European Directory Publisher Truvo (formerly World Directories) has extended its mobile search product to the Belgian market. The product utilizes MobilePeople’s Java based Liquid Maps platform, which powers several mobile search platforms being rolled out by directory publishers in Europe.

The downloadable search app will pull listings from yellow pages (Pages d’Or), white pages (Pages Blanches); news from hln.be; weather from Meteo; web search; and of course ringtones and wallpapers. It will also come with save & share functionality as well as other calls to action like click to call or email. It will be available in French and Dutch.

MobilePeople was just acquired by local search platform provider LocalMatters. The two should be a powerful combination, given LocalMatter’s installed base and the growing hunger among European directory publishers to launch or improve mobile search apps.

For Truvo it’s a continuation of its mobile product growth, and in line with its stated intentions to develop non-print sources of ad revenue in earnest. Among directory publishers worldwide, it has been a leader in that sense.

Two consumer advocacy groups plan to file an FTC complaint about mobile marketing and its emerging practices. The advocacy group Digital Democracy filed its complaint in conjunction with U.S. Public Interest Research Group.  

According to an article in MediaPost, Jeff Chester, founder of Digital Democracy, says, “We’re filing a complaint to force the FTC to take a proactive stance. Mobile ad companies incorporate the same problematic business practices that we witnessed with PC-based broadband marketing, including behavioral targeting and profiling techniques — except that this time they know your location.”  

The main focus of the complaint is behavioral targeting in general since this type of data is often captured without first obtaining consent. The Federal Communications Commission already prohibits marketers from sending text message ads to consumers without their opt-in consent, but some other types of mobile ads — such as wireless application protocol banners or search ads — are not similarly restricted.  

The Kelsey Group forecasts the mobile marketing segment to grow from a current $33.2 million to $1.4 billion by 2012. Our forecast also predicts the mobile Internet population will grow to 91 million by 2012, making the mobile advertising market too attractive to ignore.  

The goal of the FTC complaint is to place restrictions on mobile advertising while the category is still developing. The downside is that these types of restrictions are the very things that have kept the mobile advertising industry from developing in the U.S. With search growth slowing, mobile advertising is the next logical platform for growth and investment particularly by the major portals, meaning it will be a hard-fought battle to maintain the freedom to experiment with advertising formats and data gathering techniques to determine what consumers will and will not accept on their mobile handsets.   

MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper publisher with titles such as The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News, has teamed up with TauMed to launch a video-centric health vertical. The vertical launches this month at four of MNG’s smaller papers. It will eventually be incorporated across the chain. Other local media partners are also being lined up.

TauMed, which is privately funded and has 12 employees, is the brainchild of Tauseef Bashir, a former executive with FAST Search and Transfer, the search company recently acquired by Microsoft. FAST’s influence is readily apparent in the service’s intent to make every action searchable. (MediaNews Group is also a FAST client.) “All the information is search driven,” says Bashir.

As with other health portals in the marketplace, the service isn’t focused on local information other than directory content featuring doctor and hospital search. More local content will come in a second phase, says Bashir. The local effort will be aided by the promotional, sales and editorial capabilities of the local syndication partners. Ratings and reviews are probably the core of the local experience, he notes. The site will also be mobile enabled.

A lot has happened so far this week with directory assistance and voice search providers.

Call Genie yesterday launched a new product suite. This includes three platforms that let DA providers, Yellow Pages publishers, carriers and search engines build branded mobile local search products. These products will utilize the assets gained in Call Genie’s November acquisition of BTS Logic and Phonespots. It also signals another evolutionary step for Call Genie in moving beyond voice-driven category search to more comprehensive mobile local search functionality for the above players. This will be a sizable opportunity, as stated many times here and in TKG’s recent mobile forecast.

V-Enable also launched a downloadable client version of its WAP-based FreeMobile411 for Sprint phones. The WAP-based version was released earlier this month and differentiates itself from other free 411 offerings by offering live human support (see video here). The product includes business and residential search, maps and directions, and category search, in addition to live operator assistance. The client version will allow users to speak queries while holding the talk button and receive visual results — multimodal functionality that will be one of its main selling points.

Speaking of multimodal, Tellme (one of the first and leading providers in voice/visual mobile search) launched a new search app for BlackBerry today at the Web 2.0 conference. The application will carry Tellme’s voice in/visual out functionality and will include business lookups, movies, traffic, weather, maps and driving directions. See the video demo here.

Lastly, The Kelsey Group has learned from knowledgeable sources that Jingle, which runs 1-800-FREE411, is for sale.

I am always leery of reports that point to a “Scandinavian miracle” (or a “Massachusetts miracle” or what have you). But a December 2007 NAA Growing Audience report has some valuable details about how Schibsted Media, the Scandinavian publishing giant with additional properties in France, Spain and Switzerland, has begun to remake itself for the digital age.

