Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for inviting us to the committee. It is a pleasure to appear in front of you.
With me this afternoon is Martin Aubut, who is senior manager, social commerce, of the Yellow Pages Group. Martin is an expert on the Internet. I thought having him with me today could be useful should your questions touch on issues that I am less familiar with.
In addition to my responsibilities as general counsel of Yellow Media Inc., the ultimate parent company of Canpages and Yellow Pages Group, I am the acting privacy officer of the company.
I thought I would start by giving you a brief introduction of Yellow Pages Group, also known as YPG, which acquired Canpages in June 2010.
Yellow Media Inc. is a leading Internet company in our network of companies, which includes Yellow Pages Group, Trader Corporation, and Canpages. Yellow Media owns and operates some of Canada's leading properties and publications, including Yellow Pages directories, YellowPages.ca, Canada411.ca, AutoTrader.ca, CanadianDriver.com, RedFlagDeals.com, and LesPAC.com.
Our online destinations reach over 11.5 million visitors monthly, and our mobile applications for finding local businesses, deals, and vehicles have been downloaded over two million times. We're also a leader in national digital advertising through Mediative, a provider of digital advertising and marketing solutions to national agencies and advertisers.
Predecessors of YPG published their first directories in 1908. We have operations in all the provinces and territories of Canada. There are approximately 2,500 employees at YPG, 530 at Canpages, and 1,200 at Trader.
Through the acquisition of Canpages, we hope to be in a better position to compete with other major online players such as Google. We believe that our acquisition of Canpages will sharpen our online competitiveness by expanding our sales force, capabilities, and offerings, thus accelerating our move online.
If you factor in the sales professionals we have at YPG, Trader, and Canpages, we have approximately 2,000 people in the sales organization. We're looking at a better utilization of that tremendous sales capacity, targeted at small and medium-sized Canadian enterprises.
You should know that Street View, the service currently offered on Canpages.ca, is licensed from two third parties, one of which is MapJack, for parts of the cities of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Street View has been in effect since 2008; Google Street View is used for the rest of Canada.
Depending on where you are within our universe of websites, we are currently using Street View technology from Google and Microsoft, in addition to MapJack, the provider that Canpages has historically used.
I am pleased to confirm to the committee that Canpages' supplier of the Street Scene service, MapJack, has not been used to collect either Wi-Fi network data or Wi-Fi payload data. Therefore, we have never been in possession of any such data.
Yellow Media Inc., YPG, Trader, and Canpages are fully committed to abiding by the privacy legislation applicable to our business.
We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.
Thank you.