KEY POINTS:
Yellow Pages Group is banking on its comprehensive database being the jewel that wins it deals as demand increases for "location-based services" delivered over mobile phones.
Yellow Pages data includes geographical co-ordinate information for most homes and businesses.
Telecom's former directory arm, sold to a private equity consortium just over a year ago, has been ramping up investment in web-based and mobile phone technologies.
This month it plans to launch a "Yellow mobile" directory service accessible on Telecom and Vodafone mobiles equipped with WAP internet browsing capabilities.
Yellow Pages also plans to launch a text version of its 018 directory service which will allow mobile phone users to text in the type of service they are looking for, and the general location, to receive a listing of businesses that match the description in the area.
The company this month began supplying its business data for a new GPS navigation service Vodafone is offering to users of its high-end BlackBerry phones.
Using the new Compass service, Vodafone customers with GPS-enabled BlackBerries can receive graphical and voice directions to nearby amenities such as petrol stations, parking buildings and restaurants using location information sourced from the Yellow Pages database.
Blair Glubb, Yellow Pages Group's former marketing director who last month moved across to a newly created role of digital media director, said the group had "geo-coded" about 99 per cent of the businesses and residences on its database.
This put the company in a strong position to partner mobile phone operators and other providers as consumer and business interest in location-based services intensified.
"One of the key points for us is that we are looking to partner with essentially anybody with whom we can get broader distribution of our business listings and data," Glubb said.
"We'll be working as closely as we possibly can with Vodafone and Telecom to help them enable the services they're looking to launch in that space."
While GPS tracking is currently only available on a small number of high-end mobile phones, that is expected to change over the next year or two as the technology behind it becomes cheaper.
Telecom does not yet offer a navigation service equivalent to Compass, but is likely to do so once it launches its new WCDMA network later this year.
Vodafone Australia launched a similar Compass service in Australia last year.
One of the popular aspects of the Australian service has been linking it to the national database of petrol prices.
This enables customers to see a list of petrol prices from all nearby service stations and, if they chose, receive directions to the outlet offering the lowest price.
Vodafone New Zealand's general manager of product and services, Kursten Shalfoon, said the service could not be offered here because this country did not have an equivalent central database of petrol prices.
However, he said Vodafone was interested in extending the Compass service to make use of similar databases where they were available.