The report, by David LaFontaine, says Schibsted sees up to 60 percent of 2008 revenues might come from interactive — vastly higher than the 8 percent to 10 percent contribution made to U.S. newspaper revenues (and perhaps overstated, or concerning just one or two markets). Key to its online revenues is its ability to keep its newspapers as destinations, rather than relying on Google. Ninety percent of the traffic to VG.no, for instance, comes directly to the site due to its hosting of a robust search engine and addition of video, social media and mobile apps.

About 38 percent of adults read the print edition, but almost 50 percent of the Norwegian market uses a VG product — print, online or mobile — every day. “Our target is to pass 60 percent,” CEO Kjell Aamot told LaFontaine. “We call that building an audience, even though we’re slowly, slowly eroding our print audience.”

Local retailers are increasingly going beyond store locators to drive sales. The extensions to store locators include brand locators, coupons, menus, trip planners, and even guides to where Wi-Fi, nonsmoking and RV parking can be found.

A leading vendor in providing retailer solutions is Anaheim, California-based Where2GetIt. Roughly 280 companies and 550 brands are using Where2GetIt today, representing 700,000 brick-and-mortar locations. These include manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and agencies.

Brands that use Where2GetIt include such mainstays as Office Depot, Hancock Fabrics, Columbia Sportswear, Mountain Hardwear, Patagonia, Monster Cable, Mitsubishi Digital, Sony, ViewSonic, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Applebee’s, White Castle and Cracker Barrel. I ran across the firm looking for an Alpine car stereo, for instance.

The 25-person company got its start in 1997, when it won an assignment from Seiko to build online maps showing where its watches could be bought. Since then, Where2GetIt has extended its “locator” capabilities to a wide range of brand-specific products.

It provides a “turkey locator” for Popeyes Fried Chicken, a “running locator” for Reebok, a “pie locator” for Bakers Square and a “job locator” for recruitment firms. What ties them all together is a focus on helping consumers find brand-name products.

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel says the firm’s “Business Locator” continues to be the firm’s mainstay — typically one of the two most used features on a retail Web site. But the supplemental products have become increasingly important to the firm’s business model, which is based on licensing. For instance, adding coupons to Popeyes’ site doubled the chain’s Web site traffic, he says.

The firm’s other services tendered tend to be more strategic (i.e. future oriented). Firms such as Office Depot, for instance, use Where2GetIt’s mobile products. They include mobile locators, mobile browsers, SMS text messaging and toll-free 800 interactive voice response.

The firm is also heavily engaged in site analytics to drive sales conversion. “We try to figure out how far people will drive” using crowd sourcing and other techniques, says Patel.

Earlier this week, my colleague Charles Laughlin posted an entry about the beginning of the YPA annual conference titled “YP Industry Pledges Counteroffensive.” That headline pretty much captures what was an upbeat event that attracted 600 attendees. As YPA President Neg Norton told the industry, “the root of the problem is a belief that we are going away.” The fact is that both the print business and the electronic piece suggest otherwise.

Norton said that industry membership is 462 companies, a new record, with 57 new members in 2007. The YPA, along with the ADP, is working hard on environmental guidelines to educate people that “Yellow is green.” He went on to talk about the 90-day communications plan designed to help people understand the value story and other industry strengths. There are six key elements to this plan, which is still in development.

• Continue to meet with the financial news media
• Approach B and C counties to tell success stories that will bolster local business
• Release the metered ad study that will prove return on investment
• Complete a small-business omnibus survey
• Release the global usage study
• Get the industry’s message across through op-ed columns

Today, the YPA sent out a note inviting people to become friends of the Yellow Pages and receive an RSS feed so that we all have the facts and figures at our fingertips. Norton spoke about Yellow Pages as an industry in transformation where its members had a choice between managing the decline or investing in the future. One example of a company that had done the latter is Australia’s Sensis. In a presentation made by COO Carol Johnson and General Manager Jo Lynne Whiting, along with two of their sales colleagues, they made it clear that the customer is at the top of the pyramid for their $2 billion revenue business, which we calculate makes Sensis the sixth-largest directory company in the world. While the business declined 2.8 percent in ‘07, it is up 4.9 percent in ‘08, and Johnson indicated that she expects better results at year-end.

The Sensis team put together 10 revenue recommendations, which they followed religiously starting with the elimination of all discounts and the need to train, train, train the sales force to tell the value story. Initially, customers didn’t believe that they would not discount and some were angry. But Whiting said that after one year, customer satisfaction and value for the money are both up 12 percent, and employee satisfaction is +8 percent over last year. They praised the work done by Dennis Fromholzer, who they hired as a consultant to help them build information-rich ads that are the No. 1 usage driver.

