[Geowanking] gazetteers of businesses?

[Anselm Hook]

I'd like to quickly and easily seed a social annotation project with world
wide businesses;  hotels, coffee-shops and the like...  are there any
free, low-hassle databases of such?

Clearly businesses want to make themselves visible but the only way I can
think of offhand is to goto commercial aggregators like Yellow Pages or
city chamber of commerces - and this is tedious to do for the 16k cities
around the world not to mention innumerable smaller towns.

Simply letting people add all of these, or scraping the innumerable sites
that have this kind of content is not a good solution.  In the former it
would take too long, and in the latter there is questionable legality.

VMap0 and US Census have some of this; and there are some gazetteer sites
that have some of this; but thinking about it I can't really say I've
heard of anything that is specifically a free compendium of businesses...

It feels like I am missing something since this clearly has a lot of value
and the businesses themselves have incentive to be visible.

 - a