There’s been a lot of activity at ‘Brown Towers’ recently, not least of all was the release of Brownbook.net USA, Brownbook.net Canada, and Brownbook.net Australia.

So, in the last week we’ve gone from 2.2 million businesses listed to well over 27 million (2.2m UK, 22m USA, 1.1m Canada, 2m Australia).

Recent developments include:

- Added in FOUR new countries with base data - including the ability to search globally.  You can also add businesses in ANY world country and we’re even starting to see activity in countries where we haven’t even added base data.  We also added some diddy little flags to the home page content to denote which country the home page content is coming from.

- Re-prioritised the search results to give more weight to exact matches on business name

- Added the business name to the Recently Reviewed Businesses on the home page (so you can see which busineses people are commenting on

- Modified our OpenSearch API to support country selection in the API

- Added a more obvious link to enlarge photo reviews, and to play video reviews

- Added support for an ‘affiliate code’ so our partners can provide local search services using our PLATFORM, and they can earn money when businesses claim their listings.  This can be used in conjunction with our OpenSearch API.

- Our MOBILE PLATFORM is ALMOST ready for primetime.  A few people have been trialling it for us and initial feedback is good.  We’ve just got a few more tweaks of the UI to get it just right, and that should be live in about 2 weeks.

- We have a new member joined the UK Business Team: Sarah is responsible for getting the knowledge out about Brownbook.net and she’s going to be working on various news, promotional, and marketing-type activities.

I’ll make another update soon, the next version due in a couple of weeks has some great new tools for business owners and consumers, so stay tuned.

PS: check out this example of a business page with a photo gallery promotion (Emy Lou Photography in Brighton, UK).

A lot of people (I have found most) seem to use the term “Yellow Pages” when they talk about consumer-facing business directories, I guess its something that my generation grew up with.  But few people realise that the term is, in some countries, a registered trademark.

In the UK Yell Group owns the trademark and they guard it fiercely, indeed The Brownbook received several letters when we started out cautioning us, in no uncertain terms, about the use of the term.

I can’t help but wonder how long the term will remain an enforcable trademark?  How long before it becomes genericised?

Let me ask you this - and before you answer just spend a few minutes with Google News - do today’s up-coming consumer generations assign the same meaning to the term “yellow pages”?  Are Yell’s actions likely to stop people using the term in a generic context?

Well, for companies like us, yes.  One of the common complaints from trademark owners is that of ‘passing off’ - that the alledged infringer will somehow be confused with the TM owner and all us dumb consumers will somehow thing that the upstart is the TM owner.  Well, Brownbook.net is proud NOT to be associated with ‘Yellow Pages’ or the owner of that trademark, maybe I need to make that even clearer, just in case you missed that ;).

We’re moving ahead, creating a new path, clearing out the old and welcoming the new, why would we want to be associated with the stalwarts :).  Come the revolution…