UBL communicated today with its Agency Partners about UBL Direct improvements and its delivery to the imminent Apple Maps.
Dear UBL Partner,
We are excited to advise you of some important product improvements at Universal Business Listing, and how they might impact our service to you. We recently announced the launch of the UBL Direct product feature which we are advising you today will replace the Quick Listings that were part of many of our product tiers. This is a significant improvement in our distribution on behalf of your clients.
UBL Direct will now deliver business profiles directly to over 20 key publishers (and growing) via API, FTP, and other methods, resulting in faster, more enhanced listing display. See the current list at https://www.ubl.org/Products/UBLDirect.aspx. As experts in the online world, you will appreciate that such direct technical connections are a logical evolution, and UBL expects the number of these sites and data providers to grow rapidly. The Quick Listing method, which was largely manual, will be retired.
This change will impact those of you who are displaying reporting data to your customers including links and publication confirmations, via our dashboard or reporting API.
To be clear, this is not a new product; it is a feature. As such, it will result in no immediate price change to you, but we urge you to review which product sets you are offering your customers. Many of our partners are still using our “Basic” package which does not have access to UBL Direct, nor does it take advantage of any of our claiming services which help you manage the transition of Google Places to Google+ Local, for example.
You may also be curious about the impact of the newly announced Apple Maps on our service. While this has not been released, UBL’s listings are included in the information of the primary data providers, so we are confident of inclusion. We will be watching the launch closely.
Finally, we want to advise you that the name of the parent company of UBL has been changed from Name Dynamics, Inc. to UBL Interactive, Inc. We believe this will save confusion as we continue to grow our organization around the strength of the UBL brand. All invoices will now come from UBL Interactive and you should advise your accounting departments of the change. Otherwise this will not affect your agreements with UBL.
We thank you again for your support and our team will be happy to answer any questions you have about our product developments.
Sincerely,
The Support Team at UBL
Local citations, Local Search Optimization, location based search apps, UBL reporting
UBL Direct, Universal Business Listing, Apple Maps, Google+, Google Places