Does Your App Know Where You Are? Maybe the Yellow API can help.

In the new online dominated world one of the clear causalities has been the humble phone book. Gone are the days of flipping through the phone book to find a business or number, now we hit Google or the phone book online. At this point phone books have often been relegated to temporary monitor stand duty, if not just outright recycled. At the same time however, people want a lot of the information found in the phone book as an app on their phone, and thus Yellow Pages Canada has launched the Yellow API.

You can sign up as a developer to use the Yellow API and be able to tap into daily updates to their listings and then be able to build apps based on that data for consumers to use. Having an API to tap into local business info is great, it could be a real plus for people who just want to find the closest hardware store or something, but for developers there is also a potential benefit in earning revenues when people click on the listings or ads served up.

For me Yellow API is really a case of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. They see that more and more people don’t use phone books, so in order to stay in business and sell listings you need to change to put your information where people actually want to use it, and in this case that place is the phone already in their hand.

Yellow API is in beta right now, but if you happen to be in Toronto this week, there will be a session during FITC Mobile 2010 showing how the new Yellow API works.

Hat tip: Techvibes