Last March 17, Yellowpages.com announced a multiyear distribution deal with Microsoft. This month, Yellowpages.com’s local listings and advertisers will begin appearing across Microsoft properties, including, MSN Yellowpages, MSN Search, Live Search and Maps.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, according to a Kelsey Group report. Typically, however, these distribution deals involve a minimum guaranteed payment in exchange for traffic guarantees, Matt Booth of Kelsey wrote. The top payment on traffic referrals is usually capped. The Idearc deal, which this deal replaces, was rumored to be worth more than $20 million per year to Microsoft. We would therefore expect the AT&T deal to be within that range.

Booth also believes that the Yellowpages.com announcement is more bad news for Idearc, Microsofts current local provider. On top of the distribution loss, Idearc recently had a string of high-profile executive departures that include: two CEOs, the CFO, the chief legal officer and the president of the Internet group. The company also reported lower than expected earnings weighed down by heavy debt service. Finally, it also means that Idearc reps will face off against Yellowpages.com reps touting valuable logos in their sales kits.

The Microsoft deal means AT&T has now closed exclusive distribution agreements with all the major portals (AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!). The company also has a reseller agreement with Google.

Yellowpages.com CEO Charles Stubbs expects the MS deal to add an incremental 35 million monthly searches on top of 125 million currently reported. Stubbs was pleased that this deal brings the company even more reach across all 50 states.

What’s the point of specifically mentioning all 50 states? Yellowpages.com has been aggressively adding white space sales reps, Booth wrote. We estimate the company has added more than 1,000 Internet sales personnel over the past year. These reps predominately sell in locales where Idearc operates print and online. From AT&Ts perspective, this means that all sales are truly incremental dollars with little fear of print cannibalization.

Watch out for a more detailed analysis of the deal in the Kelsey Group Advisory.

Here’s a bit of amusing Yellow Pages news from another corner of the world. Egypt Yellow Pages the official publisher of Yellow Pages branded products in Egypt announced last March 31 that it had nearly exhausted its entire current print run of its 2007/08 Yellow Pages print directories, the Cairo, Alexandria, Industrial Areas, Delta & North Coast edition and the Sinai & Red Sea edition.

Marc Lambert, Managing Director of Egypt Yellow Pages attributed Egypt’s appetite for the company’s products to a flourishing economy and a well structured marketing campaign educating the residents of Egypt just how easy it is to find a business and service using the Yellow Pages. Lambert also added Having a well thought out distribution plan has really allowed us to deliver maximum return on investment for our advertisers.

With nearly 100% of the quarter million Yellow Pages print directories now in people’s hands, homes and businesses throughout Egypt, Yellow Pages directories will continue to facilitate the buying and selling of virtually any product or service available in Egypt, their press release stated.

Year after year the demand for our print directories keeps growing and growing, commented Engie Ali, Distribution Manager for Egypt Yellow Pages. Due to such phenomenal directory demand we will be printing 30% more directories in our next print run. This means an additional 75,000 directories to be added to the print order in 2008. The combined distribution for the coming year will now be 325,000 Yellow Pages directories.

The company also stated that they have no more directories in stock for distribution for the next few months, a clear sign of success for Egypt YP, it seems. All 325,000 copies of the new 2008/2009 Egypt Yellow Pages print directories will be ready for distribution starting June 2008.

It’s always wonderful to hear how the print edition is faring well in a far removed area of the world, from Egypt at that. But I also have a nagging feeling that their press release may also be a brilliant PR move to underprint directories and get people vying for the few that were printed. Cool!

Someone has been following in the giant’s foot steps. Yell.com, the UK equivalent of Yellow Pages, recently launched netReach, which is quite similar to Google AdSense. Their advertising syndication product is aimed at online media owners and Yell.coms advertiser base.

The services combines Yell.coms content with filtering techniques, and is designed to prevent inappropriate adverts being served to partner websites. Yell.com netReach can deliver geographically and contextually relevant advertising results onto third party websites, and offers network partners a level of control not available from generalist search engines.

In addition, netReachs network partners can choose which business classifications appear on their websites, eliminating competitive issues. The Manchester Evening News is among half a dozen network partners including Multimap and Genie Knows who successfully trialled Yell.com netReach between November 2007 and January this year.

These three businesses are the first to join the Yell.com netReach network, with more companies set to follow in the next few months. Ad syndication programmes also provide a revenue stream, and Yell.com netReach remunerates partners on a pay per-click basis. Trial sites undertook competitive analysis examining revenue generation and click-through rates and Yell.com performed well against competitors.

