It is no surprise, since Udi Manber, its original leader, left over a year ago. But Amazon has formally abandoned its effort to launch Yellow Pages (and Maps) as part of its A9 search engine.
A9 received lots of publicity for the Yellow Pages and specifically, its BlockView feature, launched in January 2005. BlockView, originally “Find It On The Block,” enabled consumers to see pictures of local businesses and adjacent businesses, get maps, add comments, see related news and information, etc. It was produced by automatic digital cameras, laptops, GPS and a bunch of kids driving around entire cities in cars (and sometimes, due to mapping glitches, inadvertently driving over bridges out of the city).
More than 20,000 miles were covered in 20 cities and over one million businesses had had their pictures taken – a high percentage when one considers that many of the 12 million+ SMEs in the U.S. don’t actually have storefronts. In the end, however, the widely available satellite imagery that is now commonplace probably made the feature obsolete. Moreover, Amazon never put local sales channels in place, so it was never able to really leverage the publicity and develop an actual Yellow Pages business. It was cool, though.
Good call back in April of 2005, addressing the challenges Amazon’s A9 would face as a Yellow Pages business.
It is pretty amazing that A9 did not focus its attention on developing an actual Yellow Pages business or some type of partnership, especially when it was in such a great position to do it. The high cost of a nationwide sales force may have had something to do with it, and they may not have been thinking along the lines of a YP partnership.
I think what A9’s Yellow Pages could’ve become is exactly where MerchantCircle is currently heading today. Not only that, MerchantCircle is becoming a networking destination for a group that is commonly ignored, the local independent business without a corporate infrastructure behind them.
Most sites are focused on consumer traffic, while MerchantCircle focuses on providing tools and services for merchants. I think of MerchantCircle as Myspace for local businesses and exactly what A9’s Yellow Pages could have been.