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Microsoft tells me all about mobile search

A lot of fuss has been made about the power of Microsoft's purchase of Tellme, for example with Jeff Raikes, President, Business Division, Microsoft, explaining their vision for using Tellme's technologies in the mobile search area as being fundamental to their strategy. "Frankly, today TellMe already does more mobile search support than Google and Yahoo combined", said Raikes.

But how much of the power of mobile search is actually tied up with the input/voice recognition component?  Not much I would suggest, while not denying the convenience factor.

For instance Omar Tawakol, Chief Advertising Officer, Medio Systems, recently said in Search Insider:

In practical terms, assuring a pleasing mobile search means a number of things, including: providing consumers a click-saving experience that returns answers instead of links; inferring a consumer's context from his or her device, location and other information within ranking algorithms; balancing the subscriber's short-term and long-term preferences to present personalized, relevant results that adapt to a consumer's changing context; and providing rich client interfaces with streamlined interfaces including custom shortcuts, auto-completion of search terms, or voice inputs to simplify the user experience. Mobile search will ultimately only see the same success as its online counterpart when it provides consumers with an experience that matches the consumer context.

Not much of that above is actually helped by the Tellme front end, which means that perhaps their backend is much further developed than meets the eye?

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > MEX: PMN Mobile User Experience conference, London 2nd/3rd May 2007. > MEX Conference Manifesto: GOOBILE supports Manifesto Theme 9 - The mobile experience is limited to voice and text by in-efficient search and discovery mechanisms. We think any service should be accessible from the standby screen and it should be as simple as dialling a number.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Jumptap taps advertising giant WPP for funds

One of our more common post subjects - JumpTap, which competes against another of our favorites Medio Systems of Seattle - has raised an undisclosed round of financing from advertising giant WPP. The investment follows the announcement in November that Medio had raised $30 million from Accel Partners and others.

"It's clear that in time the mobile search and advertising market will be substantial," said WPP Digital CEO Mark Read, citing the 1.8 billion cellular phones in consumers' hands worldwide.

WPP took a 2.5% stake. Founded in 2004, JumpTap’s client base includes Alltel Wireless and Virgin Mobile USA, while the business had gross assets at the date of investment of $3m according to one report. That's an interesting number because JumpTap is a well-funded startup, having in October 2006 closed a $22 million round of venture financing. A year earlier it received $21 million in financing.

Oddly enough there is no announcement of the deal on Jumptap's website.

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > MEX: PMN Mobile User Experience conference, London 2nd/3rd May 2007. > MEX Conference Manifesto: GOOBILE supports Manifesto Theme 9 - The mobile experience is limited to voice and text by in-efficient search and discovery mechanisms. We think any service should be accessible from the standby screen and it should be as simple as dialling a number.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Tellme tells you via mobile voice search

Mobilecrunch reports on Tellme's new voice-activated mobile search application for directory services.

...TellMe mobile is a free Java application that you install on your phone. You can then find normal 411 information via a voice activated menu. Just hold the talk button and say the city and state you are searching in. Then say the business name. Phone and address information comes up on the screen. You can then call the business, see a map and/or get driving directions, and send the information to a friend via SMS.

Like the new Gmail mobile application, TellMe requires a Java enabled phone, see FAQs.

Mobilecrunch is hooked and gives a good review, well worth reading, but in the comments on the blog one reader takes the wind out of the sales of the launch with the following comment (Comment by TS):

All of this is well and good for people who care enough to actually download an application — which unfortunately is nowhere near enough of the population to make the whole venture profitable. People need a number or address and don’t want to pay two dollars to the carriers for directory assistance? They end up calling 1-800-free411, an intuitive process, a memorable number, nothing that involves work or figuring things out. Let’s call TellMe another step on the road to fully-integrated and useful mobility, but definitely not something that consumers will get excited about.

There is definitely a restricted audience for downloaded applications, unless Tellme can get in pre-installed.  On the other hand for those who can download it the charge per request is a fraction (data charges only) of the direct carrier call to directory services.

