Speaking Sensis

When I think about the authenticity of maps, I remember being a kid and creating my own treasure maps, pouring coffee over them and then getting Mum to burn the edges so they had that “real” buried-for-hundreds-of-years look.  

While the team at Whereis® don’t rely on coffee (well not in that sense anyway) and we certainly don’t get mum to burn the edges of our maps, we are committed to making sure their authentic and we drive thousands of kilometres across the country each year to keep them that way.

On our travels we record everything a driver might see in the city, regional centre or country town, such as the numbers of lanes, speed limits, turn restrictions, driveway entrances to service stations and road gradient.

As Australia is made up of more than 1,000,000kms of roads and highways with an ever increasing population, new roads, developments and suburbs popping up at a rapid rate, the process of capturing, interpreting, cross-checking and integrating data for Whereis® maps never stops.  

It’s a pretty common misconception that Australian roads don’t change that much and when people ask us about this, they are often surprised to learn that each new release of Whereis® mapping software actually captures between 10,000km and 15,000km of new roads and re-verifies 235,000km per year through continuous research.

In addition to this, our latest Whereis® map, Version 16, also comes with more than 610,000 points-of-interest, customised alerts like speed and school zones, more than 237,000km of roads with addresses, thousands of up to date information from sign posts, extended lane guidance, rail crossing alerts and loads more.

The other common myth is that in-car GPS systems update themselves automatically.  As convenient as that might be, today’s in-car GPS systems, just like our childhood treasure maps, don’t update themselves and the map software has to be manually updated. Thankfully, it’s very easy to do. 

All you need to do is keep the engine running while you pop the data DVD in your GPS device and let the new map data update the system.

So next time you getting your car serviced, either ask that your mapping data be updated or simply order your new software online and do it yourself at www.whereismaps.com

Who knows perhaps with accurate and authentic map data from Whereis® maybe you’ll find that elusive hidden treasure after all…

With the end of the year almost upon us, Sensis’ CEO, Bruce Akhurst, provides his first bi-monthly update.

Hi.

I thought it might be good to end the year by starting something… a regular report that I hope will give you a deeper insight into how Sensis is working to improve the value we offer all Australians.

New ways to help you find, buy and sell
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.

Our innovation programs reflect this commitment. How can we make our services simpler and more informative for buyers? And how can we build the value and simplicity of our advertiser services?

On this front, we’ve been particularly busy in the last few weeks. We launched the White Pages® app for iPhone recently. I was very happy to see that it reached the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store very quickly. This caps off an exciting quarter for our mobile sites, with usage growing off the scale. We launched White Pages® Mobile four months ago and it’s already delivering over 400,000 visits a month¹. At about the same time, we also launched the Yellow Pages® iPhone app. Since then, Yellow Pages® Mobile usage has more than doubled to over 650,000 visits a month²… in just a few months!  Clearly, Australians are connecting with these new generation mobile services and that’s great for advertisers. Our network strategy means that Yellow Pages® advertisers – print and online – can be searched through mobile and therefore can benefit from mobile usage growth.

We’ve also recently commenced delivery of the 2009 Yellow Pages®. This year’s book includes a more informative front cover and an expanded information section. Both of these enhancements were specific requests from Australians who participated in research we conducted earlier this year.

In Yellow Pages® Online, we’ve recently launched a new advertiser product – Purely Mobile Business, or PMB. PMB is designed for mobile businesses, like mobile mechanics, looking to reach out to customers in the areas they service.

We also recently launched Category Search, which is a new product that lets advertisers combine Voice, Whereis® and Citysearch® advertising into a single, easy to use product. Response has been strong, with hundreds of customers choosing Category Search in just a few weeks.

The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.

Finally, MediaSmart – our online and mobile display advertising business – has released new targeting capabilities. Working closely with Telstra, we’ve developed a segmentation capability that ensures mobile display advertising is more relevant and targeted for both mobile users and advertisers… like helping a major bank deliver specific branch manager contact details to customers mobile phones based on their location. This is a genuinely unique capability and I’m pleased to say the support from marketers has been fantastic.

In the field
Right now, our Yellow Pages® regional and local consultants are out talking to advertisers, as are our White Pages® consultants. We’ve been backing them up with new products, comprehensive training and a much stronger focus on engaging with local communities.

This local focus led to the opening of a new office in Penrith on November 10 (with offices in Ballina and Coffs Harbour also opening soon). We were really pleased to open Penrith by announcing a new community partnership with Great Community Transport. At the same time, we’ve been increasing our support for local businesses by regularly sponsoring and speaking at local events – over 80 in the last few months.

1.5 million calls… and counting
If you ever wanted proof of the value of Yellow Pages®, here it is. As you may know, we’ve been running a metered ad program for two years now. This program helps advertisers track the number of calls they receive from Yellow Pages® print.

In January, we began monitoring the phone calls delivered by Yellow Pages® print to a small cross-section of display ad customers (a sample of less than 1% of our total customer base). By early November, the number of calls delivered to these customers by Yellow Pages® print passed the 1.5 million threshold!

