Ingrid Michelsen recently wrote about how WhitePages Mobile Moved From the Sidelines To The Limelight in 6 months and today we announce reaching over 2 million users on mobile.

We have learned a lot, sharing with MediaPost the importance of having ad-supported and paid models, innovating with new services like Caller ID, and why the carrier pipes are a lot smarter then folks give them credit for. In today’s Mobile Marketer, we offer some of the key success factors advertisers should consider around targeting, brand, and performance.

Leading the charge in the delivery of our mobile services is Bret Moore, the most productive mobile product executive in the industry. In the last year, Bret has led 6 key mobile product launches and 16 updates/new versions for new devices. Bret presented our Caller ID for Android at this years Google I/O conference. Check out all of the innovative products he has launched in the related posts section below or by clicking on his name.

Finally, our mobile services provide even more reasons why we no longer need the paper phone book. WhitePages Mobile gives you access to hundreds of millions of contacts, right at your fingertips, and on the go.

Let’s hug a tree and Ban The Phonebooks!

Follow us on Twitter for More Mobile Updates:
http://twitter.com/mooreb
http://twitter.com/knakao

On YouTube:
WhitePages Q&A Series – Mobile

Related posts:

1. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone v1.3: It’s Smarter
2. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone – New and Improved App!
3. (Mobile) Innovation Will End This Global Recession

Today we’re taking the covers off our latest mobile product – LOOKUP!   This new text messaging service is the first of its kind – and it’s amazingly simple to use.  Just text any 10-digit phone number to 566587 (LOOKUP) to find out who called or texted you.   Sound easy?  It is.

Of course, text messaging is the single most popular use of mobile phones aside from, well, calling.   What may surprise you is how many people are not only using text to keep in touch, but also to find information.  Some recent research showed that 38% of mobile phone users have searched for information using text messaging!

So, it’s a natural to take the WhitePages database of 600MM listings – including hard to find mobile and unpublished numbers — and make it available through text.  Now, if you have one of our new iPhone, Android or BlackBerry apps, you may already use WhitePages to find people and businesses on the go.   However, we wanted something that anyone could use, no matter what kind of phone they had.  Here’s how you do it:

• Text any phone number to 566587 (LOOKUP).
• We’ll tell you if we have a match.
• Reply GO to see the caller name and address.

That’s it!   The service is available for $1.99 per match found, or $2.99 per month to look up as many numbers as you want.  That’s about the price of a call to 411 – but includes millions of numbers you can’t find anyway else.

Give it a try on your phone today – and happy texting!

Thoughts, questions, concerns?  Just post a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

Bret

Related posts:

1. Caller ID By WhitePages for the Google Android Phone
2. Make FREE Calls On Your Cell Phone
3. Out Now! WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry App World

This new version represents a huge step forward for our most popular mobile app – and if past updates are any indication, there will be quite a few of you already trying it out and using the new features.

I’ll go ahead and get one thing out of the way — we now have in-app advertising.   Thankfully, most people understand that this is a necessary part of most high quality free apps.   What some people may not know is how hard it is to make it all work!  Ad standards are still emerging for apps so it took a lot of hard work from Jen Fraum and Cory Gaddis on our ad team to get an ad platform all teed up and ready to deliver campaigns!    We signed on Continental as our “pilot” (ahem) sponsor and expect more to come soon.

Of course we wouldn’t want to *just* release a new version with ads – we’ve added a number of important improvements to make the app a whole lot “smarter” and easier to use.  How, you ask…?

- The app remembers where you left off. Need to shut down the app to make a call, answer a text, or surf the web?  Go for it!   Now, no need to worry about re-entering your search info or starting from scratch.  The WhitePages app restarts exactly where you left it, without a keystroke to waste.    Even during a session, your most recent search is always stored so you can modify your search without having to re-type all of the info.

- The app knows where you are. WhitePages Mobile

has been using GPS in different ways for a while, but now we’re auto-populating new searches with your current location to help save typing.   Combined with the auto-suggest we added in v1.2, searching for businesses nearby just got fantastically fast – find your nearest gas station with (literally) 3 taps.