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > MEX: PMN Mobile User Experience conference, London 2nd/3rd May 2007. > MEX Conference Manifesto: GOOBILE supports Manifesto Theme 9 - The mobile experience is limited to voice and text by in-efficient search and discovery mechanisms. We think any service should be accessible from the standby screen and it should be as simple as dialling a number.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Virgin taps JumpTap for mobile search

JumpTap continues its string of partnerships with Virgin Mobile USA announcing a partnership to launch new search functionalities both within the MVNO's own content deck and off-portal across the mobile web.

The relationship with JumpTap will also allow Virgin Mobile to expand its mobile advertising capabilities.

Targeted advertising via search is the next step forward in Virgin Mobile's approach to mobile advertising – which first debuted earlier this year with the launch of SugarMama.

"The SugarMama incentive program was the first of its kind to offer customers free airtime in exchange for their viewing of ads online, once they opted-in," added Virgin Mobile CMO Howard Handler. "Both programs represent Virgin Mobile’s customer-centric view of advertising; in search, customers will be served sponsored links that are contextual and relevant once they’ve entered in a topic."

"Navigating through pages of WAP content, or trying to hit websites that aren't mobile-enabled to find that one thing you're looking for, will soon be a thing of the past," Virgin Mobile VP of mobile data services Dominick Tolli said in a prepared statement.

"By simply typing in the name of a favorite artist or topic into their wireless handsets, customers will immediately pull up results of all related content from both Virgin Mobile and sites across the Web."

The new search engine, which goes live in February 2007 and will be available on all Virgin Mobile 3G-enabled phones – such as Slice, Flasher V7, Switch_Back and more – at no additional cost over the existing fees related to WAP deck access and Web browsing.

Virgin Mobile is no ordinary mobile phone company and it has avoided the MVNO failures that hit experienced companies such as Disney - and it still sees plenty of room for growth in the US youth market. Expect more innovations in mobile search and marketing.

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Mobile search - getting your mobile site in shape

Ross Dunn at The SEO Blog has a good roundup of what it takes to make your site mobile-friendly.

...there just happens to be a piece of the Internet that I bet you haven't made the leap to yet and it is going to be BIG. This new space is mobile search and mobile Internet surfing, says Dunn.

Dunn then explains the current state of affairs, introduces .mobi, and gives a list of references for building mobile sites.  If you're new to this it is worth a read.

Pity that he left off one of our own favourite mobile site building services - Scott Rafer's WINKsite - here you can build a powerful mobile website for free, just like the one that hosts Goobile (down on the lower left column).

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) .

JumpTap integrates mobile search and pay-per-call

Pay Per Call advertising company Ingenio has partnered with mobile search and advertising company JumpTap to provide pay-per-call ad listings within JumpTap search results.

While Ingenio's pay-per-call offering began in a desktop environment when the company launched in 2004, momentum has been growing for mobile implementations, according to Marc Barach, Ingenio's chief marketing officer.

Prior to September, Ingenio had two mobile partners: AOL Mobile and Go2. In the past few months, Ingenio has inked mobile distribution deals with Microsoft's Windows Live Mobile, Mapquest and JumpTap.

Ingenio has 105 employees and top shelf investors such as The Carlyle Group and Benchmark Capital.

How does it work?

When a user sends a search query to JumpTap’s custom branded system through their mobile phone, they are presented with pay-per-call ads along with the search results, letting carriers like Alltel, a JumpTap partner, generate additional revenue if the user calls that particular business from their phone. Pay-per-call only charges the advertiser for the ad if the user initiates a call.

The press release contains some interesting statistics and market research, for example Jupiter Research rates mobile ad spending in the U.S. at $1.4 billion in 2006, projected to grow to $2.9 billion in 2011. The Kelsey Group estimates the market for pay-per-call advertising will more than double each year for the next five years, with revenues reaching $3.7 billion by 2010. So both mobile ads and pay per call are rapidly growing markets.

"Consumers are starting to be mobile information consumers. As a result, we're seeing hardware and services providers cluster around that need, providing better ways for consumers to use their devices to get local services and information," Barach told ClickZ.