Imagine how many valuable phone calls Yellow Pages® is delivering to all our advertisers. Imagine how many more enquiries there are when you add people who are bypassing the phone and visiting the store or office. And imagine how that number could grow even further if you included all the other Sensis and third party online, mobile and voice services that form the Yellow Pages® network.

Interesting movements in the advertising market
Recently, we’ve seen some interesting movements in the media sector. The September quarter IAB report showed 3.3% growth in the online advertising market compared to the September quarter last year³. While this is a marked slowdown on last year, the results were really buoying for Sensis, as they show we are growing our share of the market.

Another interesting observation comes from our Adstream business. Adstream sits at the centre of the ad industry by helping marketers, agencies and media outlets, like TV, radio and newspaper publishers, manage and distribute their ad content. We’ve seen renewed growth in enquiries to Adstream recently. Could this mean the ad industry’s on its way back?

Our people have spoken
The other day, we received the results of our latest employee opinion survey. This is a global survey undertaken by Towers Perrin and it covers some of Australia’s, and the worlds, largest companies. In the latest survey, Sensis exceeded the Australian norm (the average of all Australian companies) in every category. Our results also benchmarked well among the world’s best employers, with results in a number of categories exceeding global norms. This is fantastic news. We work hard to ensure Sensis is a great place to work for our present and future employees. These results tell us we’re on the right track.

Sensis Sustainability Report
Finally, if you’d like to know more about Sensis’ strategy, operations, performance and impacts, I’d recommend you check out the 2008/9 Sensis Sustainability Report, which has just been launched. You can download it today from our newly upgraded corporate site.

Until next time
So that’s it for now. Have a happy, relaxing and safe Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back to you with a further update in February. In the meantime, thanks for all your support. You can rest assured we’ll be pulling out all stops to keep improving our value to you.

1: Omiture Site Catalyst, November 2009;
2: ibid
3: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Expenditure Report, quarter ended September 2009.

A high-tech, high-powered mapping vehicle will be putting areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George on the map this week…quite literally.

Little-known Queensland towns in this area will be some of the many new inclusions that Whereis® – Australia’s local mapping expert – will soon be adding to its extensive navigation map database of Australian cities, towns, landmarks and roads.

“The Whereis® four-wheel-drive has a large, round Trimble GPS receiver on the roof. It’s been causing a bit of a stir as it passes through towns in Queensland as people try to work out what’s going on,” Adrian Tout of Whereis® said.

“People get quite excited when they find out we’re mapping most of Queensland’s roads and landmarks so that locals, as well as visitors, have access to the most up-to-date map information on Queensland in their GPS device,” he said.

“While Queensland is one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations you wouldn’t know how to get to a lot of areas unless you had local knowledge. With Whereis maps in your GPS device, it’s like taking someone who knows the lay-of-the-land with you – with useful details such as the condition of the road.”

“Our team on the road is making a big effort to mark points of interest for travelers – boat ramps, highway rest areas, spectacular look-outs, motels and van parks, public river access points are all detailed for travelers keen to go off the beaten track.”

The Whereis® car has logged more than 245,000 kilometres of mainland Australian roads to date this year, and is on-schedule to log a further 6,500 kilometres in Queensland during the next few months. The Whereis team will then convert the data into digital maps to be used in GPS units, the online mapping site whereis.com, various navigation apps for the iPhone and the Whereis® Navigator application, which is accessible on selected Telstra mobile phones.

Andrew Wood, part of the Whereis mapping team has been assigned to this important mission. He has mapped thousands of kilometers of road for Whereis and has teamed up with a skilled driver to map Queensland. “This is the best job in the world – I get paid to drive around one of Australia’s most beautiful states,” he said.

“Some of the maps people are using to navigate Queensland today are extremely old and many have simply been digitised from older printed maps – and large parts of back roads on maps are also inaccurate. We also taking into account the many changes that have been made over the years with the development of intersection upgrades on main roads and new estates,” Andrew said.

The two-man Whereis team has already mapped more than 30,000km in south-eastern Queensland including Wallangarra, Gatton, Esk, Kingaroy, Chinchilla and Gooniwindi.

Andrew counts seeing two kangaroos going head to head in the middle of the road as one of the most unusual things he’s seen during his travels to date and is looking forward to visiting the Gulf and Cape York to try his hand at Barramundi fishing.

The Whereis car began its Queensland adventure in Stanthorpe, mapping an old road that had been re-opened. Over the next few weeks, the car will be focusing on the areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George with travelers and locals in mind.

Whereis® is now offering Australians three new ways to find their way around town – Whereis® fuel savings, Whereis® Navigator turn by turn instructions from the 1234 voice service and Whereis® Traffic.

Whereis® fuel savings
When it goes live on 17 August, Whereis® Fuel will take the guesswork out of finding cheap fuel.

The simple, new mobile application uses GPS data to help find the cheapest fuel nearby from Australia’s best source of fuel price information, MotorMouth.com.au. The fuel service adds to the existing suite of rich content already available through Whereis® Navigator which includes weather forecasts, traffic incident alerts and business searches via Yellow Pages®.

