YellowAPI.com Celebrates Digital Innovation with Launch of a Redesigned Site and New Blog

MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwire - March 20, 2012) - Yellow Pages Group (YPG) has launched a redesigned YellowAPI.com website for the company's public application programming interface (API). Since its initial launch in late 2010, YellowAPI.com has embodied YPG's digital leadership and gained industry recognition. It has enrolled over 1,700 software developers, who have worked on new digital applications using YPG's business database, which features 1.5 million business listings and is the largest in Canada. Simultaneously, YellowAPI.com also has launched a blog to help feed its ongoing dialogue with developers. This "API Fanboy" blog complements the newly redesigned YellowAPI.com website in fostering strong relationships with the developer community and in helping developers reach their innovation potential.

"In a relatively short time, YellowAPI.com's Places API has enabled us to accomplish a great deal in terms of driving digital innovation and in providing greater exposure to our advertisers across multiple channels," said Nicolas Gaudreau, Vice-President, Digital & Print Media at Yellow Pages Group. "Additionally, with the soon to be available Deals API, developers will have access to the best geo-localized deals and coupon data using one of Canada's largest deals database, which will provide even more effective promotional opportunities for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses."

Since its launch in late 2010, YellowAPI.com has sparked the creation of 35 web and mobile applications that leverage YellowAPI's Places API, which regroups Canada's largest and most accurate business listings data. Among them, Yellow Pages TV is an application recently developed using the Places API data to allow viewers to access, share, and map business listings on their television. YPG has also signed seven Canadian start-ups, providing them with seed-funding under its YellowAPI Developer Program to support further mobile and web-based innovation. In addition, YPG has sponsored and hosted a series of "hack-a-thons" across Canada under the banner of YellowAPI.com. These competitive events fuel digital innovation by gathering developers and encouraging them to build a viable web or mobile application using a given API within a set period of time.

An agreement signed in the past year with location-based social-networking site foursquare means developers on the YellowAPI.com platform will soon be able to pull foursquare data - such as check-ins, tips and badges - directly from YellowAPI.com to enhance their own apps. YPG is the first Canadian company to participate in foursquare's venue harmonization project, which seeks to improve the accuracy of business locations stored in the social-networking site's database.

In that same vein, another YPG partnership signed with Twitter in 2011 is set to use YellowAPI.com to make Canadian business listings available to the social network's users, who would then be able to tag their tweets using YPG business locations. YPG is the first and only content provider in Canada to have formed such an agreement with Twitter.

"Social-networking sites like foursquare and Twitter recognize the value of integrating with YellowAPI.com for access to rich, accurate local business listings, which has meant several industry 'firsts' from a collaborative perspective," stated Gaudreau.

The rapidly expanding list of applications that leverage YellowAPI.com listings range from leading consumer brands, such as Yahoo! Mobile Canada and Procter and Gamble's Iams pet resource app, to creations by local start-ups, such as Reservely, an app that makes online reservations to any restaurant in Canada, and Rendezview, which locates two friends who want to meet and chooses a point in the middle.

For more information about YellowAPI.com including interviews with some of the app developers enrolled in the YellowAPI Developer Program, watch this video and consult the "API Fanboy" blog here.

To read more about YellowAPI's initiatives since its launch, consult our LifeinYellow.ca blog post here.

About Yellow Pages Group

Yellow Pages Group (YPG) is Canada's leading performance media and marketing solutions company. The company serves approximately 340,000 local businesses through its nation-wide sales force of 1,200 media consultants. YPG also caters to the country's largest national agencies and advertisers through Mediative, its digital advertising and marketing solutions division. YPG is held by Yellow Media Inc. YLO which owns and operates some of Canada's leading properties and publications including Yellow Pages(TM) directories, YellowPages.ca(TM), Canada411.ca(TM), and RedFlagDeals.com. The Yellow Media Inc. network of online properties reaches over 9 million unique visitors monthly. For more information: www.ypg.com.