- The app can count. If there’s only one “Kyle Myers” in Seattle (and, if you know Kyle, that sure is true) and you’re searching for him, then the app will go directly to the listing page – no extra pages or clicks required.

- Save to phone contacts now works great. We’ve had a few nagging issues with how the app labels home, work and business info, as well as some issues working with Exchange and other contact sync methods to make contacts stay up to date over the air.   We’ve hammered those out so now it’s easier than ever to keep your phone (and PC/Mac) contacts up to date with WhitePages.

- Other nice bug fixes.   Also included:  we fixed some issues with map linkouts, fixed the page spacing in OS 3.0, and added enhanced listings with household, work and company info to our Reverse Phone searches.

Download v1.3 now from iTunes and let us know what you think – and if you like it, don’t forget to leave a great rating & review on iTunes!!

Comments, question, concers?  Just let me know below.

Bret

Related posts:

1. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone – New and Improved App!
2. WhitePages Mobile: Top 10 iPhone Reference App For Over 1 Year
3. Out Now! WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry App World

Note: This post is the 10th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.

The following post was written by Joe Heitzeberg who is our VP of Tech at WhitePages. He is charged with delivering the services and offerings that power the WhitePages experience, running a scaleable and efficient infrastructure and building and maintaining a top-notch tech team.

What is Agile Software Development?

I start this blog post off by revealing a secret:  I nearly always ask interview candidates to define what Agile is, and the more prescriptive and exacting their answer, the lower the score they tend to get.  You see, for WhitePages, Agile is not a prescriptive, exacting process and ruleset, it is a set of general principles and themes — much like branding.

If you’ve been following along with the brand building series, then you may see this and other parallels.

A sprint team meeting in progress.

Principles vs. Rules

In branding, it is important to establish and embrace a set of principles.  For WhitePages, we established brand pillars based in part on our beliefs and aspirations.  These include brand pillars such as “Relevant Innovation” which is the notion that WhitePages values speed of innovation and staying ahead of the curve.

Similarly, with Agile we developed a set of principles that help guide how we organize and accomplish the work of a top-50 website.  These include:

• Empowerment: To deliver on our mission and goals, we realize that the people who truly make a difference are the folks who write code, create requirements, lead scrums, crank out wire-frames and designs and so forth.  For us to be successful, we embrace “empowerment”, which means letting the six or seven Agile sprint team members have the ultimate responsibility and accountability in the success of our products.
• Transparency: To make sure that the hard work of agile team members doesn’t go unnoticed and unrecognized (and, okay I admit it – as a check and balance to staying on course) we embrace transparency.
• Problem Solving Mentality: To stay ahead of the curve and move fast, when we encounter problems or set-backs, we like to say, “Hey, we’re engineers, let’s solve it.”  Problems with complaints aren’t worth much, but problems with solutions are invaluable.  Likewise, great ideas without follow-through aren’t worth much, but going quickly from the whiteboard to the website is everything in the web.
• Being Together: One of the first things we did nine months ago when we moved to Agile was rip down the walls between everyone’s work spaces and move people away from their functional teams to sit with their cross-functional Agile teams.  At first this caused some stress, but everyone quickly realized the benefits and great ideas that emerge when engineers are together with designers and so forth.
• Continuous Learning and Mistakes: We accept that pushing the curve upwards in speed, innovation and learning is what counts, and to get there we need to move fast and take risks. Thus, we will stumble and fall along the way. It’s okay.  Like installing a new screen door for your patio, you chalk up the edges and bang them into the siding to figure out where you need to file the rough edges down.

As with brand pillars, there are no prescriptive rules and procedures to enforce – only general principles that allow freedom and creativity within some general constraints.

Substance vs. Surface

Just as branding is not principally about mascots, taglines and logos, Agile is not about techniques like pair-programming, a particular toolset or a specific team composition.

Sure, you might have a cartoon character as part of your logo, and this may feature prominently into your brand identity, just as you may use pair-programming as part of how you develop code within Agile, but these specific things do not define your brand or your agile process.

Just as brand is more about emotion than logos, Agile is more about culture than techniques.  (I could write a whole other post about culture change and agile, but I’ll leave that for another day)

“We’re either insanely ambitious or just plain insane”

A few weeks before our site relaunch, I stopped by Alex’s (our CEO and founder) office to jokingly ask him if we were insane or just ambitious, and that we’ll only know after the site relaunch goes live.

