A9 Yellow Pages are out, with pictures - Old concept, cool implementation

Many posts around about A9 releasing an interesting implementation of Yellow Pages functionality. First post I read was Om's, with some comments from Techdirt and Russ, and a full story from CNET. John Battelle then pointed to the story he wrote for Business 2.0.

As Russ mentioned for Spain, French yellow pages have had that feature for a while (here is one of my favorite restaurants in Paris, le Bistrot du Sommelier). The experiment actually started back in 1999, with 7 cities. The company which developed the technology is France-based SNV, which launched the concept back in 1994, and took two years to develop the coverage of Paris. The company was bought by Wanadoo (the ISP arm of France Telecom) in 2000. It then covered Madrid in 2001, and stopped there the European expansion.

So nothing new on the concept, but the implementation is quite nice. Key additions seem to be:

The granularity of picture shots (less than 10 feet from one picture to the next ?).

The fact that you can submit the "Best picture" for a given address. What is not clear to me is how they will sort out potential conflicts, but this idea of involving users in improving the quality of data is interesting.

The ability to add your own picture to an existing business, provided that an existing Amazon user. The moderation of such addition remains to be clarified.

The display of all shops on a street is also pretty cool.

Comments

[yair]

when will the first husbend find out his best friends car is parked infornt of his house in his home photo?
you can see license plates. jesus.

[Lucie Lee]

I didn't like the website. Too complicated to use and hard to find local listings...