NetReach was launched last month as an annual fee add-on for existing Yell.com advertisers, while new customers can create an advertising package including the product. The netReach network aims to give advertisers extended reach across a network relevant sites to deliver proven value and strong leads.

Ian Bowen-Morris, head of ad syndication at Yell.com, said: Given the growing trend from web users to filter out or turn off from sites serving irrelevant content, leading web publishers are keen to find a trusted solution for syndicated advertising. As yell.com is trusted by thousands of people every day to find business details and can offer a high level of content control to partners, we believe we can really add value to a wide range of online media owners.

It seems inevitable that Yell.com would go down this road to try to compete with Google, but at the end of the day, they still have a strong brand and established customer base to work with.

Strategic partnerships between companies seem to be paying for the Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), as proven by the significant and noteworthy increases in seach traffic throughout the nation. This was the result of a recently concluded study by research firm ComScore, DMNews.com reported at the end of last month.

According to ComScore, Yellowpages.com Network forged a mutually beneficial alliance with Areaguides.net and 411.com, and saw its IYP search market share grow from 14.7% to 20.2% from Q4 2006 to Q4 of 2007. As a result of this growth, Yellowpages.com is now the market leader (it has overtaken Superpages.com by a narrow margin) in the IYP search space.

In 2007, Superpages.com also established a new partnership with Local.com and acquired Infospace FindIt/Switchboard.com, but also discontinued its relationships with 411.com and MSN Yellowpages. According to ComScore, Superpages.com’s market share dropped from 20.9% to 20.0% from Q4 2006 to Q4 2007.

Similarly, Yellow Book and R.H. Donnelley saw traffic more than double from December 2006 to December 2007, the report added. Part of this growth may be attributed to Yellow Book’s partnerships with Infospace and Addresses.com and R.H. Donnelly’s acquisition of Business.com.

During the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City last March, a panel consisting of representatives from various local search companies stressed the importance of partnerships in an area where there is no clear market leader.

According to Justin Sanger, founder and president of LocalLaunch (a local search engine marketing and search optimization firm owned by R.H. Donnelly), content is absolutely critical in the local search world, he stressed. As a result, local search companies have had to embrace and work harmoniously with those that have historically been their competitors.

We can’t build walls around our inventory, Sanger said. Distribution is critical. Nobody’s the gorilla in this market, said Bruce Crair, COO of Local.com, who also spoke at the Search Engine Strategies panel. The more we network with our cooperation partners  the better off the advertiser and consumer is.

Forbes magazine recently carried an interesting article on mobile trends and the future of the mobile industry topics which are on everyone’s lips these days.

Forbes consulted with the head of the London-based design consultancy firm Fjord, Christian Lindholma decade-long veteran of Nokia who has also had noteworthy stints with Yahoo!’s mobile group who peered into his crystal ball and dished out his unabashed predictions on the mobile world.

With his broad mission of  simplifying digital complexity,  he identified these 8 Trends for a Mobile World

Trend No. 1: Beauty Is Back

Pretty graphics and fun transitions are now basic requirements to compete. This started a couple years ago with Sony Ericsson upgrading its user interface. Then the iPhone upped the ante.

There’s a new design discipline emerging called “motion design.” It’s about creating seamless and beautiful journeys, not just functional, individual screens. The skill set comes from guys who have been doing special effects for TV and video. The platform is evolving from bitmap graphics to vector-based graphics, which can scale in degrees. That changes the whole way you design.

Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG understand the benefit of beauty. I would expect to see a lot more beautiful stuff in 2008 than we’ve been used to seeing.

Trend No. 2: ‘Chained Islands’ Are The New Walled Gardens

All the major operators are proclaiming openness and stepping up their services. I think a multi-platform, single sign-in experience will emerge. This will simplify mobile services, because content will move fluidly between devices, but the openness will be moderated. The “landlord” of the island will control the user interface and potential partners.

To monetize these applications, there will be signed terms of service, such as lock-in by DRM or through metadata like song ratings, photo ratings, or photo clusters. Apple’s iTunes and iPhoto are benchmarks of this model. Nokia and its new Internet services portal Ovi is an example of emerging “chained islands.”

Trend No. 3: The Mobile Net Becomes Useful

There are already large volumes of 3G phones with good browsers and screens measuring two inches or larger. We expect there will be 50 million such phones in use by the end of 2008. Combine that with the unprecedented effect the iPod touch and iPhone have had on content companies, inspiring them to make mobile optimized sites. It’s now possible to build really interesting mobile browser-based services. We believe there will be a spike in usage of the mobile Net in 2008.