So much has changed and been created under the hood as part of this latest site relaunch that we might have been crazy ambitious to take it on at once.  Aside from our wholesale switch to Agile Project Management, consider this:

1. Completely new front end platform in Ruby on Rails  — not only was this a wholesale switch, but we did it knowing that with our scale we’d likely enter into the Top-5 (traffic) of any website using Rails.
2. New deployment and config system –  how the code we develop moves from system to system as it makes the way from a developer’s laptop to our website has been totally redone.
3. New source control – how we manage changes to code and merging code from multiple developers across multiple projects was migrated to a new system.
4. New data center – not only have we moved the physical location of our production servers, we also took the opportunity rewire the networking, storage and server components to make them more consistent, manageable and efficient.

The results of these efforts and the relaunch itself are already showing how the product and engineering team’s efforts deliver on the brand principles:

• Relevant Innovation: New systems enable us to deliver features to users significantly faster than before.
• Stewards of Trust: Our new source control and deployment architecture means a higher degree of dependability and reliability from release to release, ensuring smooth releases, minimal downtime and secure data.
• Best Source: Across the board performance increases of 20-to-40% mean that our users are able to get at the information they’re looking for much faster – strengthening our position as the best source on the web for people search.

Your Thoughts

Have you drawn parallels between agile methodology and branding at your company?  Would you like to share what principles your organization has adopted to make agile work.  We’re always learning and sharing what we learn, so please write me or comment below.  Thank you!

Joe

Related posts:

1. Brand Building: Managing the Development Process
2. Brand Building: WhitePages Strategic Brand Platform
3. Brand Building: Making Money on WhitePages’ Website

This began with the launch of our WhitePages Mobile for iPhone application in August of 2008.  The app quickly shot up to the Top 5 of the App Store charts, and it was clear we had a hit! Since then, we expanded our mobile plans and tackled apps for Android, BlackBerry, and revamped m.whitepages.com.

Distance to Listing

Auto Populate Categories

Now, we’re returning to the iPhone to kick things up a notch and make it even better based on what we’ve learned. I’ve noticed that searching for businesses is one of the most popular uses of our iPhone app.  This makes sense – when you’re on the go, being able to quickly find a store, restaurant or bank just makes life easier.  So, the new app has a number of business search improvements, including:

• More listings when you search for a business category – up to 50% more search results
• Distance indicators so you can see which businesses are closest to you using GPS location of your iPhone
• Easier input – most searches are reduced to a few taps by using a auto-populated list of the top business searches.

People Search is also better.  We added a ton of new listing data to help you find who you are looking for fast including:

• Household Members and Age Range for residential listings
• Company Name and Job Title for at-work listings

For both people and business search, more results are displayed – up to 300 listings!   I know a lot of you have been waiting for this one.

The new WhitePages Mobile for iPhone still has all the great features of the first version – including the WhitePages online directory of more than 220 million people, maps, directions and reverse search.

And on top of all that, there’s fresh new colors and design to match WhitePages new look.

Take a look at the video of the new and improved WhitePages Mobile for iPhone to see what’s new.  This is our most popular app so we’ve been eager to get these improvements out – I hope you like them!

The app can be downloaded for free from the App Store on iTunes, or just upgrade for free right from your iPhone if you are already using the app.

I love your feedback, so hit me back with some comments.

Bret

Other WhitePages Mobile Posts

Out Now!  WhitePages Mobile for Blackberry App
(Mobile) Innovation Will End This Global Recession
WhitePages on mobile:  It’s not just for iPhones anymore
Caller ID by WhitePages:  A New Android App that Puts Telemarketers on Alert!
We have an iPhone App!

Related posts:

1. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone v1.3: It’s Smarter
2. Out Now! WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry App World
3. WhitePages on mobile: It’s not just for iPhones anymore

Board Presentation Slide

We quickly put our plan into place, hiring internally and signing deals with top mobile developers. All told, there were over 20 people from the U.S., Germany, and India working with us, resulting in a slew of new and innovative mobile offerings:

Preview! WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry App World

WhitePages on mobile: It’s not just for iPhones anymore

Caller ID by WhitePages: A New Android App that Puts Telemarketers on Alert!

