Shares of Local.com Corp. (NASDAQ:LOCM) are trading higher this morning after the company issued a press release stating that the search engine that pipes down into a local format has taken its United Kingdom off of beta status.  The new http://uk.local.com can easily see the following data:

• Sort results by rating, distance, business name and category;
• Limit results to a defined radius;
• Filter results by related categories and nearby cities;
• Sort by star ratings and read user reviews;
• Access recent searches, which are now automatically saved for easy reference.

This company is actually a stock we’ve had on our small cap Internet watch list of potential BAIT SHOP candidates (now the Special Situation Investing Newsletter).  We have not ever added it as an official takeover candidate because of a myriad of reasons, but that is more structural rather than situational.

We are considering opening up this watch list of candidates to our subscribers of the newsletter, although please understand that a watch list is much different than an active list of actual takeover candidates.  We do not believe that the company would instantly be acquired and an entire group of circumstances would have to come together over a staggered time frame for this to occur.

Shares of Local.com are up 8% today at $6.92, although shares have traded as high as $7.25.  Its market cap is almost $98 million and NASDAQ lists that its September short interest grew 19% from August to 2.457 million shares. 

Other key articles related to this as follows:

• Local.Com Renews With Yahoo!
• Local.Com Private Placement Holders Register Shares
• Local.com Spreads Its Wings, Acquires PremierGuide
• The patents that got it really going over summer

Jon C. Ogg
September 26, 2007

Jon Ogg produces the 24/7 Wall St., LLC Special Situation Investing Newsletter; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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