The agenda is shaping up well for the Local Search Association’s April conference, the first involving a partnership with BIA/Kelsey. The event runs April 21-24 at the Boca Resort in Boca Raton, FL.

We’ve lined up headline presentation from Ursula Worth, Google’s head of directories and web hosting partnerships, and Mary Boysman, VP of Brand Marketing and Advertising at Aspen Dental.

Worth and her Google colleagues will offer some insight on how it views the future path for local online media, while Boysman will give an advertisers perspective on building a local integrating marketing program.

Aspen Dental operates more than 300 retail dental centers in 22 states. Aspen uses the full spectrum of media choices to drive customers to Aspen locations, from print Yellow Pages to search advertising and social media. Boysman will offer a major advertiser’s perspective on how it builds its marketing program and how it evaluates and rates the performance of its media choices. Anyone interested in a cut of Aspen’s sizable annual media spend will want to hear what she has to say.

In addition to the headliners, BIA/Kelsey and the LSA have built a robust lineup of workshops that offer attendees a rich store of data and insight.

The workshops include an overview of BIA/Kelsey’s Yellow Pages and local online forecasts; a review of new BIA/Kelsey research on the pay per call market, plus a download on a series of sales rep interviews being conducted by Hawthorne Search. Additionally, the Local Search Association will provide a look at results from the latest Local Media Tracking Study, conducted by Burke Research.

Stay tuned for announcements on new speakers in the coming days. Look here for more information on the conference.

On Thursday’s Q4 and full-year 2011 earnings call, Eniro announced that it will phase out its print Gula Sider (Yellow Pages) directory in Norway, leaving only local directories as a print product choice in the Nordic country with a population of 4 million.

The move is yet another sign that the core Yellow Pages directory is nearing the end of its natural life in some of Europe’s more densely populated and digitally advanced markets. In December, European Directories shuttered the print operations of its Gule Sider (Yellow Pages) operation in Denmark and sold its online assets to Eniro.

This move shouldn’t come as a huge surprise given the rapid migration of directory revenues from print to digital, particularly in large markets like Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen, where declines in usage and revenues have been steep in recent years.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that print will account for just 40 percent of Nordic revenues in 2011, and barely 20 percent in 2015.

Eniro will continue to publish its local directories product in Norway, called Ditt Distrikt, in 74 smaller communities around Norway. There was no word given on the fate of the Gula Sidorna (Yellow Pages) directory in Sweden, Eniro’s largest market.

For the full year 2011, Eniro reported group revenues of SEK4.3 billlion, a decline of nearly 19 percent, though the organic decline was a more manageable 11 percent. Adjusted EBITDA was SEK1.1 billion.

Poland, once one of Eniro’s more stable markets, experienced a dramatic 44 percent revenue decline in 2011. Another troubling sign for Eniro was very modest 1 percent organic-only growth in its core Scandinavian markets. However, the company is maintaining its guidance to return to growth in 2012.

BIA/Kelsey will have a more complete rundown of full-year 2011 results in an upcoming Advisory.

On yesterday’s AT&T earnings call, CEO Randall Stephenson opened the door to the possibility that the telecom giant would sell off its directories business.

Here is what Stephenson said on yesterday’s earnings call: “That’s one area that we’re going to obviously take a very hard look at, and while I don’t want to give any indication on M&A activity, it’s one of these areas that we’re going to have to decide, do we keep it, do we restructure it, as we move forward.” The quote is from an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In our annual Picks and Predictions Advisory released earlier this month, The Kelsey Report predicted that at least one of the few remaining telecoms owning a directories business would divest it this year.

Here is what we said: “2012 could end with zero publishers of any significant size under telecom ownership. The most likely scenario is that one of the two biggest operators still under telecom control, AT&T or Sensis, will be sold. AT&T seems to be the most likely candidate.”

