Jesper Simonsen has announced that he has accepted a position in the management team of Heise Medien Gruppe as responsible for directory operations in Eastern Europe. He will, however, continue to co-organize the Yellow Pages TODAY! Workshops and Conferences, the next to take place 17 – 18 November 2010 in Copenhagen. 

Dave Morgan of Media Post Publications warns of a new threat to local media companies, such as local newspapers, yellow pages, radio or local TV. He believes that location-based Web services will take 20% to 25% of the annual revenue out of local media's current advertising base within four years. That money will instead be spent as promotion and marketing fees paid to these new location-based services or applications that run on top of them.

Last year Google launched a developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration that showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Now Goggle says that Wave has not seen the user adoption it would have liked. Google won’t continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but it will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. (Source: Google)

Bing has added a new layer to its Maps data to make them more attractive than Google’s maps. The new layer is from Open Street Maps, a free editable map of the whole world. This layer is a lot like the Wikipedia concept, where anyone can 'view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. By using location data collected by ordinary people and a variety of sources such as recordings from GPS devices, from free satellite imagery or simply from knowing an area very well, Open Street Map is said to be more detailed than maps offered by Google. Users' data gets uploaded to OpenStreetMap's central database from where it can be further modified, corrected and enriched by anyone who notices missing facts or errors about the area. Presently, it has more than 250,000 registered contributors. (Source: Search Engine Land)

Google is still jittery when it comes to China. After striking a deal with the Chinese government to remain active in the country and accept a certain amount of censorship – Google said for the first time on Thursday that its search and advertising services were being blocked. Later Google played down this interruption, saying that it s not so much a blockage as a miscalculation on its own part. The reported disruption cast a cloud over what had been seen as a victory for both sides, with the Chinese government renewing Google’s licence to operate just weeks ago. “Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage,” Google said. It appeared that although machines found a blockage, real people could access Google just like before. (Source: Financial Times)

Thomsonlocal.com has signed a three-year deal with Microsoft to become the first independent reseller of AdCenter, the pay-per-click offering for its Bing search engine.  The deal "will enable Thomson Local to provide businesses with enhanced geo-targeting capabilities, to match their adverts to location specific queries by Bing users," according to the directories company. Microsoft has been advertising Bing extensively since March in a bid to grow its 3% share of search engine queries. (Source: Media Week)

The boss of Dutch mobile operator KPN, which is also active in Belgium and Germany, said that in future, heavy users of mobile data, e.g. by extensively using the Web on their mobile phones, will in future have to pay more, as “sanity” returns to the mobile industry that had charged high fees for voice calls while offering unlimited data downloads for very modest fees. In the long run, data would be more important than voice, KNP said. One needs to differentiate between heavy users, light users and people in between and charge each group accordingly. Voice also is data, but it is a very light use of data. In five years 10 % of mobile phone use may be voice and 90 % data. People should then pay less for voice and more for data. (Source: Financial Times)

The Economist writes that economic uncertainty and faltering confidence of small and medium sized enterprises continued to depress revenues at British directory publisher Yell. Reporting a 10.6 per cent drop in first-quarter organic revenues, the directories publisher said it did not expect any significant improvement in either the second or third quarters of the year.

123people darf öffentlich im Internet verfügbare und frei zugängliche Bilder zur Personensuche verwenden. Das Hamburger Landgericht wies eine Klage ab, in der die Suchmaschine beschuldigt wurde, das Foto einer Frau unrechtmäßig anzuzeigen, da diese einer Veröffentlichung nicht zugestimmt hatte. „Hat der Abgebildete sein Foto nicht gegen den Zugriff von Personensuchmaschinen gesperrt und die Webseite für Suchmaschinen optimiert, ist von einer Einwilligung in die Veröffentlichung durch 123people.de auszugehen“, argumentierte das Gericht. Das auf 123people.de gezeigte Bild stammte von einer Firmen-Homepage. Dafür hatte die Klägerin einer Veröffentlichung des Bildes zugestimmt. Das Gericht bezeichnete die Klage als zulässig, aber unbegründet, heißt es in der Erläuterung zum Urteil.