Yahoo and American Express have expanded upon an existing partnership to offer small business owners new tools and content. The features will be available via a new Yahoo Business Solutions site that AmEx is sponsoring, located within Yahoo Small Business.

Cloud computing is responsible for a large amount of untapped marketing opportunities for businesses of all sizes. We tend to think about enterprise level businesses when we think of cloud infrastructures and implementations, but in reality, small businesses have just as much reason to turn to the cloud than the big companies, if not more. 

You may or may not be aware of the Visa Business Network. This is a site the company recently launched as a way to connect small business owners with one another, providing resources like goal toolkits, mentors, content-ranked information and more. 

We think some of our readers may find this valuable, so we spoke with Michael Lee of the Visa Business Network Outreach Team. He talked about how it helps businesses get started with building their Facebook and Twitter presences. 

Social app developer Fan Appz has just announced that it has integrated its platform with Facebook Places. The company says this gives businesses "a powerful and easy way to create highly relevant offers based on a customer’s offline activities."

That doesn’t sound bad. 

There’s no question that mobile is getting bigger, and is becoming an increasingly important channel for businesses to reach customers.

We had a conversation with Tim Nguyen, a sales manager for mobile marketing firm Trumpia, which has worked with plenty of small and large businesses in assisting them with utilizing mobile marketing to drive traffic and revenue.

Yahoo announced today that it has expanded its partnership with Dex One to allow listings on Yahoo Local. "This broadens the reach of Dex One’s local advertiser network, providing their clients with greater exposure in local communities and more consumers with detailed information on local businesses," a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

Facebook Places is going to be huge for businesses. It already is. You’ve probably been hearing about all of the opportunities that come with check-in apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. Facebook has half a billion users. This takes things to a whole new level.

Yahoo announced that it has released the first phase of Customer Registration for Yahoo stores. This introduces registration, sign-in, and account features for store owners to offer their customers. This way, customers can register their info for quicker checkout experiences in the future.

Customer Registration uses OpenID, which should make things even smoother for customers. They won’t have to remember new log-in info, and can simply sign in with a Yahoo, Google, or AOL account.

Google has launched a section in the AdWords Help Center aimed at helping small businesses improve their campaigns. It’s called Small Business Corner.

Local search site Local.com has acquired Octane360, a provider of domain-based local ad solutions for small businesses, domain portfolio owners, agencies and channel partners.

Local.com is paying $5 million in cash and stock, with an earnout of up to $5.9 million if certain performance criteria are met in the two-year period following the closing.

Do you think lolcats are silly? You may be right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t provide important business lessons (if you can get lessons from Justin Bieber, why not lolcats?).

Google has released a report that details its economic impact in each of the 50 states in the U.S. In the report, Google says it generated $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers, and non-profits in 2009.

"In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising," says Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales.

MerchantCircle is going international. The local business social network, which gets nearly six million unique monthly visitors (according to Compete data), should be increasing that number greatly as it expands into Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

The winter Olympics are off to an interesting start, as always. And while I’ve only caught parts, I did manage to watch short track skating when Apolo Ohno miraculously won silver. From the qualifying heats to the final race he was pretty amazing to watch.

While his competition in those qualifying races wasn’t super stiff, you could still see the mark of experience…As well as how strong and fit he is going into this competition. In both of those early heats he calmly hung out in the back of the pack waiting for the chance to make his move.

Google has introduced some new features for its recently launched Place Pages for local businesses. Most notably, businesses can now instantly (close anyway) post data to their Place Pages from Google’s Local Business Center dashboard. If you log in, you can post updates, coupons, announcements, etc. that will go live in minutes.

Small businesses that features reviews on their website are seeing significant returns, according to a new survey from RatePoint.

Among the 30 percent of small business retailers who had product reviews on their websites, 43 percent said reviews had led to more sales, while 28 percent indicated they had resulted in more traffic.

Citibank has released the results of a survey about small business social media use. According to Citibank, few small business owners and managers are increasingly using social networking sites.

Over 500 small business executives across the United States were surveyed, and 76% of them haven’t found sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or expanding their business during the last year. 86% said they hadn’t used social networks to get business advice or information either.

Google has introduced a new type of ad for local businesses called Local Listing Ads. They are designed to display when users search for a business in its local area. Google says it’s the easiest way to advertise your business to local customers on Google, because they require no maintenance. 

Google has launched a new version of local search for mobile. This version heavily utilizes Google Maps to make organization of results easier on your phone.

The new local search for mobile lets you find business listings on Google Maps while you’re on your computer, where you can "star" them. Once you star them, you can easily find your starred listings grouped together from your phone, making it easy to keep the listings you need while you’re out, together. This can potentially make errand running a lot easier, as demonstrated in the video below.

Yahoo and AT&T announced a partnership, where AT&T will sell Yahoo! display ad inventory to local businesses in the US. They will begin doing so later this summer.

"Local businesses are looking to drive in-store traffic, and our alliance with AT&T Interactive will help them reach a local audience of highly-engaged potential customers on Yahoo!," said Jim Schinella, Senior Vice President, North America Region, Yahoo!.

Yahoo is launching a campaign with Bank of America this week, which a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews is essentially "a big online push for BofA to build visibility and facilitate dialogue in the small business community."

Yahoo’s Small Business Answers Center is designed for small business owners with "great ideas and good questions," who don’t always get credible answers.