AT&T Advertising Solutions, the Yellow Pages operation, ended the year down 16.3 percent, to $3.6 billion. BIA/Kelsey estimates the company had print revenues totaling $2.3 billion, down almost 23 percent over 2010. Online revenue growth was just 3.3 percent, to 997 million. Online growth declined throughout 2011, from 6.8 percent growth in Q1 to a 1.2 percent decline in Q4. Since 2006, BIA/Kelsey estimates the Advertising Solutions business has lost about US$2.6 billion in top-line revenues.

AT&T’s directories operation is a two-headed monster that comprises the St. Louis-based Advertising Solutions business, which includes print directories and the sales force, and California-based AT&T Interactive, which operates the YP.com platform and develops digital products. Advertising Solutions is led by Jose Gutierrez, and the interactive business is led by David Krantz. Both units report to Ray Wilkins, who is CEO of AT&T Diversified Businesses.

Wilkins and Forrest Miller, who runs strategy and M&A activity for AT&T Diversified Businesses, have recently announced their retirements from AT&T. These departures will leave the organization short two senior leaders with ties to AT&T’s directories business. Miller led the directories business when it was under the SBC corporate brand.

U.S. directory and local search player The Berry Co. has scooped up defunct search marketing firm WebVisible’s Geneva platform from a liquidator in the wake of that company’s collapse.

“This acquisition will dramatically enhance our presence and capabilities in the digital local search space,” said John Fischer, interim president and CEO of TBC Holdings and Berry. “We plan to take the best of the Geneva technology and create a new platform and leads optimization engine that meets the ever-changing needs of advertisers across a range of digital products. We are delighted with the exceptional range of software development and product management talent represented by the employees of the new company.”

Berry has set up a separate business, based in Playa Vista, California, to operate the platform. One of the main reasons for the arm’s-length relationship is that the WebVisible business was based on reseller relationships, some of which Berry will maintain, while longer term Berry has ambitions to develop the technology further and possibly seek additional customers for the platform. This would be difficult if the operation were nested within the Berry organization. Essentially, Berry will become a customer of the new entity.

In addition to the technology, Berry has taken on 14 engineers and a few product specialists to help operate the platform.

Eric Owen, Berry’s VP of digital strategy and partnerships, told BIA/Kelsey that the WebVisible platform had several attributes that Berry found compelling, among them its dashboard capability, call tracking network and an order entry and ad insertion system with billing functionality. That latter is critical to helping Berry provision more digital products.

And moving more digital products through the pipeline is key to Berry’s longer term strategy, which involves provisioning multiple lead generating products and tracking the performance for the customer.

AT&T Interactive is launching a contest today to encourage online and mobile application developers to use its APIs to build new uses for local business data. ATTi is trying to tap into the collective creativity and brainpower of the developer community to extent the reach of its online and mobile advertisers.

ATTI’s main products are its YP.com online directory and YP Mobile app, as well as its local ad network, which currently features about 300 partners. ATTi is offering developers access to 17 million local business listings across 4,600 categories.

While ATTi’s products have extensive reach, Joanna McFarland, ATTI’s VP, Publisher Network, acknowledges, “There are still a lot of consumers we are not reaching.”

In addition to extending reach, ATTi wants to promote innovation in local. “We are interested in seeing what new use cases emerge for local business data.”

Those who participate in the YP Developer Challenge will compete for the chance to win $5,000 plus a sponsored trip to the SXSW Trade Show, March 12-15, in Austin. McFarlane says the winner will share a booth at the show with ATTi. ATTi has also launched a YP Developer Center portal.

In Canada, Yellow Pages Group did something similar with its developer program, which encouraged developers to build new local applications with Yellow Media’s data. See this video for more on how Yellow Media works with developers.

McFarlane acknowledged the similarity to Yellow Media’s efforts. She noted that ATTi is minimizing the requirements around using its data to eliminate barriers to participation. While ATTi will require attribution of the data, it will not require link backs or other common restrictions.

When asked about monetization, McFarlane said only that ATTi’s has some ideas it wants to try out with developers later this year, but for now its focus is on unleashing the developer community’s creativity and assessing the results.

The Sweden-based local search company Eniro has acquired some of the assets of De Gule Sider in Denmark, the Yellow Pages operation closed down recently by European Directories.

