Last November, Microsoft launched its much-awaited Live Search Maps, which offers users three-dimensional and photo-realistic views of selected urban cityscapes across the United States.

According to Microsoft, the free online service will provide users with a fresh look at many landmarks and locations, as well as local listings, ratings and reviews, and driving directions to help people easily find, discover, plan and share relevant location information.”

Live Search Maps 3-D rendering of New York City (its most recent addition, along with Ottawa, Canada) will initially provide aerial views of Times Squares, Central Park, and other iconic spots, along with Yellow Pages listings, location and contact information, consumer ratings and reviews for New York City businesses. Real-time traffic incident and driving directions are also incorporated into the maps. Users will be able to create custom maps and lists of places for their own use, or to share with others.

Though this new technology has elicited a lot of oohs and aahs since it was launched, many still consider 3-D mapping to be a novelty in this day and age, rather than a useful, everyday tool.

According to an article in ITWire.com, 3-D mapping is really about future applications that are interesting to contemplate. Think of them as more practical versions of Second Life, metaverses that will offer lots of content, e-commerce opportunities (i.e., Travel) and even social networking in the near future, as connection speeds improve. And these 3-D worlds will play well on TV, as the Internet increasingly makes its way into the living room.

Though it could have some useful local search relevance in the near future, 3-D mapping generally regarded as being ahead of its time, because its full capabilities aren’t maximized with average broadband connection speeds.

When broadband speeds, processing power, and graphic chips catch up to 3-D mapping technologies, it could see greater adoption for both the fantastical Second Life-type experiences, and more practical local search and 3-D mapping applications, wrote Mike Boland of the Kelsey Group. Watching them converge in different ways will be interesting, and will impact the standards that emerge for the next generation of local search.

According to John Kelsey’s blog (blog.kelseygroup.com), the Yellow Pages is enjoying an optimistic wind blowing from Europe. He was referring to this year’s annual European Association of Directory Publishers (EADP) conference in Barcelona, in which Directories 2.0 was at the forefront of discussions.

Attended by 240 participants from 29 countries, the interactive program included topics such as advertising trends, UGC, blogging and local search, market research and sales, and marketing. The main focus was on today’s changing marketplace for directory publishing, specifically the next generation of interactive services and the evolution of online search and mobile access.

Most of the event’s speakers which included Ana Garcia Fau, CEO of Yell Publicidad, and Cornel Riklin, CEO of European Directories considered the Yellow Pages to be growth businesses.

Fau, who was the keynote speaker of the conference, described to the audience gathered at the Hotel Arts how the directory industry has evolved from viewing interactive products as competition to embracing everything about alternative delivery systems. By recognizing these alternative systems, many European directory publishers were able to generate higher revenues from online products, which allowed them to truly diversify their total portfolio.

Marc Tellier, President and CEO of Yellow Pages Group of Canada,predicted a new era in directory advertising that will be reached through an industry-wide goal of creating value for our customers.

Now that the Internet has become a solid platform with numerous innovations driving its ongoing development, it presents a threat from disruption of traditional directory publisher business models.

But within the chaos of disruption lies great opportunity. Many Yellow Pages publishers have developed competitive online products, while others have stepped up to the challenge ahead by enhancing and moving their printed products forward.

The eccentric creator of popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Jimbo Wales, plans to launch a search engine that will rival Google in the fourth quarter of 2007. Those are bold predictions from Wales, but it’s hard to underestimate the man who founded the sixth-largest website in the world.

The new community search engine, which he calls Search Wikia, is an effort to create an open-source competitor to Google where a Wikipedia-style universe of users rates websites and sorts the search results. The concept is to combine search with the community features of user-editable search results made possible by using wiki technology.

And unlike Google, Search Wikia plans to publish the design of its algorithm (the mathematical formula that determines what website comes top of a search). Wales likes to emphasize that Wikia’s inner workings will be transparent to everyone. If the search process was open to inspection, he feels that users would put more trust in the results they receive.

In interviews, Wales has stated that Search Wikia will be an “open, thoughtful search engine, one which will have better quality and more thoughtful results than its rivals. Like the volunteer-created Wikipedia, Wikia is an attempt to take the open-source, community-based model to profitability and broader public acceptance.
In the April issue of Fast Company magazine, which did a cover story on Wales (Why Is This Man Smiling? by Alan Deutschman), Wales said Wikia will be the search engine that changes everything…. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.” He envisions people intervening to improve on the machine-generated results that we’ve become accustomed to.

Fast Company also cites a few statistics in Wikia’s favor: “Only 21 percent of professionals always feel that search engines understand their queries.” And only 10 percent “always find exactly what they want on their first attempt.” In another study by French linguistics scholar Jean V’ronis, 28 percent of users felt that all the search results were “totally useless.”

Google can sleep well at night for the time being, Wales stated in recent interview with CNET News.com. We are trying to build a full open-source search engine of high quality. If that works, then Google will have a lot of competitors in search. But if they dominate the ad business and treat those competitors as partners for ad sales, then we will look back on the days when we thought Google was a search engine instead of the central ad marketplace of the planet and chuckle.

Many regard Wales ambitious project to be a long shot, but, then again, who would have bet on a little startup company called Google in the late 1990s?

A Sneak Peek into IPTV During the Drilling Down on Local 07 conference, which was held last March in Santa Clara, California, attendees were given a sneak peek into Yellowpages.com’s IPTV Internet Yellow Pages channel.

PTV (Internet Protocol Television) is a system where a digital television service is delivered by using Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure, which may include delivery by a broadband connection. Instead of using traditional broadcast and cable formats, television content is received by the viewer through the technologies used for computer networks.

At the Silicon Valley summit, guests were given a glimpse of its first screen shots  a colorful video service that enables users to select and browse by popular categories, with details of nearby businesses also provided, along with mapping.

The service can also be browsed by name but isn’t ideally suited to the task. Advertisers, meanwhile, can set up microsites, wrote Peter Krasilovsky of the Kelsey Group in a recent report. It wasn’t clear from the screenshots how much of the service will be video oriented, and how much will be static.

According to Matt Crowley, CMO of Yellowpages.com, the service (which is already set for Channel 97) won’t be available until 2011. [Though it is already] built and running at the office, he added. Crowley emphasized that the IPTV service is not really a standalone product, but part of a three-screen approach for Yellowpages.com that encompasses mobile, PC, and TV.

From a sales channel perspective, Crowley stated that SMEs will have an opportunity to use the interactive television orientation of the service to order from an online ad store. He cited research showing that 35% of SMEs would be interested in such a self-service ordering process.