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yellow pages (dict)
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Yellow PagesIn many countries, the Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory for businesses organized by the category of product or service. As the name suggests, they are usually printed on yellow paper. At least until the anti-trust breakup of the Bell System in the late 20th century, the term "Yellow pages" was a trademark for commercial directories and the commercial portions of the by-commercial-category sections of directories that also include by-name listings; directories were published on behalf of the component Bell companies by the Reuben H. Donnelly publishing company. Then and since, phone companies or their agents sell the right to place advertisements within the same category, next to the basic listings; since the Bell breakup, other companies (sometimes telephone companies who provide local telephone service only in areas not covered by the directories) publish directories that compete with those of local telephone companies for advertising business. With the encouragement of The Thomson Corporation, at the time an advertising sales agent for the nationalised General Post Office's telephone directory, a business telephone number directory named the Yellow Pages was first produced in 1966 by the GPO for the Brighton area, and was rolled out nationwide in 1973. The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Yellow Pages in 1966 to publish and to distribute the directory to telephone subscribers for the GPO, and later for The Post Office. Thomson Yellow Pages was sold by The Thomson Corporation in 1980, at the same time as Post Office Telecommunications became the (then) state-owned British Telecom (BT). The Yellow Pages directory continued to be distributed to all telephone subscribers by BT. At the same time, The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Directories Ltd, and began to publish the Thomson Local directory, which would remain the Yellow Pages' main, and often sole, competitor in the UK for more than the next two decades, and would be the competitive driving force behind such changes to Yellow Pages as the adoption (in 1999) of colour printing and "knock-out-white" listings. In 1984, the year that BT was privatized, the department producing the directory became a stand alone subsidiary of BT, named Yellow Pages. In the mid-1990s the Yellow Pages business was re-branded as Yell, although the directory itself continued to be known as the Yellow Pages. Yell was bought by venture capitalists in 2001, and in 2003 was floated on the Stock Exchange. After the one year "no competition" clause expired BT too went into competition with the Yellow Pages, re-entering the market with "The Phone Book", an "all in one" offering which contained the traditional alphabetical domestic and business listings as well as a new classified section. References Australia's business directory was first published in its own volume in 1973 as the Yellow Pages. The directory was originally produced by the Postmaster General, and continued to be produced by the government, as the telephone system transferred to Telecom Australia and now Telstra. Today, the Yellow Pages is produced by Sensis, a wholly-owned advertising subsidiary of Telstra. The Yellow Pages have for many years produced some of Australia's most popular television commercials, often highlighting the perils of not placing an advertisement in the directory on time. The most famous of these immortalised the phrase "Not Happy Jan" in the Australian vernacular. In specific localised area of the Australian Capital Territory, it has been known to be used as toilet paper when there is none left in the house. Other countries In Belgium the equivalent directory is titled Gouden Gids (Dutch) or Pages d'Or (French), and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber. In Finland the directory is called Keltaiset sivut. In France, they are referred to as Pages Jaunes, which means "yellow pages". They are distributed free by France Tlcom. In Germany a directory titled Die Gelben Seiten is distributed free to each subscriber. In Indonesia, the telecommunication company TELKOM with PT. Infomedia Nusantara (one of its subsidiaries), regularly publishes phone books. The phone book consisted of white pages and yellow pages. The phone book is updated regularly (typically every six months or a year) and is published in various editions (depending where the book is published). In Netherlands the equivalent directory is titled Gouden Gids; within the district concerned it is distributed free to each telephone subscriber. In Sweden it's called Gula sidorna, distributed by Eniro AB. In Switzerland the company Swisscom Directories AG produces and distributes directories in several forms including internet-based yellow pages in four languages, including English. The company Swissguide AG provides additional business information on all Swiss companies. In Canada the company Yellow Pages Group produces and distributes directories in both English and French. Yellow Pages Group is the market leader in print and online commercial directories and one of the largest media companies in Canada. In China, the modern yellow pages industry was started in the late 1990s with the formation of two international joint ventures between US yellow pages publishers and Chinas telecom operators, namely: a joint venture started in Shenzhen between RHDonnelley and China Unicom (later including Hong Kongs PCCW and InfoSpace); and a joint venture between China Telecom Shanghai and what later came to be known as the yellow pages operations of Verizon Communications Corp.(NYSE:VZ). Later, another mainly state-owned telecom operator, China Netcom began to produce, either directly or on a sub-contracted basis, yellow pages in selected cities around the country. By early 2005, there were a number of independent local and international yellow pages operators in numerous cities including Yilong Huangbaoshu, based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province with operations in Hangzhou and Ningbo. See Also - Yellowikis - an on-line wiki based business directory
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