.. with more to come in the next couple of weeks (Follow me @knakao on Twitter to get the udpates)

We created new revenue streams for our company. Our Premium Caller ID service for mobile is getting 3 times the projected uptake, leading to even more funding for our mobile efforts. This puts more money into the economy, innovation can help end this recession.  And just as importantly, our mobile innovation is helping us to reposition the WhitePages brand and prepare the company for massive growth over the next few years.  In fact, all of our mobile apps incorporate the new WhitePages Visual Identity and our ‘Caller ID’ concept was designed as a proof point that would allow our customers to ‘connect with confidence’ (check out our Strategic Brand Platform post for more info).

While it is the job of cost cutters to trim the fat, now is the time for product innovators to present a vision and create value — which is exactly what our head of mobile product development Bret Moore has done.

We are not alone. I suspect there are other folks out there investing in innovation. Help me to motivate others by sharing your story below.

Innovation is Recession Resistant

Wireless industry will help reverse recession: CTIA keynote

The 10 Worst Innovation Mistakes In A Recession

J.P. Morgan: A Profile In Leadership

Innovation Will Blossom During The Recession

Kevin Nakao
VP, Mobile and Monetization

Related posts:

1. Out Now! WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry App World
2. WhitePages on mobile: It’s not just for iPhones anymore
3. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone – New and Improved App!

It’s been very busy in the WhitePages Mobile group lately, and this time I think we’ve really outdone ourselves.   So, I wanted to give you an update on WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry – now available in BlackBerry App World.

While we have seen tremendous success and uptake from our iPhone and Android apps as well as the newly relaunched m.WhitePages.com, we wanted to design something new with the power BlackBerry user in mind.  It’s our best and most featured-packed application yet.

Instead of listing all the things you can do with the WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry app, I thought it would be more interesting to start with some tips on a few different ways you can use the app, and why I’ve found it to be an indispensable addition to my mobile app collection.

Who just called?

If you’re like most users, quite a few of your  incoming calls or texts aren’t already in your phone contact list.  With WhitePages Mobile, you can now look up numbers directly from the BlackBerry phone call log.   Just press the Send button to see your call log, then press the menu button.  You’ll see an option to search WhitePages, which launches directly to a page with info on the caller.  That’s quick!

Even better, we’ve included 600 million hard-to-find mobile and unpublished numbers to provide the best results possible.   This works for incoming calls as well as unknown text messages.

Getting your contacts all in one place

It’s fantastically simple to update existing contacts, and quickly create one contact that holds all of the information WhitePages has available – home address and phone, work address and phone, company and job title.  Find a listing, select Add to Contacts, then Add to Existing contact.   New information will be updated to fill in the details you didn’t know or didn’t have time to type in manually.   Then, your information is stored all in one contact for easy access and syncing with whatever contact management system you may use.

Another great new feature is Send/Share.   If you don’t want to keep all of your contacts on your phone, this lets you send WhitePages listing info to your desktop in a flash by email or, share the listing with a friend or colleague.

Find people with Company Search

Now it’s easy to search the 40 million+ work listings in the WhitePages database — track down important business contacts and colleagues quickly with just a last name and company name.   With only a few keystrokes you can get a phone number, map, and directions to get you to business meetings fast, or locate colleagues who may have moved offices or locations without knowing the city and state.

This is one of the easiest ways to find phone and address info for important business contacts, with no strings attached or new memberships required – if you’ve ever had to friend, follow or fumble through contact lists to get the information you need, we’ve made this easy and straightforward.  Plus, you can add to your phone contacts or check your recent search results in WhitePages Mobile to keep the information right at your fingertips, offline or online.

From business trips, sales prospecting and trade conferences to everyday communication, WhitePages Mobile brings a whole new level of convenience and productivity to active BlackBerry users.   I hope you’ll enjoy using it as much as I do!

So, take a look at our video to see how it works, then go download it from BlackBerry App World.  It’s available now on the Bold, with all of the other major BlackBerry models (Storm, Curve, Pearl) to follow soon.   Check out our first review, and feel free to let me know what you think about our new app below.