EDSA has made the decision to discontinue print directories in Denmark, where it held the incumbent position, while selling many of its online/mobile assets to Eniro. Among the properties Eniro has acquired include the dgs.dk domain, as well as trademarks, intellectual property, IT and customer lists. Eniro emerges as the leading online and local directory player in Denmark.

EDSA’s decision to shut down an incumbent print operation might have once been shocking, but in the Nordic markets in particular, the shift from print to digital has been under way for some time. Before the decision was made to shut down the Danish print operation, BIA/Kelsey estimated that 2012 directory revenues in the Nordic markets would be 67 percent digital.

The search marketing firm WebVisible was abruptly closed down by its creditors over the holidays, with CEO Ron Burr managing only to convince the company’s lenders to wait until after Christmas to foreclose on the business. As of Dec. 27 the company no longer exists, and its employees (estimated at 130 back in March but likely fewer at the end) were left with little to do but go home to wait for their final paychecks to arrive in the mail.

In an email to employees, Burr explained the company’s demise this way:

It is with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that today, December 27, 2011 is the last day of operation for WebVisible. I know this is a shock and has come abruptly. Even with all our efforts to recover throughout this past year, we found ourselves in a position in which the debt load of the company was simply too much to overcome. Our bank foreclosed on its loan which means they are taking over the company’s assets and collecting all remaining payments. As a result they have forced the company to shut down. We proposed many different options, attempting to negotiate with the bank, trying to find some alternative, but they are simply not open to alternatives. This happened quite suddenly, and the timing could not be more unfortunate.

Back in March, we talked to Burr about his vision for WebVisible. He had taken over the leadership of the company six months earlier from founder Kirsten Mangers. At that time, Burr insisted the business was generating about $25 million in revenues and was poised for sustainable growth. He said WebVisible made some “expensive mistakes” in focusing WebVisible on a direct to SMB model rather than on serving its reseller partnerships. Burr refocused the business on its partners, but apparently he wasn’t successful in generating enough revenues to service the debt and keep the lenders happy.

The European directory and local search operator Truvo has taken major steps toward consolidating around its flagship Belgian operation. On Dec. 22, Truvo “divested” its operation in Ireland, selling it to Contact Holdings, which operates Yellow Pages companies in the Baltic States. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Truvo has also dramatically curtailed its senior management team, eliminating five positions, many held by longtime Truvo executives. The departed include CFO Marc Goegebuer, MD Belgium Martine Bayen, VP HR Peter Vandenheulen, VP Marketing Jose Lema and VP Operations Ramon Ferrer. CEO Donat Rétif will assume the role of MD Belgium while the other positions will be eliminated or absorbed by remaining staff, according to an announcement sent to investors on Dec. 23. The combination of selling Ireland and eliminating senior positions will save Truvo 6 million euros in costs, according to the statement.

Jon Martinsen is CEO of Contact Holding. He and Truvo CEO Donat Retif worked together at Herold Business Data in Austria when it was owned by GTE (later to become SuperMedia). Herold is now a unit of European Directories. Contact Holdings is apparently the new name for Interinfo Holdings, which operates directory companies in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Interinfo is owned by the private-equity firm Balt Cap.

Truvo’s Irish operation, which uses the brand Golden Pages, was battered by a combination of a brutal Irish economy and a heavy exposure to one large metro market, Dublin. The last full-year figures for Truvo Ireland were in 2009, before a recapitalization removed Truvo’s obligation to report its results publicly. Truvo Ireland finished 2009 with revenues of 54 million euros, a 26 percent decline from the year before. Assuming similar declines over the past two years, the business would end this year in the 34 million euro range. David McGuffy was MD of Truvo Ireland. It is unclear if he will remain with the unit under its new ownership.

Truvo (then World Directories) was initially a minority owner of the Irish directory operation. It acquired the remaining 63 percent of the Irish business from Eircom back in 2002 for US$186 million (at the 2002 exchange rate), which was roughly an 11X multiple on EBITDA.

