YPG Canada Upgrades iPhone App
Yellow Pages Group Canada announced today that it has released a new version of its popular iPhone app, including a new interface and, most notably, video. Other features (some existing) include:
– Full access to merchant content, including video and photo montages
– Business, person and reverse phone number lookup
– Save to your favourites (My Favs) and/or address book
– Share listing results with others via e-mail/SMS
– Local proximity-based search using GPS & Maps
– Direct connect to Voice Search (no charge usage)
The video integration follows AT&T YPMobile’s similar move and will likewise pull from the publisher’s growing library of SMB videos. As we see greater smartphone penetration, mobile Web use and mobile local search volume, SMB video’s growth on the mobile device could follow behind its growth online.
Although video is a useful tool to qualify local business decisions, the volume of video consumption won’t be as high as online. Mobile obviously isn’t as conducive to media-rich research due to the screen size and the immediacy under which mobile local searches often occur.
But it’s still a good integration whose reception will be determined by the moving target that is mobile user behavior. We’re glad to see publishers that experiment, so long as they’re not doing it “just to be there.” This doesn’t appear to be the case and we’ll talk directly to YPG next week at our Directional Media Strategies conference. More to come.
