Yellow Pages News Roundup

Catching up on some notable recent announcements/developments in the global Yellow Pages industry:

Today, R.H. Donnelley announced a partnership with Tribune Media Services to provide movie-related content on DexKnows.com. From the press release:

DexKnows.com is using TMS movie data to provide information for films playing in more than 6,000 theaters across the U.S. Fandango ticketing links are seamlessly integrated into the content, allowing consumers to quickly purchase tickets in advance. For consumers on the go, movie information and ticket purchasing is also now available on the DexKnows.com mobile site (m.dexknows.com) and app, the latter of which is available for download for the iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, and other smart phones.

The Swedish publisher Eniro, which conducted a rights offering in June that was 99.3 percent subscribed, has announced a deal with digital map provider NAVTEQ to distribute Eniro’s local content through NAVTEQ maps in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Poland. NAVTEQ maps are distributed online, via mobile phones and mobile navigation devices. The Eniro content will be available in NAVTEQ’s third-quarter database release.

Yell Group has named Rorie Devine as its new U.K. chief technology officer. Devine joins Yell from Bwin, an online gaming company.

A New Zealand start-up building an online directory of local service providers has clashed with Yellow Pages Group (NZ) by claiming it has the country’s largest directory of local service providers. Yellow Pages has challenged this claim and is demanding that Tradesmen Direct withdraw the claim, made on its Web site.

Tradesmen also plans to launch print versions of its online directory, beginning next year in Nelson, New Zealand, using the brand Go Pages-Trade Pages.

Social media meets Yellow Pages is quietly taking hold in Europe. Tupalo, an Austrian-American social media start-up in which European Directories has invested, is expanding into the Dutch market. Tupalo is gearing up to compete with Qype and Yelp, both established social media players with pan-European designs of their own.