Mohamed Salah: Local Search, Yellow Pages and Web Technologies

Last week we hosted a press conference at our premises in Maadi to announce to the media the launch of the strategic partnership between Egypt Yellow Pages and Otlob.com the online food delivery website in Egypt owned by LINKdotNET. More than 40 reporters, journalists, PR,  IT Specialists attended the conference that introduced the new food delivery service on Yellow.com.eg

Click here to try out the new food delivery service in more than 380 restaurants

Here is the video report of the event:

Here are some event photos:

From left to right Mohamed Salah, Marc Lambert, Ahmed Eraqi and Walid El Saadany

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Press Conference

Reporters at the event

Many reporters, journalists and IT Specialists attended the press conference

Some photos for the joint press conference between Navteq, Nokia and Turkey Yellow Pages to announce signing the strategic partnership deal through which Turkey Yellow Pages will provide business listings information of more than 500,000 listings to Navteq.

Navteq and Turkey Yellow Pages Partnership

Presentation by Göktuğ Okan Oğuz - General Manager of eBusiness - Turkey Yellow Pages

Press Conference of Navteq and Yellow Pages

After all,  I want to say that the big winner from this partnership is the large user base in Turkey who will benefit from combining the maps of Navteq and the data of Yellow Pages

Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia

Turkey Yellow Pages signed a 5 year strategic deal to supply business listing information to NAVTEQ and Nokia global mapping platforms. This is the kind of partnerships that the giant mapping provider Navteq and Nokia are looking for. In these days, the mapping technologies have reached a new level, GPS became a major component in any mobile phone, not less important than a camera. Most new cars are already equipped with in-car navigation systems. Detailed maps are now available for almost anywhere in the planet. Without a detailed map a GPS would be useless.

So the equation that stood for some time was:

GPS + Detailed Maps = Know your way

Now this equation has totally changed, having access to hundreds of thousands of locations for hotels, restaurants, shops, gas stations, hospitals, …. definitely means much more. It means you do not need to worry any more about finding a place you want to go to.. All what you need is to decide what you want to do, and the where or how is not a problem anymore.

The new equations is

GPS + Detailed Maps + Business Listing Locations = Find your destination

It is so exciting now that Turkey Yellow Pages data will power up Nokia OviMaps which were offered for free a few days ago.  Nokia OviMaps is now one of the most convenient mobile maps that you could use, not only because it is free now, it’s technology has changed from raster images into vector maps so the application can be downloaded locally to your mobile from Ovi App Store, and it’s size is no more than 8 MB. This includes all the maps installed on your local mobile, no need to keep downloading images from the internet.

Back in late 2006, when we developed our Nokia Mobile Search plug-in for Egypt, UAE and KSA Yellow Pages we were so delighted about it, it was a breakthrough for the use of the mobiles in our daily life to find a restaurant or a hotel on the move. One and half years later Nokia decided to drop support for their Mobile Search applications. Their insights were toward mobile maps. Now here comes OviMaps, the new amazing free Nokia mobile mapping platform and again powered by Yellow Pages, the most trusted local search provider as always.

So stay tuned for the upcoming updates from OviMaps which Turkey Yellow Pages will power up its data soon…

It does not take a marketing expert to know that the advertising campaign by Telecom Egypt is pretty much “weired”. They are offering prizes if you pay your bill on time! Is it some kind of fast cash grab or aiming to  increasing loyalty of the customers? I don’t think it is the second one, i would only be loyal to a Telco company if they include me in a point collection program, which they don’t have.

Surprisingly enough, it seems that the campaign worked,  the reason i know this is that their online bill inquiry service could not handle all the incoming requests. It has been down for almost 1 week.

Telecom Egypt bill inquiry service down

Now if you try to hit their website, you get this error message:

Telecom Egypt bill inquiry service still down

One questions i get a lot about yellow.com.eg maps is what maps are you using? People see the Google map on our website so they think we are using Google maps data. This is not correct. 

What we are using is google maps API for the GUI. However, the data is compiled by us, what we do is geocoding our database. i.e. specifying the exact latitude and longitude for each listing we have. This sounds like a tough job, actually it is but we are performing very well in doing it. 

I guess it’s logical to ask why we are doing all this effort. The answer can be found if you visit Google Maps and try to find a restaurant in Egypt and if you visit Egypt Yellow Pages website 

On Google maps searching for La Bodega will produce 7 or 8 results, some of them might be correct and some are not. This is because the data source is the user generated content, which is not correct in many cases. 

La Bodega on Google Maps

on Yellow.com.eg when you search for La Bodega, you get one and only one map location, the map location is accurate and is geocoded by our local search team. If we are not sure about a map location, then we do not enter it, if you see a map location online this means the location is accurate. 

La Bodega on Yellow.com.eg

click here to see La Bodega restaurant profile page 

The nice thing about having our geocoded database is not only the accuracy, but also the flexibility of using any maps for the GUI, we have tried both Google maps and Microsoft virtual earth (now known as Bing maps), Google maps has proven so far superior in Egypt.

Youtube decided this year to announce their 2009 statistics to the public, the following are the top 5 videos:

1. The Inspiring: Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent

Anything in life is possible if you just try hard enough and never give up your dreams

2. The funny innocent: David After Dentist

This boy is high, he thinks he has 2 fingers!!

3. Pure Happiness: Wedding Dance

Fun People

Another year has come and gone, i’m taking a moment here to look back at what happened in 2009, what people want in Egypt, what they are looking for and interested in.

Saying goodbye to 2009 and welcome to 2010, this is what people are interested in

Top 10 searches in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

Hotels remain in number 1 like 2008, Restaurants jump from 4th position to second position, Schools comes in the third place while Banks drop 2 places to be in the 4th place.

Cars move out from the top 10 and Pharmacies enter in the 10th position.

Most popular businesses in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

As for the businesses, HP retains its first place for the second year, DHL and Western Union comes in second and third places. Followed by Telco companies Vodafone and Raya, as for banks CIB jumps this year above HSBC, and finally cafes and fast food restaurants appear for the first time in the top 10 list: Cilantro, KFC followed by Pizza Hut in the 10th place.

Prefered visitor language for www.yellow.com.eg in 2009

One more interesting fact is that Arabic version of www.yellow.com.eg is getting more attention, usage has increased from 40% in 2008 to 45.8% in 2009 almost reaching the English. This is a direct result of enhancing the arabic search logic which now produces better and much more relevant results.

2009 was just a great year for Egypt Yellow Pages. 2010 will hopefully be even better, we will keep doing our best to serve our visitors and enhance their experience.

Merry Xmas and Happy new year to everyone

The first 4G network will be launched in Sweden and Norway early 2010. It’s speed is gonna be approaching 100 mbits/sec, the interesting news is that they haven’t invented a handset yet that works on 4G, so users will only be able to access the network using a USB modem and a laptop!

Eventually, they will make a handset but what does this tell us, broadband internet access from a cellular network being available for computers before mobiles? it tells us what it is really gonna be used for, i mean what’s the importance of this high speed on a mobile device? are you going to install torrents or emule on your mobile and start downloading movies? of course not… but imagine what would this speed mean to an internet user from his computer.

In my opinion the main source that is gonna drive revenues for mobile networks is the data service. It’s not the voice or SMS services any more. Today i can talk and send free SMS’s to my 400 colleagues at EYP for free as a part of our enterprise lines. The time is now over for anyone who pays 1000+ LE for their mobile bill, as you can now pay 300 LE and talk almost unlimited (2700 minutes per month).

Welcome to the new era of mobile broadband service!