Seems like everyone is confused about everything.

We talked to quite a few Yellowpage companies. From Yellowbook to SuperPages to regional and independent yellowpages companies, many of them were there. And none of them knew what to do.

We had a real enlightening chat with a person who worked at a regional yellowpages company. He said that he would be attending a YP conference sometimes in the next two weeks, and he was preparing for the same barrage of confusion that they always pull out - ‘what about the internet?’ Sure, some of them are getting online. Some of them are getting with the time, realizing their brands and sales forces they have assembled are fantastic. But in general, for the last 10 years (he runs their internet division), that is all they have done - ask ‘is the internet worth it?’ If people thought newspapers struggled with inertia, then they haven’t seen what the yellowpages are upto.

Another interesting tidbit we gleamed was that these companies do not care (much) about the data itself (ie what we are selling at iBegin Source). Their true focus is on advertising. Not only selling, but upselling (far easier in terms of effort vs return). These companies could potentially compete in the marketplace - but they are all too focused on just the ad sales.

There were some interesting battle stories. One of the most bizarre went as follows:

Two brothers each had their own rug business. And they hated each other. Both were big YP advertisers, and they would continually call in to cancel the others’ advertising print. They would pull all sort of tactics, such as calling on the weekends, confusing the weekend help (with a barrage of obscenities and what not, customer support just tries to you you off the phone). Eventually it got so bad that they had to do a lock on both their accounts. The only way any change could occur was if they went down to the store and saw the owner’s ID. In the end, one of the brothers ended up going to jail … for burning the other brother’s business down

YP data is the other problem with data categorization. Imagine you are looking at two pages - on the left is ‘Carpet Cleaning’ and on the right is ‘Carpet Drying’. Often times the categories do not have an obvious endpoint/startpoint. Someone who is doing data entry that sees an ad somewhere in the middle - what category will he chose? A lot of errors arise that way.

Next up: newspapers.

I’m finally back, and right on the cusp of exhaustion.

So - data.

Learned a lot of interesting stuff over the time. Some points to note (going to adopt this format for various topics):

• InfoUSA claims 14 million listings, but the online system only shows roughly 11.5 million - what gives?
• Acxiom rep threw out ‘19 million’ at me. Their official sales only claimed 15 million - disconnect?
• Amacai is mentioned, but seems to be staying afloat because of their parent company
• TrueLocal is out there, but they have multiple brands. Especially confusing is FranDat (listings of all franchises) vs BranDate (listing of all brands). Why not just merge them? Whats the definition of franchise vs brand. Is there overlap?
• Again mentioning TrueLocal, they claim 5 million URLs. Taking a high rough estimate of 15 million, are you telling me 33% of businesses have their own website? As a user - think of your own experiences. Searching for XXX online - did you find a URL? Color me skeptical
• Yahoo! claimed 22.5 million businesses. 22 million were local, and about 300k (my memory may be fuzzy) are regional-local (eg In-N-Out Burger is only in the west
• Quicken claimed 29 million businesses. Of them, 19 million are single-employee businesses.
• Quicken also claimed 6 million new businesses a year, 5.5-5.7 million fail (I wonder how many previously-established ones fail)
• Kudzu’s (owned by Cox) Atlanta site is nothing like their other sites. They buy meta-data for Atlanta that they do not for the rest of the cities
• There is a lot of meta-data services companies out there. Some of them are big fans of us, some of them not so much. We will be expanding into some other areas where we (again) let users contribute. This is an especially micro-local play, and might not even be a part of iBegin (superficially)
• Taxonomy databases are abound. They basically help build relationships between (seemingly) unrelated items. A simplistic one is where you define ‘furniture’ to include anything related to ‘chairs’ ‘couches’ ’sofas’ ‘bed frame’ etc. This is a huge gap that local search has right now, and improved taxonomy will help greatly. But will it happen soon? I’m leaning towards no
• There is no concept of accuracy. I might as well be asking their mother’s favorite prime number (answer: “no clue”)
• (potentially tipping my hat here) but a lot of work has to be done using census data. Demographics are key
• The rise of partnerships are accelerating. It is almost like newspapers are slightly transforming into conduits for users to express themselves, and other companies then provide technological poweress. It isn’t about raw data - it is about the access to that data (XML, pre-built solutions, etc)
• Yahoo! rep scoffed at San Diego Tribune’s usage of low-cost open source solutions. It actually grated my nerves.