Two of the most popular panels ran consecutively. Frank Jules, president and CEO of AT&T A&P, gave his first speech at a Yellow Pages event and made it clear that AT&T, like Sensis, is investing resources, distribution and advertising in its largest markets. The company purchased Ingenio, a pay-for-performance corporation, and is offering new products like video ads, Hispanic directories and gatefolds. Video was the highlight of another highly rated panel that followed. Moderated by the CMO of Newsforce, Dana Todd, the focus was on new mobile and video tools and how adoption drives usage and usage in turn drives adoption.

Finally, two significant industry awards were given out. Dorothy Talkington, senior VP of national at Ketchum, received the Stuart Stanze individual contribution award, and Denny Payne, former CEO of AT&T A&P and YPA chairman, received the YPA Lifetime Achievement Award. These two winners were the exclamation points on the Industry Excellence Awards, whose winners can be found on the YPA Web site.

The industry faces greater challenges than ever before, but it is refreshing to hear its leadership admit those and outline a plan that can help get the message out to the various Yellow Pages constituencies that this is still a very strong business. Never before has Yellow Pages faced economic uncertainty, a generational shift, environmental issues and a slow but certain transition from print to digital. We believe the industry is up to the challenge.

Today’s big news is Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo!. The $44.6 billion bid represents a 62 percent premium on Yahoo!’s closing stock price yesterday, which was affected by Yahoo!’s depressing earnings announcement, in which Yahoo! said it would lay off 1,000 workers to “re-accelerate” growth.

For 2007, Yahoo! reported a net profit of $660 million, down 12.1 percent as Yahoo! boosted marketing and development spending by 25 percent in an effort to catch up with Google. Yahoo! has a market capitalization of about $25 billion, compared with more than $300 billion for Microsoft.

Already, Yahoo!’s stock price is up 45 percent, which should be some solace for the execs — many departed — holding options, who have been watching their value fall precipitously.

Microsoft’s bid, of course, did not come from out of the blue. Earlier last year, Yahoo! broke off merger talks, so one assumes this new offer won’t be automatically accepted. Our guess is that other bidders will not enter the picture, unless Yahoo! solicits a “white knight.”

One thing we believe is that the “cultural” issues between Yahoo! and Microsoft are not as pronounced as they have been in the past. Yahoo!’s culture has changed enormously in recent years as it has struggled against Google, and it no longer seems to have such strong identity issues.

Going forward, the real question is who’s best positioned to compete with Google. According to comScore, Google’s share of the global Web search business stands at 77 percent, followed by Yahoo! at 16 percent and Microsoft at less than 4 percent.

Another question is who can get by the tough regulators at the EU (we don’t anticipate significant U.S. problems). Our view is that a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger would strengthen the competitive picture against Google, so regulators would ideally welcome it. Indeed, just a few weeks ago we stopped using the politically correct language “and Yahoo!” when talking about local search. Google is that far ahead.

Microsoft’s Aggressive Steps

What’s clear is that Microsoft plans to take the steps necessary to match up with Google. It has been extremely aggressive as of late with both the aQuantive purchase and the $300 million investment in Facebook. From a Microsoft point of view, Yahoo! is clearly its single best growth injection.

The focus here, of course, is on search. But search is just a piece of the puzzle. Yahoo! also brings to the table its instant messaging service, news access with audio and visual feeds, and personalized Web pages. For business, it offers several services aimed at helping companies boost their presence on the Internet. It has stakes in or owns several other companies, including online shopping with alibaba.com, Flickr for photo blogs and Kelkoo, which compares prices.

Generally, it is conceded in the industry that Yahoo! — including Yahoo! Local — has a first rate social platform. Yahoo! also has developed a relationship with hundreds of newspapers for its HotJobs recruitment service that has extended into display advertising and search. The newspaper consortium appears to be doing fairly well with Yahoo!, although it recently opted to go with Zillow for real estate.

A Closer Look at Integration Issues

An integration of Yahoo! and Microsoft assets is so complex and daunting that we believe little would quickly change. Globally, integration will be hampered by the companies’ respective partnerships, which are intertwined and deep.

The complexity of retaining Yahoo! consumer usage is another major concern. We view the integration of the ad platforms to be similarly complex, but perhaps not as daunting. We would note, however, that the merger would benefit from MSN Search’s longtime relationship with Overture, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing. AQuantive is still separate, so bringing back-office operations together will be less sticky and tricky.

The integration of Hotmail with Yahoo! Mail is a bigger problem. We wouldn’t anticipate any near-term effort to integrate those two properties. Another area of overlap is in mapping. Yahoo! Maps has significantly greatly market share, but Microsoft has been pumping even more money into its Virtual Earth service and would likely become the merged company’s new standard. Another area of overlap is in mobile, where Yahoo! Mobile services have done well, but would run into Microsoft’s forced synergies on the WINce operating system.

