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.

Yellow Media is cutting jobs in its Canpages print directories division but says it will keep its Canpages online business.

“From an online and mobile perspective, the Canpages brand will continue to exist,” said Yellow Pages Group Treasurer Anne-Sophie Roy. Roy gave no word on how many jobs would be lost or which Canpages city directories would be cut.

Yellow Media bought Vancouver-based Canpages in 2010 for $225 million. At that time, the Canpages website had 3.5 million uniques. Yellow Media’s strategy post-acquisition was to operate Canpages as a separate business, as Canpages also had its own print directories. Both companies had their own different scope and price points.

Shares in the Montreal-based company dipped more than 10 percent in morning trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange after rumors of the news broke out. Canpages publishes directories in Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. It also owns and operates Canpages.ca.

Increased digital offerings are springing up to offset the sting from print advertising revenues that dropped at 13 percent in Q3 2011. Also in Q3, Yellow Media logged a $2.9 billion writedown to the value of its business. The company stopped paying dividends last year to improve its financial position. Although it may be stripping jobs among the Canpages print division, Yellow Media advertised on Twitter and LinkedIn that it’s hiring for Mediative, its digital marketing agency. Some Canpages employees are receiving employment offers at Yellow Pages Group in areas where there is no duplication.

Last year Yellow Media sold Trader Corp., home of AutoTrader magazine, to London-based private equity firm Apax Partners for $745 million to help reduce its debt. Yellow Media will release its Q4 2011 results next week.

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.

A few years ago, the location of businesses became a big question mark, as well as a strategic issue, as people wanted to shop or dine nearby. These “geo-fencing” issues were especially important for Yellow Pages companies.

Since then, search has become more the norm, along with GPS-based phones, which have location baked into them. What hasn’t changed is that you still need the geo-fencing data tied with other meta data for local discovery. You still need to know what subway line is near, where the nearest parking garages are, or what your choices are for dining when you are visiting your friend in Chelsea.

Companies such as Maponics, Urban Mapping, Zillow and others are still licensing or providing their geo-fencing results. And now, the customer base is more universal among companies in the local space, along with key verticals related to schools, real estate and other verticals. Other companies, such as Yahoo, have used such data to introduce Proximity Search.

The result can be a seamless paradigm that integrates local mapping information with coupons, deals and other merchant information. But not everyone gets it.

“Some publishers still don’t get how to have cross platforms,” suggests Maponics CEO Darrin Clement. “They’re still looking for leads in the social world; still bolting on coupons to their results. They’re too intent on protecting the existing paradigm.”

Clement says mobile users, especially, need seamless roaming of information. He notes that some local services will just use the Zillow API. And it works well for start-ups. But Zillow only has 7,000 neighborhoods, he notes. “We have 160,000. Zillow has 100 cities. We have 2,300 cities.”

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.

We reported at the end of the year that Yell is moving in a new strategic direction. This week, the Yellow Pages publisher announced the appointment of Matt Anderson as its new chief strategy and business development officer. Anderson has previous experience as a partner in the consumer media and digital division of Booz & Co.

“Matt played an instrumental role while working at Booz on the development of Yell’s new business strategy and was closely involved in brokering relationships with new partners including Bazaarvoice and Netbiscuits as well as our acquisition of Znode,” said Yell CEO Mike Pocock in a statement.

Anderson will focus on building more global and strategic partnerships for Yell. In addition, he will work closely with Yell’s digital team to develop new products and solutions, and to incubate new businesses with global potential. He will be based in Yell’s Houston office, which is becoming a key location for the U.K.-based publisher. Pocock also hails from Houston.

During its investor relations call last month, Pocock said that Yell’s digital directory business is seeing declines due to the increase of players in the market. However, Yell has seen a continued interest among its clients in digital services, particularly websites and online search. Yell’s digital services offering saw an 11 percent growth in Q1, particularly in the U.S., which offset declines in Internet Yellow Pages.

Anderson’s presence is key to growing digital services. Previously, he developed robust strategies in industries experiencing structural uncertainty and change. He is also recognized as an expert speaker and media commentator on dynamic digital strategies. Since Pocock became CEO in 2010, Yell has seen significant senior leadership turnover. Most recently, Yellowbook CEO Joe Walsh and Yell Group online head Mark Canon have left the company.

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 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.