Some of the most popular mobile sites, like Google, and Yahoo! and the BBC, seem to be overhauling their solutions. There are also lots of startups that have realized that building and distributing an application is too hard, and they’re switching to browser-based solutions.

Trend No. 4: GPS Is The New Camera

Integrating a camera into mobile phones has proved an extremely successful idea. Now GPS is poised to be the next killer mobile app. Chip prices are rapidly dropping, and providers are dreaming big of monetizing location-based services. Maps are being fused with navigation. We expect more than half of phones will have GPS chips five years from now.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all betting big on local services. Nokia seems quite positive about them, too. Its investment in Navteq last year is seen as kind of a tipping point. Yellow Pages information is a big, big service among the incumbents, so there will be an interesting battle in leveraging maps and building value-added search services on top of that.

Trend No. 5: 2008 Will Be The Year Of Bad Touch Screens

The industry has reacted to the iPhone much faster than it reacted to the BlackBerry. That indicates there’s a strong belief in the concept of a touch screen phone. Apple has a huge advantage with its multi-touch technology, optimized software and good sensors. Touch screens are ridiculously hard to do well, because they pose both hardware and software problems, and these typically aren’t detected until late in development.

Companies are launching touch screens hastily and hoping for the best. We’re seeing phones that just started shipping that don’t quickly respond to touch. As a user, you somehow think they’re broken.

The first proper benchmark is whether Nokia will announce a Series 60 touch device in Barcelona. Touching that will give an indication of the “state of the union” for touch screens

Trend No. 6: Google Slows Down To Telecom Time

Internet time is maybe three times as fast as a normal year. Telecom time is maybe half the speed of a normal year. A telecom year is slower because operators enjoy fantastic profit margins just by providing a few new mobiles and getting people to sign up for 12- to 18-month contracts. There’s no big reason to challenge the status quo, and no real force that can challenge it either. Telecom time will be a constant for some time to come.

Google has been an iconic darling of the Internet industry. The media expects them to perform at Internet time, but entering the mobile industry will grind Google down to telecom time. We suspect they will not progress much in mobile in 2008, because operators are quite skeptical about Android.

The way Google operates, it’s very much startups and small teams. If you have five, six or 10 teams asking different questions about the business, technical specifications and due diligence, it becomes too much to handle. Microsoft, which many consider the greatest software company ever, has taken almost 10 years to get any kind of traction in the mobile space. We estimate Google has invested more than $150 million in mobile, but radically outperforming Microsoft will still be hard.

The media compares Google to Apple as a new entrant, but that’s really apples to oranges. Google doesn’t have nearly the same types of assets. Apple is the master of marketing, of hardware/software integration, and the world’s best retailer per square foot. No one’s done a good job at courting developers for mobile, but I think the iPhone SDK will be a huge hit.

Trend No. 7: Dawn Of The Casual Computer

We now have compact devices with 12-inch screens. But if you go smaller than nine inches, you enter a void where no one has been successful.

A casual computer is somewhat different: It’s smaller, with you all the time, and is unobtrusive enough that it can casually glide in and out of your everyday life. Taking a laptop out of your backpack in a restaurant is quite rude socially, whereas it’s not with an iPhone or iPod touch. Suddenly you have a new computing paradigm: an entertainment-driven, multipurpose device that provides a great Internet experience and is pocketable.

Compare that to the Eee PC, a low-end laptop that also costs around $300. If you’re a kid and have $300, you’re probably going to buy the iPod Touch, because it’s fun, cooler and has more show-off value. Metaphorically speaking, the Eee is porridge and the iPod Touch is ice cream.

Microsoft could be the loser here, because its whole brand is about utility, not entertainment. But it could bring out a pocket-sized Xbox and change the game.

Trend No. 8: Go Down Or Go Out

The mobile business is all about the low end, where volume is huge and still growing. The low end will be the primary battlefield in 2008. Nokia dominates this market, but Samsung is saying it wants to sell a $50 phone, and Sony Ericsson has also announced low-end devices. To succeed, you have to do everything differently, understand these consumers and their different needs. It’s absolutely brutal down there.

The big lesson last year was the Moto, a Motorola market-entry phone that came across as a poor man’s phone. It had a low-power display to prolong battery life, and looked so different it was off-putting to consumers.

It’s important to remember that mobile devices are aspirational products. Consumers are generally smart. If they have dollars to invest, they will try to get the best their money can buy. Even in the low end, you have to do high design.