An Updated List of Apple Business Listing Data Providers

Interested in who provides business listing data to Apple Maps? With rollout of iOS 9 Apple is becoming ever more important in local search. This fact struck home early this year when a major theme park contacted me and said that people were piling up at their service entrance instead of their front gate. Turned …

Continue reading

Some Thoughts on the YP industry & Google in Europe

I am just returning from the SIINDA conference in Budapest. SIINDA is the newly formed association born out of the combined efforts of the EASDP, the European Association of Search and Database Publishers (YPs), and EIDQ, the Association for the Directory Information. Most of the attendees at the conference were Yellow page companies that were …

Continue reading

Microsoft Buys Nokia – What will become of Navteq/Here?

Microsoft bought Nokia today for $7.2 billion dollars. Nokia, you will recall, bought Navteq in 2007 for $8.1 billion in what was hailed at the time as pivotal move by Nokia into location based services. But as Horace Dediu pointed out,  by late 2012 Navteq had been losing about $1 billion a year for Nokia …

Continue reading

Google Maps 1.1 for iPhone Not Well Received

Early last month, Google released a 1.1 upgrade to their iPhone mapping product that was faster, integrated Google contacts and included more countries. Apparently though the upgrade has not gone over well with users as the bad reviews seem to be flowing into the App store at a significant clip. Since its release 5 weeks …

Continue reading

Siri: When did you start working?

Last night I was driving to Baltimore for an upcoming LocalU seminar. I heard the ding of a received text while listening to a podcast and I was curious. I asked Siri to read it to me. She did. She asked if I wanted to reply, I said yes. She sent my response flawlessly. A …

Continue reading

Driving Directions Survey- A Fragmented But Important Market

  Introduction: When we think of driving directions, we often think that Google’s omnipresent role in the world of Maps indicates that they dominate the market for directions. When Google surpassed Mapquest and Yahoo in desktop mapping in 2009, it seemed that it was game over. But the current reality of driving directions seems to …

Continue reading