Rétif makes clear in the statement that Truvo sees its future tied largely to the fortunes of its Belgian operation. The fate of Portugal, Truvo’s remaining non-Belgian operation, is uncertain, but it’s logical to assume Truvo may be seeking a buyer. Truvo is also a minority owner of Trudon, the South African directory and local search provider.

Heavily leveraged Yell Group has earned some breathing room from a deal with its lenders announced yesterday. Yell announced that it has reached terms with the “overwhelming majority of lenders” to increase the headroom on its debt. Without such concessions, Yell was at risk of violating the covenants, which require the company to stay within a determined debt to EBITDA ratio.

Yell’s current debt is roughly 2.6 billion GBP. For the 2011 financial year (ended March 31), Yell reported EBITDA of GBP514 million on revenues of GBP1,878 million, a 27 percent margin.

Yell is currently in the midst of a significant strategic transformation under the leadership of Mike Pocock, who took over as CEO on Jan. 1, 2011. The company is shifting from being largely print based to a multi-product, digital focus. Yell has projected it will generate 75 percent of its total revenues from digital sources by 2015.

In July, in advance of its new strategy announcement, Yell announced a flurry of deals, including one with Microsoft to resell its Office 365 cloud based solutions, and acquisitions, inlcuding Znode, an e-commerce software company. These deals demonstrated Yell’s commitment to a wide expansion of its product set.

In a statement, Yell CFO Tony Bates said, “We are pleased that, with this decision, lenders have strongly endorsed our new  strategy and have given the Group additional freedom to carry out its transformation program.”

The negotiations with the lenders apparently were not easy, and were extended on Dec. 7. And on Dec. 9, news reports suggested lenders were resisting the directory company’s request for loan amendments, which prompted Yell to make changes to its request.

Yell has seen significant senior leadership turnover under Pocock. Most recently, Yellowbook CEO Joe Walsh and Yell Group online head Mark Canon have left the company.

Yell’s shares rallied briefly on Monday after the deal was announced before declining to end the day down 12 percent. On Tuesday, Yell’s shares were trading at 5.16 pence. Over the past six months, Yell’s shares have traded in a range of 3.35 p at the low end on Nov. to a peak of 11.25 p on July 13. Yell’s historical high was more than 600 p back in 2007.

Moh Ok, Chief Scientist at PayPal, and Bo Fishback, CEO and Founder of Zaarly, talked about the integration of social, local and mobile to close the loop on driving consumer purchases during a morning dedicated to SoLoMo here at ILM Asia.

Ok and moderator Mike Boland talked extensively about mobile payments, and whether the market will drive toward a common standard. Ok said PayPal and its parent eBays are currently “laser focused” on commerce. The PayPal mantra is anywhere, anytime, anyway.

Rather than talking about various forms of commerce (mobile, social, etc.), “It really should just be commerce,” Ok said. “You should be able to make it in a seamless way.”

In discussing all the different mobile payment methods out there — Google Wallet, Square and the looming NFC — Ok said the key is to be able to “pay however you want.” He describes PayPal as “Switzerland in terms of how people pay.”

Fishback followed Ok and described Zaarly, which is one of those companies that builds a compelling and original business off of an old and simple idea: putting local buyers and sellers together. “I don’t believe in companies that require behavioral change,” Fishback says.

On Zaarly, users post a need and others respond with offers to fulfill that need. Small businesses are essentially being built off of Zaarly, Fishback says. 

Zaarly has fewer than 100,000 users and has had roughly 40,000 posts in the past quarter. The company has roughly 4,000 businesses on its system. 

Fishback says it takes 300 people to create a liquid market.

Boland called it a “reverse Craigslist” and Fishback accepted that as an apt description. Peer to peer hyperlocal is another description.

“The more local you get, the less people want to rip each other off,” Fishback said. “There are no Nigerian scam artists on Zaarly.”

Advancing mobile payments is a key issue for Zaarly. Fishback says there is an imbalance in the market now. “It is easy to pay, harder to get money.” He is looking to partner with innovators in the payment space.