(This post was coauthored by Matt Booth and Peter Krasilovsky.)

In a significant development, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com is replacing Yahoo! Local Search for AT&T’s broadband and Internet customers. It is a move that will greatly enhance Yellowpages.com’s position in the space. The company recently told analysts it expects to attract 2 billion searches in 2008 and 3 billion by 2010.

The move is part of a broad multi-year reworking of AT&T’s existing deal with Yahoo! that gives Yahoo! $300 million to $400 million in upfront cash, according to analysts interviewed by paidContent.

It replaces a previous deal that was primarily based on providing Yahoo! with a share of every AT&T broadband user for a co-branded AT&T/Yahoo! portal and sell through of premium services – an arrangement that AT&T has publicly chafed at.

According to published reports, the previous deal brought Yahoo! roughly $300 million in high margin cash flow. A complete collapse of the deal was unlikely, but the renegotiated terms reflect AT&T’s strong position in the company’s many markets like wireless, directories, and increasingly, the Internet.

AT&T is clearly focused on building up its own portal efforts. The new deal will have a portal “powered by Yahoo!.” With the Yahoo! deal completed, it is adding access to its portal and e-mail for all AT&T customers, not just AT&T Internet customers.

The news comes at an interesting time. Last week, the wireless spectrum bids were due and AT&T will clearly be a contender. Further, Google is rumored to benefit substantially from increased mobile traffic from the iPhone available exclusive through AT&T Wireless.

It is unclear if the deal essentially cuts Yahoo! out of being a local search destination site for AT&T customers. In an environment where top portal and search brands are recipients of mobile usage, that seems unlikely. Regardless, it gives Yahoo! more opportunity to sell display and search advertising throughout the AT&T network. It is something that could have strong dividends as Yahoo! battles directly with Google and others. No doubt, retaining tight control of the carrier deck will allow AT&T to steer traffic accordingly.

It is of no small coincidence that last month, AT&T reworked corporate branding to reflect the company’s intended direction. What was once “AT&T Advertising & Publishing” is now being touted at “AT&T Advertising & Search.” The merger between Yellowpages.com and Ingenio, a $250 million transaction, confirms our belief that AT&T is moving the company toward a fully integrated cross-channel marketing company.

It also extends the reach of the Yahoo! portal to the old BellSouth territories recently integrated into AT&T, and extends Yahoo!’s content beyond the desktop to mobile as well – something that will be much more important over time.

According to paidContent, Yahoo! may see declines over $150 million to $200 million in revenue due to the deal’s restructuring. But there clearly is also plenty of upside if Yahoo!’s advertising is widely used, and mobile develops as strongly as anticipated.

We have speculated for some time that AT&T is a natural fit for Yahoo! in terms of an eventual merger or sale. While this news doesn’t sway us one way or another, we do believe these two companies are moving closer together and an eventual marriage of some type is more than a remote possibility.

(This post was co-written by Matthew Booth and Peter Krasilovsky.)

Classifieds can now be sent in via text messaging thanks to SMS Pal, a text message classified ad company. The service costs 99 cents for every listing and is charged back as a premium SMS message to the user’s carrier. The classified ads run on line at smspal.com and in local participating newspapers.

Based in my town of Carlsbad, CA, the company was started last July by former Apple Online Store engineer Joe Moreno, who noticed lots of texting activity in 2005 when he served a stint in East Africa, where he was stationed as a Marine Corps Reserve.

Moreno’s innovation is taking out several text words for classifieds, including “sell,” “job” and “skills.” Instead of renting out his own short code, he is working with an SMS aggregator. Using his service, ads can be up in 160 characters. “Most cellphones make a ‘ping’ when the cell tower has processed it,” he says.

SMS Pal’s first affiliate is a small Arizona newspaper, The San Tan Sun News. SMS Pal is currently in discussions with other newspapers and has aspirations for international outlets. Moreno’s expectation is that the local papers will serve as promotional partners, supplying print display ads, etc. A number of newspapers are already using texting to deliver news headlines, he notes.

Moreno says the East Africans have made a marketplace around their cellphones since they don’t have ready access to the Internet. In the U.S. Moreno expects the service to appeal equally to smartphone-savvy users sitting in Starbucks, as well as less advantaged people who don’t have easy Internet access. He has observed, for instance, that African-Americans and Hispanics are the heaviest users of cellphones. Without Internet access, “they can’t use Craigslist; they can’t use eBay,” he says.

The next step for the service is to provide users with SMS updates. “People will want to be looking for specific merchandise or jobs. They’ll want to find babysitters and lawn service workers.” As with ad placements, the alerts will also run 99 cents.