A lot of companies are angling to supply this information and profit off the resulting data through advertising.
White Pages the Seattle based provider of business and personal contact information, is one such firm that views mobile and local services as its future. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Nakao says the company, which expects to generate $60 million in revenue this year, believes half of its projected growth will come from mobile. In 2010, WhitePages’ mobile business grew 70%. This year, the company anticipates growth will increase to 80%. It says its mobile apps, which come in iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry versions, have been downloaded 8 million times to date.
Location information matters because it pays well. A good chunk about 30% of WhitePages’ mobile revenue comes from geo-targeted mobile ads on its various applications. Nakao says these location-based mobile ads pay 10 times the rate of standard ads on the company’s network because advertisers believe they are more likely to bring in business.
WhitePages is still hunting for ways to keep growing through local and mobile products. One major new campaign is an online contact management service called Hiya, which it is launching on Thursday. The service, which is accessible via an iPhone application or the Web, claims it is the first location-aware mobile address book.
On the surface, Hiya functions much like a phone’s built-in address book. Listings include a contact’s name, phone number and email address. Hiya is designed to go beyond typical address books, however, by making physical addresses an integral part of the service. Users can call upon WhitePages’ database of 200 million listings to fill in this information or ping their contacts to submit this information themselves.
By tapping both into the phone’s GPS and these addresses, Hiya aims to be more useful than other location-based services like Foursquare. Users who finds themselves in an unfamiliar city – on a business trip, for instance – can search for contacts that live or work nearby and easily map out directions to their homes or offices, says product manager Amanda Bishop. “You can do some of this on Foursquare, but your contacts have to be on Foursquare too,” she explains.
One twist on the typical geo-location services model is that WhitePages plans to provide business recommendations based on address book popularity. Nakao says the company will assume that local businesses that have been saved as contacts by many Hiya users are well-liked and trustworthy. A Hiya listing is “a great, implied recommendation,” he notes. Eventually, that data could be sold as market research or be used to sell Hiya ads.
The idea of sifting through someone’s contacts to figure out the local favorite restaurant or plumber may alarm some people. To succeed, Hiya will have to overcome skepticism about its privacy implications. Many people may not submit their data to the service, even when asked to do so by friends and family. Users, in turn, may not take advantage of all of Hiya’s features, fearing that their friends and family’s contact data will be misused.
Bishop says WhitePages studied earlier attempts at “networked” address books that stumbled, such as Plaxo, which developed a reputation for spamming people following its 2002 introduction. “We have some of the same features as Plaxo, but are less aggressive,” she contends. The company says it will store Hiya contacts in a separate database from its general listings and won’t bother people unless specifically asked to – by users compiling mailing lists for holiday cards or wedding invitations, for instance.
Though Hiya will launch as a free app without ads, WhitePages plans to monetize it once it has developed a following. Nakao declined to specify how that would happen but compared the process to the evolution of the company’s iPhone app. Following its initial 2008 release, the app was revised to incorporate ads (location-based as well as regular display ads and sponsored listings) and premium services. WhitePages also offers a caller ID service for Android phones that was initially free, but later converted to a paid app.
