Google Places and Google Local Business Center - What's the Difference?

Google Realigns Local Listings with Place Pages
Google Local Business Center recently changed their name to Google Places. The change is supposed to align their portal for local businesses with the 'Place Pages' they introduced in late 2009. Along with the name change came several additional features you should be aware of if you're marketing your local business online.
Google's Place Pages are primarily for local businesses, but they also provide useful information about cities, neighborhoods, points of interest, and mass transit stops. You can see a Place Page simply by going to Google Maps and entering in a search term. When the results come up, you'll have several results with representative pins on the map. When you hover over a pin, a box will pop up and in that box is a 'More Info' link. That link takes you to the Place Page for that local business or location.
So when you go to Google Places and fill out your information, it will automatically be listed here on Google Maps and in Google's local search listings. So whichever platform your customer uses to find you, they'll be able to find you.
What Else Can I Do With Google Places?
Google also announced several changes along with Google Places rebranding. The major ones are: the ability to define service areas for your business and the ability to use customized QR codes (more on what this is in a minute).
Add Your Service Areas
One of the limitations of Google Local Business Center was the inability for you to define which local service areas you serve. If you are physically located in one city but service several surrounding towns or wanted to be able to use neighborhood or subdivision names to help narrow down your target audience, you couldn't. You had to resort to including this kind of information in the additional description block where your prospects would probably never see it.
But that's changed. In Google Place listings, you simply list the names of the areas you service in the service areas block and then you can use the additional description block for differentiating yourself. And if you're a home-based business, now you can actually hide your physical address as well. Although it remains to be seen (and tested) whether or not this will hurt your placement.
Customized QR Location Codes
First of all, a definition is in order...what's a QR code? A QR code is similar to a traditional bar code except it's two dimensional and can hold several hundred time the amount of information a normal bar code can.
Many mobile phones have scanners that can scan these codes, so if you have one on your website or on your promotional materials, your customers could scan it into their phone or GPS and have it take them right to your store. It could also give them additional information about your business like business hours, special deals for people with the code, etc.
The customized QR code that Google Places will automatically create for you will take customers to your Google Places Page when they scan it in. So you could put it on business cards, stationary, newspaper ads, or any other printed material and encourage people to find out more about you online.
You can expect that Yahoo! and Bing won't be far behind Google on these developments. After all the local search market is growing exponentially and will only continue to expand over the coming years. As mobile devices become an even bigger part of our lives and we leave our home-based PCs and laptops for mobile computing platforms, it will become even more critical for you to be found when your customers go searching online for you.