Mario Davoli, General Manager, Telstra Mobile Applications, said the Whereis® Navigator functionality means users can then opt to receive turn-by-turn, spoken directions from any location to help find the nearest and cheapest fuel supplier listed.

Sign up for a free, 7-day trial of Whereis® Navigator on compatible handsets* to take advantage of the full suite of GPS functions.

Easy as 1234
Dial 1234 on a Whereis® Navigator enabled handset and you can now receive turn-by turn spoken directions to Yellow™ and White Pages® listings anywhere across Australia.

Whereis® Navigator customers can now enjoy all the benefits of an in-car GPS via the new integrated mobile service.

Whereis® Navigator, Commercial Manager, Fred Curtis regards 1234 integration as a significant step towards seamless mobile navigation technology.

“The fact that it now only takes a quick phone call and single click on an SMS link for a Whereis® Navigator customer to be guided via spoken directions to one of thousands of locations across the country is a really exciting development,” he said

An added ‘send to a friend’ function allows for simple sharing of direction data via SMS.

Whereis® Traffic
Avoiding serious traffic jams and finding your way around major traffic incidents just got easier, with launch of Whereis® Navigator Traffic in Adelaide, Canberra and Perth.

The new feature launched initially in March in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane helps drivers choose the best route to their destination by re-directing them around high-impact traffic incidents.

Whereis® Navigator is available on a range of mobile handsets including a selection of Blackberry, iMate, Palm Treo, Samsung, HTC, Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices. For further information, customers can visit their local Telstra shop or dealer, www.telstra.com/navigator or call 13 22 00.

These days Whereis® maps can be found online, on your mobile, in your car and Sensis will now send them to your mobile when you call 1234 or 12456! But for more than 10 years you’ve probably been accessing Whereis® maps on your portable GPS device. So it was great to see a recent review of top Australian GPS devices identify and praise Whereis® as the digital map provider powering the top seven ranked GPS units in Australia.

The Choice Magazine review – a trusted information source for Australian consumers – looked at 17 of the leading GPS devices in Australia and tested them for their May publication. The extensive review benchmarked leading brands such as TomTom, Garmin, Navman, Uniden, Mio and the recent ALDI model.

The testing involved selecting and routing to six random destinations in Sydney – a railway station, an airport, a university, a medical centre, a golf course and a sports complex – all starting from the same point. Travel times and distances were also measured between all 17 systems.

The review found Whereis® demonstrated superior quality in terms of mapping accuracy (notably in regional Australia) and was the data powering each of the first seven ranked devices.

So make sure you know who’s powering your GPS device before you buy one – maps do make a big difference.

Today, Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst spoke at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon on what he describes as The Age of Engagement.

Digital media isn’t merely cannibalising traditional media. It’s giving marketers new tools to work with and the ability to build deep, valuable relationships with customers.

The first presentation in this series looks at how local search is helping marketers support consumer purchase decisions in exciting new ways. And how the next generation of local search is being driven by the mobile phone.

The second presentation looks at social media. Be sure to check back as this presentation will be uploaded shortly.

Times might be tough in the media sector today, but there’s a lot about the future to be excited about.

This week, Bruce Akhurst, the CEO of Sensis, will be sharing his thoughts on the future in a two-part presentation: The Age of Engagement.

The first part of his speech – covering the rise of local search – will be delivered at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Sydney this Thursday, 23 April.

And, in a departure from the norm, part two of this presentation, which covers the rise of social media will be delivered using – what else – social media!

So, pop back to the Speaking Sensis blog this Friday, 24 April. You’ll be able to view both of Bruce’s speeches.

This week Sensis and Telstra launched Whereis Navigator Traffic – a new service that will no doubt be music to the ears of Australian motorists.

Ever turned a corner only to find the traffic is banked up for kilometres, and it”’’s too late to change directions? Well, the new Whereis Navigator traffic service helps drivers choose the best route to their destination by re-directing them around high-impact traffic incidents.

So what does the launch of the new Whereis Navigator Traffic mean for me?

1. I can now avoid serious traffic jams and find my way around major traffic incidents more easily.
2. I can get to my destination more quickly
3. I don’t get stuck in traffic jams which means I don’t waste sitting in my car
4. I can keep my eyes on the road whilst I am automatically re-routed around high-impact traffic incidents, meaning a hassle-free driving experience.

So it appears this new feature has the ability to make my life easier, quicker and hassle free – now that’s my kind of thing!

The feeds of traffic information come from Australian Traffic Network (ATN) too, the same group that provide traffic reports to radio and television news stations daily via ABC and Austereo radio stations or on programs like Channel 7’s Sunrise.

The info is updated by ATN every 5 minutes and they collect data from a number of reliable sources- not just standard from road authorities but from helicopter feeds and from people like you and I.

Now that’s what I call handy. Available on selected Telstra GPS enabled phones. Whereis Navigator is like a GPS device in my pocket!

http://www.trafficnet.com.au

http://telstra.com.au/mobile/nextg/whereis_navigator.html