Bret

Other WhitePages Mobile Posts

(Mobile) Innovation Will End This Global Recession
WhitePages on mobile:  It’s no just for iPhones anymore
Caller ID by WhitePages:  A New Android App that Puts Telemarketers on Alert!
We have an iPhone App!

Related posts:

1. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone v1.3: It’s Smarter
2. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone – New and Improved App!
3. WhitePages on mobile: It’s not just for iPhones anymore

Note: This post is the 3rd in a

Alright.  Last week I touched briefly on the market research and analysis that we performed prior to all of our branding efforts. Before I start discussing our ‘brand platform’, I need to emphasize how much information and detail I’m leaving out of some of these posts.  Trying to figure out how to include everything in a way that’s easy to understand, makes sense to most readers and doesn’t completely give away our company strategy is pretty hard.  If we miss something and you want us to address, just let us know in the comments section below.

The first step in tackling the brand initiative was to identify the specific objectives that we wanted to achieve.  Given that we’d never really gone through an effort like this in the past, it was imperative that we got buy-in and agreement across the company on a set of unified goals.  In the end, we identified three key objectives:

1. Align the brand based on the future vision of WhitePages: You gotta know where you’re going before setting a direction.  Important…and a great exercise.
2. Position WhitePages uniquely with customers:  We knew based on our research that customers were crying for a service that was differentiated, had personality and didn’t have the feel of your typical paper phonebook experience (again, we’re not the phonebook!).
3. Develop a brand platform that enhances the customer experience:  We wanted to move WhitePages.com beyond just being a functional website.

Addressing the above areas and getting to the point where we had alignment across the company required a ridiculous amount of discussion and debate. I don’t want to belittle the effort that went into making all of this happen, but again, it’s kind of hard for me to write about everything and keep this post short, and at least somewhat entertaining.

So, on that note, I’ll focus the rest of this post no our brand platform objective.  There are a number of ways to define a ‘brand platform’ and like all other companies out there, we felt that our definition was different than anybody else’s.  Ultimately, we felt that our platform needed to address the following areas: 

Company Mission
The fundamental reason WhitePages exists. ‘We make it fantastically simple for everyone to find each other and connect with confidence.‘ Simple, to the point and something that employees can easily remember.

Positioning Statement
How do we differentiate ourselves? I can’t give you all of the details on this one (transparency does have its limits!), but  know that we want to be THE place where people can find contact information on anything, anytime and anywhere.  Go wild with that one.

Personality
How our brand relates to customers with its distinctive tone and manner? Our next post will go into much more detail on our ‘personality’ and how it’s shaping our brand identity, so I won’t go into too much detail here.  But for the most part, we want to come across as Straightforward and Friendly…with a little bit of good humor mixed in.

Brand Attributes
The principles we live by.  Our values and character.  The attributes that were mentioned in the first Brand Building Series post  are based on several data points:  our customers, our internal value system and our vision.  These attributes will guide us in everything we do at WhitePages from product development to sales & marketing.

Brand Architecture
How our different brands (domains) are related to, and differentiated from, one anothe? We basically made 3 brand architecture recommendations:

• Change the company name from WhitePages.com, Inc. to WhitePages, Inc. WhitePages.com was too limiting and gives people the perception that you can only find us online. That’s clearly not the case (check out WhitePages Mobile) Also known as the Monolithic Brand or Brand House approach for all of you Brand savants out there.
• Focus primarily on the WhitePages.com domain. We have a bunch of different domains and each serves a specific strategic and business purpose.  In order to succeed in building the WhitePages brand, we’ll need to put most of our brand-building efforts into the new WhitePages.com site.
• Ensure that all of our business partners give WhitePages some props. WhitePages provides the data for a number of different partners (MSN, US Postal Service, AOL). Users of these sites need to know that the data that they get is a service of WhitePages. Kind of like ‘Intel Inside’ on all of the PC’s out there. This tactic helps to build the WhitePages brand when we’re an ‘ingredient’ for other products and services.

