One of the latest deals to get announced by YPG Canada was 2 days ago with FourSquare, “Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Announces Strategic Agreement with foursquare“. Over the past 48-hours, I have definitely been receiving lots of positive feedback, but a few people have asked me the question – what does this specifically mean for YPG advertisers? Before explaining how this benefits YPG Advertisers, let me explain the deal itself. I am going to grossly simplify this, but in a nutshell, harmonization of data really means connecting the IDs of venue’s listed in FourSquare.com to venue’s listed on YP.ca. Once the IDs are connected, then YPG and any developer using YellowAPI.com can use 1 ID to interface with 2 APIs. Further to our announcement last year with Twitter, in face, usage of the YPG ID is also mapped to venue’s within Twitter, check out “Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Partners with Twitter“.
Why is this important for YPG advertisers? In a nutshell, it means more leads and more business. How is this you might ask? Two things – 1) with the synchronization of venue IDs, you have a scalable way to push future enhanced content to multiple external sources and 2) by adding more value to YellowAPI.com, ie) making developers lives easier, we will see more innovation in the local space which means as more and more applications are created to fulfill user needs, more and more leads will be delivered to local advertisers. In this scenario, the user wins (they have more choices of how they want to interact with local), the developer wins (they can focus on innovative apps), the local advertiser wins (they are getting more business to their location) and YPG wins (as we fulfill our commitment to drive more leads to our advertisers).
In April, I posted the Eco-System in Canada of YellowPages.ca which garnered alot of attention and mostly people commenting to me that they did not realize YPG was involved with so many partners. Here is the updated Eco-System slide, now with FourSquare:
To conclude, the past 48-hours is bring more attention to YPG’s data initiatives. Here is a round-up of the stories covering this announcement.
AboutFourSquare.com – YellowAPI becomes first Canadian partner for foursquare’s venue harmonization project
TechCrunch – Yellow Pages Teams Up With Foursquare For “Venue Harmonization Project”
Kin Lane – Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Joins Foursquare to Harmonize Data
Scribbal – Foursquare, Canada’s Yellow Pages Announce Strategic Partnership
Techplz – Yellow Pages and Foursquare team up in mutually beneficial deal
WashingtonPost – Yellow Pages Teams Up With Foursquare For “Venue Harmonization Project”
Direction Informatique – Groupe Pages Jaunes placera votre entreprise sur foursquare
Next Montreal – Yellow Pages Teams Up With Foursquare to Share Data
Kelsey Group – YPG Canada and Foursquare Team Up for Venue Harmonization
Tech Vibes – Yellow Pages Group announces Strategic Agreement with Foursquare
TD Waterhouse – Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Announces Strategic Agreement With foursquare
If you know of other locations, please post a comment and I will add to the list.
Hi Darby,
Whatever became of the data harmonization project? Looking at the foursquare documentation I don’t see any reference to YPG.
Hi Adam – data harmonization is complete and we will start to integrate foursquare data on yellowpages.ca as well as our mobile applications shortly. In terms of public release we are in the process of loading the ID’s on our system that will then allow developers using yellowapi.com to capture the 4sq id and if they have a dev account with them you will be able to mash up data. Hope this answers your question.