"We believe pay-per-call as a business model will be the primary monetization model for mobile search, bringing more advertisers to that environment and serving useful content to consumers."

The ClickZ article also had these great statistcis and observations:

Barach says advertisers understand that the value of a phone call is higher than that of a click, and that's reflected in Ingenio's per-call prices. On Ingenio's system, the average advertiser bid for a call is between $8 and $10.

He also notes that the nature of mobile searches is changing. While the majority of searches continues to be at-hand or impulse searches for things like taxis, restaurants or flowers, a quarter of mobile searches are now made in more "considered purchase" categories, like financial services, travel, or cable and satellite TV.

That's good news for Ingenio, since keywords for those categories tend to fetch a higher price in Ingenio's auction, as much as $6 to $30 per call compared to impulse buys, which tend to be in the $2 to $4 range, Barach said.

Good news indeed!

Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

V-Enable claims first mobile voice search patent

Following on from our coverage of companies operating in voice search for mobile, V-Enable of San Diego CA claims that the company is the first in the mobile sector to receive a mobile voice search technology patent.

V-ENABLE has been granted Patent #7,054,818 by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

"We are very excited to receive the industry's first patent on developing and creating a voice-enabled mobile user interface, which can be applied toward mobile search, directory assistance, navigation applications and more," said Dipanshu Sharma, VENABLE's co-CEO and CTO.

Sharma proclaims that "voice is the way to go" for value-added mobile search services, and industry watchers say it is likely to be a $11 billion business by 2008.

That is a big prediction, but the trend is right even if the prediction is ambitious.

The V-Enable website carries an article from the Investors Business Daily called Google Goes Into Mobile Search, But Wireless Carriers Resisting and for anyone interested in mobile search it is well worth reading. For example it mentions one of our poster-boy mobile search start-ups Medio Systems: 

But in September Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Vodafone and Verizon Communications, debuted its free Get It Now search service, using technology from search startup Medio Systems of Seattle. Subscribers can search for downloadable multimedia content from Verizon, including games and ring tones.

And Nokia pondering which way to go:

"From the Nokia point of view we need to play in all areas, even in terms of creating our own Internet experience (on phones)," said Tero Ojanpera, Nokia's chief technology officer.

And also, beyond the hype and the hope states the current state of play:

Google ranks No. 1 in wireless searches, just as it does in online searches, say two research firms, M:Metrics and Telephia.

Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Most mobile content 12 clicks away - Google

Reporting from ITU 2006 in Hong Kong Silicon.com's Telecom's columnist Jo Best reported on a Google representative talking on mobile search.

The favourite phone search term is a mirror of its internet equivalent apparently - people are looking for sex. One of the other favourites though is very mobile specific - ringtones. There could yet be hope for the content market, it seems. He warns though operators have to pull their socks up - most content is 12 clicks away from the user, apparently. Ten or 11 clicks too far, you might suggest.

That's a lot of clicks, and one reason that Sol Trujillo the imported CEO of Telstra Australia drove a mantra of "one click" as they designed their 3G HSPDA mobile phone menu experience.  Insiders said that if you didn't show the one-click slide right up front when presenting new ideas or content then the presentation stopped right there!

It's a good design idea - but in life everything can't be one click - after all Japan's DoCoMo has 10,000 official sites linked through its i-mode system, and more than 100,000 "unofficial" sites e.g. linked through URLs and into the web, and no endorsement from DoCoMo.  They can't all be "one click" from the top menu!

But if Google can cut the clicks in half or more then that's progress. Google is also actively working on moving away from clicks altogether - to voice search on mobile. Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, spoke at ITU of voice not for search but for simply voice activation for large numbers of illiterate users in emerging markets.

Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Voice-driven mobile search - more than a whisper

Thought-leaders such as Google in search are known to consider that the killer enabler of mobile search is, wait for it, voice! Actually mobile search (I'm talking here about mobile phones not mobility as in laptops) is much more widespread than generally known in places like the US.

