Business listings provider Localeze announced today that it will provide online business listings to Savvi, a savings network. Localeze business listings are standardized across its list of approximately 150 local search platform partners, including search engines, online directories, social networks, mobile apps and personal navigation devices. Savvi offers member-sourced and shared local deals in addition to discussion forums and advice from its community of bloggers. We spoke to Savvi CEO Darin Gilson today, who outlined the company’s strategy to build a “robust affiliate network.” Savvi works with local, national and online merchants. Its platform integrates online, mobile and community portals.

Savvi members receive cash rewards for member and merchant referrals, in addition to online savings and special deals featured in the Savvi store.

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TargusInfo, a major direct marketing tools provider and the parent company of Localeze, a “Big 3″ provider of business listings, will be acquired by NeuStar for $650 million in cash. The deal enhances NeuStar’s positioning as a leader in authentication services across the Internet and voice networks, whether fixed-line, cable or mobile. Authentication is expected to dramatically grow with the boom in digital services such as movie downloads. Both companies are based in Northern Virginia.

Localeze’s listings business is not the biggest factor in the acquisition, but the division’s focus on enhanced SMB and franchise profiles will likely fit into the mix. TargusInfo is perhaps best known in the direct marketing world for its lead gen scoring techniques, which evaluate the likelihood that a lead will turn into a sale. TargusInfo is also well known for its Caller ID verification service, among other real time, on demand information and analytics services. It helps process more than 100 billion annual transactions around the world.

TargusInfo posted $149 million in revenues for the year ended Sept. 30. Combined, the two companies earned $732 million.

“The people who know both of us understand that billions of times every day Neustar and TARGUSinfo flawlessly help people find each other, connect to one another and share.,” notes Neustar CEO Lisa Hook in a blog post. “By combining TARGUSinfo’s leadership in Caller ID and online information services, such as lead verification and scoring, with Neustar’s strengths in network information services, including address inventory management, network security, and marketing analytics, we will be able to greatly extend Neustar’s ability to provide its customers services based on unique, non-replicable datasets.”

Localeze President Jeff Beard told us that “at the end of the day, it is all about providing real-time intelligence about identity. The vast majority of that is consumer identity,” he says. Beard adds that Neustar’s interest in TargusInfo is on several levels, including local search. Major tech companies such as IBM, Intel and others are all getting more involved in local search as part of their broader activity, he notes.

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Merchant data sent in by fans of merchants and from merchants themselves is becoming increasingly important. Can it be relied on as a main source, or should it only complement listing data from the big three providers — InfoGroup, Acxiom and Localeze?

We talked to Pankaj Mathur, InfoGroup vice president of business development, about it. Not surprisingly, he has mixed feelings. It is certainly useful and cost effective, and from an SEM perspective, there is sometimes the feeling that “more [data elements] is better,” he says.

But he warns that accuracy and reliability are more important than ever before, especially with mobile phones that can send people to bad locations. Also looming is the sense that merchants are incentivized to misrepresent themselves so that they can boost their search rankings or be found under lucrative-but-wrong categories (i.e., cab companies under “airports”).

InfoGroup (and probably the other leaders in the space) instead take the “trust but verify” approach to merchant data. The company receives 10,000 to 15,000 submissions per month from multiple partners such as OnStar, Yahoo and AOL. “We find that about 50 percent of these submissions are false positive like duplicates or incorrect information, “says Mathur.

In a newly issued article, Mathur goes into more detail about the importance of the duplicates issue. In franchise corporations, for instance, there may be lists of storefronts within marketing departments, operations departments and accounting deparrtments. They don’t always overlap with LBS (location-based services) requests, he notes.

Moreover, retailers often neglect to delete or change storefront information — something that creates a special mess when companies such as Starbucks close hundreds of units throughout the country. Mathur suggests one-step updaters (such as his company’s “Express Update”) are a partial answer. In the meantime, the validated information from the leading listing providers remains in the driver’s seat.

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