YPG Canada and Foursquare Team Up for Venue Harmonization

YPG Canada announced today that it will join Foursquare’s venues project. This will provide Foursquare with the 1.5 million business listings in YPG’s YellowAPI. Existing YellowAPI developers will conversely have one-stop access to Foursquare’s API.

The venues project is meant to improve Foursquare’s listings and its API. For YPG, this move boosts its efforts to support application development in Canada through its own YellowAPI. This distributes its its brand, listings and advertisers into the LBS developer ecosystem.

This is admittedly easier in the less competitive Canadian market, but has positioned YPG well. Tying up with Foursquare should further solidify this and distribute its listings and advertisers in ways that have branding and/or advertiser retention implications.

YPG is also serving a kind of “public service” in the venue harmonization that continues to be a challenge in the growth of disparate LBS services. This should provide some branding and PR lift … not to mention “name in lights” publicity that results from any Foursquare partnership.

YPG will be the first Canadian company to join the venue harmonization project. Others currently participating include The New York Times, New York Magazine, Thrillist and MenuPages.