Category: Maps

Egypt Yellow Pages Ecosystem

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There is no question that local search is now one of the core services of many web and mobile applications offered today. Think about the big market players such as Google and Facebook, both of them offer “places”. Social media check-in apps such as Foursquare, verticals like hotel review sites (Tripadvisor),  restaurant reviews sites, food delivery sites, map providers such as Navteq, or even directory assistance services offered by mobile operators, all their services are based on a venue database. If they don’t get it right there is very little point in offering their services.

Think about the effort and cost needed to maintain your own database. Thousands of businesses open, close, or relocate every month. This is the opportunity where what is offered by Yellow Pages is exactly the need of all these applications and services.

Egypt Yellow Pages is no exception, the integration between Egypt Yellow Pages database and their partners is becoming a key strength for many of these applications making use of the most complete business database in Egypt covering over 220,000 listings and 170,000 map locations.

Here is the ECO-SYSTEM of Egypt Yellow Pages

Egypt Yellow Pages ECHO-SYSTEM

I’ll go through the details of each of these systems and partnerships in future posts.

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Egypt Yellow Pages becomes the official data provider for e-government

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In a huge step that will shape the Egyptian information community, the e-Government has chosen Egypt Yellow Pages to be the official partner who will provide many service to the government portal including providing information of different government  entities contact information and map locations.This is a result of the  cooperation agreement Yellow Pages signed with the Ministry of State for Administrative Development under the patronage of Prof. Dr. Ahmed Darwish, Minister of Administrative Development.

With more than 33 ministries in Egypt, it was almost impossible to get a phone number of a governmental office or organization, even if you go to the website of that ministries most probably you would find the information you are looking for and if you did it will be likely outdated. Now, not only this contact information will be available and up to date, but also maps will be displayed showing their locations and you can filter by city and area to select the one that is nearest to you.

e-government new maps serivice
e-government new maps

service

Egypt Yellow Pages have been known very well from both consumers and businesses in Egypt as the local search provider that provides the information about any business in Egypt with a database that is growing each day to reach now more than 140,000 listings and increasing. Now having Yellow Pages create and update the full  content for the Egyptian government  is an important milestone in the history of the company, and from my opinion and without exaggeration it is an important milestone in the history of Egypt as it strengthen the link between the citizens and the government, something the government is trying to achieve but with little success so far.

The cooperation agreement also involved linking the new mapping service to applications and forms currently available in the portal. The service is currently available for over 72 services provided by the following authorities: Real Estate and Documentation Authority, the Egyptian Electricity Authority, Directorates of Education and Directorates of Health Affairs, with more government authorities to be added. You can access the government maps section by clicking here.


Navteq & Turkey Yellow Pages Event Photos

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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 Teams

Navteq and Turkey Yellow Pages Partnership

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

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

Press Conference of Navteq and 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

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Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia

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.

Nokia Mobile Search

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…

Yellow Pages Maps vs Google Maps

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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

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

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.