Once the brand architecture was finalized, we officially put to rest the strategic component of our brand building efforts.  No more research, no more brainstorming sessions and no more debate.  Just fundamental execution.   The key takeaway from this initial work?  These recommendations not only guided our decisions over the past 15 months but will also play a critical role in shaping our decisions in years to come.  Subsequent posts in the Brand Series will continuously mention components of our brand platform, so you’ll most likely see some of these points mentioned again.

If you have any questions regarding the process for defining our brand platform, please feel free to comment below or contact me directly by email.

John
www.twitter.com/johnlusk

Next Post:  We’ll talk about our Brand Identity

Related posts:

1. Brand Building: Defining Our Visual Identity
2. Brand Building: Educating employees on ‘brand’
3. Brand Building: Usability Testing for our Site Redesign

We’ve had a mobile version of the WhitePages.com website for a while, but only over the past year have people begun using the mobile internet on a broad scale.  According to ComScore, U.S. mobile internet usage doubled from January 2008 to January 2009 — with over 63 million people now accessing the internet from their phones each month and over 22 million doing it every day.

However, while we were busy working on new iPhone and Android apps, the WhitePages mobile site had fallen a little behind the times.  So, we’ve relaunched m.whitepages.com with some big improvements and the new look and feel of WhitePages that you’ll be seeing a lot more of.  Here are some highlights:

• Better Business Search — We’ve made changes to give you more relevant results and bring the best and closest local business listings to the top of your search results.
• Tons more information — Find who you’re looking for fast with new listing data like who’s in the household, company name and job title for work listings, and the age range of the person you’re looking for.
• New listing types — Along with the new listing information, we’ve added work listings to our mobile search results so you can find the personal and professional information you need.
• Looks and works better on more phones – m.whitepages.com will be automatically formatted to fit the screen and model of your phone, whether it’s a RAZR, BlackBerry, or something in between.
• Updated design and layout — If you’ve been following the WhitePages team, you know that we are embarking on a major re-branding effort.  Check out our brand building blog series to learn more. The launch of m.whitepages.com with our new brand and simple layout is an important step in the effort.

I hope you’ll agree the new m.whitepages.com makes it fantastically simple to find and connect with people and businesses on the go.  So, the next time you need to find a phone number that you left at home, or have a craving for Thai food while you’re on the road, just visit m.whitepages.com from your mobile phone’s browser.

Enjoy!  Let us know what you think and stay tuned for more exciting new developments from the mobile team soon!

- Bret

Related posts:

1. Out Now! WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry App World
2. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone – New and Improved App!
3. WhitePages Mobile for iPhone v1.3: It’s Smarter

————————————————————————————————-

I’m excited to announce that we’re releasing a new and improved version of Caller ID by WhitePages, in the paid Android Market that will give our customers an even better Caller ID experience.  The G1 app will be available for download today.

The first version of Caller ID by WhitePages is one of the most successful Android apps to date with over 100,000 downloads.  Users responded to the ability to find out who’s calling instantly — and, they asked us for even more innovative features.

So, in addition to the great features in our first Android app, here’s what we’ve added. You can also check out the short video that shows what’s new:

• More names to ID more calls, including mobile numbers! (This was our #1 request from users.) This means a better match rate.
• Telemarketing alerts will flash during calls from known telemarketers. You’ll never have to take a research survey during dinnertime again!
• Look up numbers on demand with the Reverse Phone feature. I use this all the time when people text me and I don’t recognize the phone number. And it’s great when you miss calls or want to update names and addresses on your phone without typing in a bunch of information.
• Better connection handling and performance means faster Caller ID results.
• A great new look and layout, including our new WhitePages branding and colors. You’ll be seeing more of this soon!

To get the new and improved Caller ID by WhitePages, simply download the app through the Android Market icon on the phone menu. Just search for WhitePages.  The price is $6.99 for six months of unlimited Caller ID – that’s less than one call to 411 per month, and a fraction of what you would pay for Caller ID on your home phone. Plus, you can try it for free for 7 days. What’s to lose?

For all of you who’ve been following our Android App developments, please feel free to drop me a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Bret

Related posts:

1. Caller ID By WhitePages for the Google Android Phone
2. WhitePages for Android arrives!
3. Caller ID by WhitePages Gets A Quick Buzz