Content Gateway(TM) allow local media companies and advertisers to seamlessly extend their reach into mobile devices across all the major carriers. Verve Wireless currently works with leading media companies from across the country including dailies, alternative newsweeklies, and city magazines. For more information visit http://www.vervewireless.com.