Nevertheless, it has to be true that a great voice interface would make mobile search potentially ubiquitous - whether searching on-deck or off-deck.

Aside from Google the traditional speech solutions companies are trying to claim this space. Their problem is that know very little about the mobile phone ecosystem, but they can learn quickly. For example Nuance Communications recently agreed to acquire MobileVoiceControl, an Ohio provider of speech-enabled mobile search and messaging services (for an undisclosed amount).

Nuance recently launched their Nuance® Mobile Speech Platform - an architecture of tools and components providing mobile application developers.

With applications designed on the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform, users can speak natural queries to find ringtones, locate the nearest Starbucks, search the Web, or dictate a complete SMS or email ... thereby eliminating the need to “thumb” in text using predictive technology or mini QWERTY keyboards.

We don't know where Microsoft is heading with voice search, but we know that they regard mobile search as a high priority, so they are no doubt weighing up acqusitions:

"In recent years the search box has fundamentally changed the way people interact with the Internet, but we have only just begun to scratch the surface for what search and live Internet services can do in the mobile space," said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft.

Perhaps one of the companies they are looking at is VoiceBox who recently appointed an experienced industry CSO - Victor Melfi. Melfi says that VoiceBox has paid particular attention to solving "the problem of the mobile device interface" and that's where he sees their advantage. The key is in having an embedded application that works seamlessly and flawlessly and one with which you can convince the mobile handset makers to risk deploying - and all at a miniscule price per handset. 

But the West is by no means alone in progressing mobile voice search. Alvin Wang Graylin the CEO and CoFounder of Chinese mobile company minfo writes me that as a Natural language mobile search service in China minfo works on both SMS and WAP.

We offer free search services for a broad range of topics nationwide to consumers throughout china. Not only do we offer natural language search, we also offer multi-language support, where users can input queries in Chinese, pinyin or English, and they can even mix the languages in a single query.

With minfo's offering there is no software to download, no command to remember and no syntax to follow. At the moment minfo interprets natural language text, and Alvin tells me that voice search is in the labs - release date not yet available. Stay tuned to Goobile to learn more about minfo and China - the world's largest mobile phone and mobile search market.

Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.

Beyond transcoding - getting sites right for mobile search

Mobile search is about finding things out on the web from a mobile phone, and the "receiving end" of that is the actual site and the experience is viewing the mobile site.

Optimizing sites for mobile is in its infancy in the US, and in most places outside Japan and Korea. DoCoMo in Japan skipped the whole problem because it declined to adopt the WAP standard for mobile webites, even though WAP was designed by its bretheren global carriers.  But rightly the DoCoMo i-mode team recognised that that (that it was designed by telecoms engineers) would be its downfall as a consumer experience and instead make the toally radical decision to opt for their own cut-down version of HTML which they called C-HTML.

These days i-mode sites will cope with XHTML and all the latest.  But that original decision had enormous ramifications. For one thing the average coding time for web developers was cut by 60% compared to WAP, for another web designers and developers needed no retraining, and for another the sites could be viewed and tested and fine-tuned in a browser.

One result is that for i-mode in Japan today DoCoMo has about 10,000 "approved and official" i-mode sites - those linked into the official menu and provided with intergated billing - and more than 100,000 unofficial sites.  The unofficial sites are any person, group or organisation who wants to write a web site for mobile, and about 50% of those are commercial.  That's a massive ecosystem created by that smart decision up-front in 1998.

Back to today, Webpronews Search Insider has an article on how to finetune your site for mobile, and some good tips.  There's no rocket science but it is an easy read, and worth a glance if you're new to mobile web site optimisation.

Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!

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Sponsored Links & Partner Sites: > TelecomWeb: Global Business News, Market Research and Competitive Analysis. > Wireless Business Forecast: Bridging Wireless Technology, Media And Your Business. > > msearchblog: pushing the barrier on mobile search, advertising, recommendation, social networking and communities. > Mobile Gambling Summit: London 22-23rd January, secure register quote "I Mode" for savings.

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.