Nyagoslav Zhekov, who recently joined Whitespark, just sent this along:

Factual stopped accepting individual manual contributions through their website (see here when you choose “Update/Add Business Data”). Instead, now they urge business owners to contact some of the “Trusted Data Contributors” to get the listings updated (obviously, in exchange of a small fee, which is not mentioned anywhere on Factual though). It is also interesting they don’t make it very obvious that they still accept contributions through their API.

Not that the manual approach ever worked properly – it could take anything from 1 day to 3 months for an addition/update to get approved.

Bottom line is that if you want to be sure that Factual (which feeds Apple) has your data, you will now have to pay. Here is a complete list of their trusted data contributors:
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I live 75 miles from the nearest Apple store but we do have an ATT store in town. I got there at 11:30 and managed to snag their last iPhone 5s. They serve a small, rural market with a total regional population of about 50,000 and received only 15 of the 5ses (?). And were sold out at 11:31. Given that I assume that every store will be sold out if they are not already.

I traded in my 2 year old iPhone 4s for $205 so the net (with a 2 year contract) was $118 after taxes. I recognize that I could have sold my 4s on eBay but this was a convenient and trouble free option that took all of 5 minutes.

In talking to my rep and several other ATT and Verizon reps over the past few weeks, they apparently make somewhere on the order of $5 when they sell an iPhone compared to the nearly $20 they make when they sell a Samsung. You can imagine how that changes the showroom floor dynamics with undecided customers. The moral: if you buying an iPhone from an ATT store, be polite and think about leaving a tip.

As soon as I started to restore from backup Apple notified me that iOS 7.01 had been released. I have been playing with it on my 4s for a few days and was likeing it and while the speed was great the battery life was really sucking and acting very weird. So maybe this will fix that. Not sure.

Siri on the other hand has become quite the capable transcriber. Not only has her understanding taken a huge leap she can now read AND send emails. That is very cool. I dictated several fairly complicated emails WHILE RIDING MY BIKE and she sent them flawlessly.

Greg Sterling wrote last week about the on-going resentment that SMBs display towards Yelp. It seems to me that the intrinsic contradiction of selling low value, high priced ads against reviews that many businesses dislike, creates an inevitable conflict and distrust. But when you add high pressure, hard sell techniques to the mix it becomes a scenario for explosive disaster.

This comment appeared on my Yelp: Real People. Real Reviews. Deceptive Sales Tactics post last Friday. And while I can not independently verify the facts, it has a ring of truth about what happens when you sell aggressively to SMBs that don’t really understand what they are buying.

Just what is Yelp thinking? Is this a cancer that will poison Yelp for ever in the space?

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Glad to have found this blog. I was contacted by a very smooth talking charming Yelp salesman this summer and he was everything you described but much much more.

This guy was good, I got to hand it to him. He got me. He pretended we were friends and sold me. And I’m not an easy person to sell to either. After calling me day and night for about a week, I finally started to believe that what he knew was best and my opinion didn’t matter anymore. So I signed up for a year at $425 a month to be effective Sept 1, 2013. I signed up beginning of August.

2 days after I signed his contract I realized I had made a horrible mistake, so I contacted him to cancel.

I argued with him that Sept 1st start date didn’t happen yet, so why couldnt I cancel? He said “your already in the system”. I didn’t want the $850 cancelation charge so I agreed to leaving it on.

The next two weeks I beat myself up. I was devistated. Even my kids noticed my mood change. I couldnt’ believe what I signed for. and I’m just AN ARTIST, I’M A 1 WOMAN ARTIST that works occasionally, but I don’t even consider my art – a business. It’s just something that I do FOR FUN, that pays, when I have TIME.

Anyway, after the 2 week emotional breakdown (I actually signed up for therapy session because of it). I get contacted by another woman from Yelp. Her job was to make sure my yelp page “looked good”. I avoided her at all costs! I didn’t reply to her messages, hung up on her calls and didnt’ return anything. I was in YELP TRAUMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She was upset with me as to why I was avoiding her (after all, she wasnt trying to sell me anything, I was already “in the system”. So finally I decided to reply to an email and I said “YES OR NO… CAN I STILL CANCEL?”.

She replied “I’m so sorry you feel this way and your campain has not even started yet, I really need to speak to you about this, but to answer your questions, YES, you can”.

Immediatly I called her and told her my whole story. Almost broke down to her. She sounded like she was not at all suprised. She cancelled me.

Although I don’t have the cancellation papers yet like she promised she would email me, I have in writting saying she would, so I’m cool with that. I know I can put a stop payment with that alone.

Just so you know, since then, my “free ad” is no place to be found on YELP. Technically it’s still there, because I can link to it. But its not coming up at all on any searches like it was BEFORE THE PHONE CALL FROM HIM.

wow. that’s all I can say. No worries, I will open a new yelp page and he wont know it’s me. that’s all….

Every year about this time I get my new Superpages print edition and every year I count fewer pages. This year is no exception. And every year there seems to be more filler than the year before. And every year, there is a new YP print company coming out of bankruptcy. It’s an old story but one that continues to fascinate me.

In many categories the ads are for national players. In florists for example there are 2.5 pages and only 1/8 of one page covers truly local florists. Lawyers, a category where there is still some interest in the use of print yellow pages by consumers, has 7 pages but most are virtual offices or lawyers from over 50 miles away. Forty percent of those ads are for PI lawyers, another 40% for disability lawyers and only about 20% are for actual local lawyers.

The print YP are no longer a local advertising medium catering to local business. It is clear that what is left of the print yellow pages has been taken over by regional and national advertisers. One has to wonder though if they ever bother to calculate their returns or they are doing this out of habit.