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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.

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.

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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.

China's mobile search users up 202%

ChinaTechNews reported that CCID Consulting Co Ltd, a Ministry of Information Industry think-tank, issued a report "Research Report on the Business Pattern and Investment Perspective of China's Mobile Search Market", stating users using search applications on their mobile phones will increase dramatically this year.

The report says that China's mobile search user numbers reached 9.9 million last year. It is estimated that the number will be 29.898 million this year, an increase of 202%.

Earlier this year, Chinese search engine Baidu.com and Nokia announced they are collaborating to make mobile search easier and more convenient in Chinese-speaking markets, including mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

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

MMA positive outlook for US mobile search in US

The Mobile Marketing Association report on mobile search shows that its catching on quickly: most US cell phone users are interested in the service and a fair amount (41%) say mobile search ads would not have an adverse impact on their use of the service.

The survey, of 587 US adults with cell phones, found that half of them who have not tried mobile search are interested in trying it over the next few months and 48% of current non-users expect to use mobile search at least once a week. Moreover, the demographic information on those who already use mobile search is compelling. Respondents with an annual income of $50,000-75,000 conduct an average of 16 searches a month, the most of any segment.

Steve Boom, SVP Broadband and Mobile at Yahoo!, said the company is encouraged by paid mobile search ad revenues in Japan, which are in the "tens of millions" overall now. "But Japan is up to five years ahead," he said.

To get a feeling for the future, see where data revenues (and this is not SMS) have grown 39% in Japan, and advertising and promotion to mobiles (onto the handset) is about a $250 million business already.

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

Operators must own mobile search - Informa

Mobile Search Growing as Off-Portal Interest Mounts

Operators increasingly fear disintermediation because of the aggressive moves of major search engine companies to own the end-user relationship, according to a recent report from Informa Telecoms & Media.

The report urges operators to consider white-label solutions, or schemes that allow them to own the end-customer relationship.

"By owning search, operators will likely be positioned to retain direct advertising revenues generated by pay-per-click and pay-per-call schemes and thus protect themselves from the disintermediation that will occur when branded search engine companies move to control the click-stream," notes Peggy Anne Salz, author of the report.

Salz notes the importance of mobile search personalization.

"While search is clearly critical to monetizing content, operators and content providers shouldn't short change themselves - or their users - by merely retrofitting Web search solutions for the mobile Internet," notes Salz.

"Search paired with personalization, which involves matching the right content to the right users, and recommendation is a much more powerful combination."

Against this backdrop, an increasing number of companies are harnessing recommendation engines - modeled on the approach of online bookseller Amazon - suggests content on the basis of the individual user's past preferences or on the basis of what a user's peers consumed, or both.

Personalized search will ensure that content matches based on information such as users profiles, preferences, click history, time of day and location, will encourage users to explore the content and drive data revenue says the report.

"Mobile search is indisputably a potent way to generate value," adds Salz.

Moving forward, personalization and recommendation will be must-have features of mobile content services. It's clearly in operators' interests to deliver effective and targeted commerce experiences to their customers. This means delivering the right content to the right users.

Salz suggests search and discovery will be about more than finding content according to key words and concepts such as music or sports.

"It's going to have to help users express themselves, their interests and connect around content," Salz says. "Finding and sharing content with people who have mutual interests will be the next killer app."

I guess the enviable success of Youtube and the recent explosion of Myspace point to the truth of that assertion for the Internet.  In theory, the mobile should produce an even bigger wave, since it is inherently more personal and private, and personalizable

- Peggy Anne Salz, a freelance technology writer and author based in Europe, tracks not only the global mobile telecom industry, but also the business models and trends that will shape its future.

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

China digital music dominates CDs

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News from China includes the following, reading the South China Morning Post in HK this morning, en route to Helsinki:

• According to Shanghai's iResearch digital income (or non-CD sales) accounted for 36% of the mainland's music revenue last year, or 2.1 billion yuan.  By the end of 2006 iResearch expects that digital sales will account for 88.5% of music revenue.
• Tom Online distributes internet music through mobile value-added services and in the 3rd quarter 2005 more than 40% of its wireless internet revenue came from music.
• The mainland's top-ranked free multiplayer role-playing internet game is the 2.5D-graphic South Korean import Yulgang, licensed and operated by Beijing-based 17game a subsidiary of China.com. Yulgang registered 250,000 peak concurrent users at the end of September.  A massive number but still well short of the 660,000 current users hit by Tencent Holdings beta run of QQ Fantasy (Tencent has opened 44 server farms for the game).

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

Accelerated take-up projected for mobile search

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From Jeffrey Herzog's Reverse Direct Marketing - The Authority in Search - we read "it is increasingly evident the extent to which we are in the very early phases of mobile search".

According to data from Telephia, search sites have a 2.9% reach among mobile Internet users, well behind e-mail and weather sites, but ahead of sports, entertainment and gaming sites. This certainly proves that mobile search has an audience (also evidenced by the expanding roster of start-ups and established players rushing into the space), but as with other mobile data categories, questions remain about its growth trajectory.

While noting that there is no killer application for mobile data, and an increasing fractionalisation of attention to the rapidly increasing quanity of content on handsets, that nevertheless:

Data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that search is still second to e-mail among online activities but is beginning to close the gap. It’s safe to assume, then, that a significant percentage of online sessions start with search. If we consider the short amount of time that search took to be fundamental to the Internet and project that onto mobile phones, we’re looking at an accelerated take-up.

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

Ability to share content a key selling point

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In Digital Bulletin, published by Brand Republic, Dominic Conlon writes in Comment: Mobile content users are doing it for themselves:

... for the younger demographic, the ability to share content is a key selling point -- it reinforces social links. And the quirkier the content, the more popular it is. One of the most successful recent mobile campaigns was Pot Noodle's "noodling" campaign, in which people submitted pictures of themselves or mates eating pot snacks in unusual places. This underlines the trend of people wanting to make content their own.

What's more, for that critical youth market, the mobile phone is only a part of their communications network, alongside email and IM usage. This means a great opportunity to deliver content which can cover both web and mobile usage, and flow easily between the two platforms.

In turn, this explains why sites that allow users to upload picture content, customise the images and either send to friends' phones or publish them in blogs, are growing in popularity. So much the better if users can customise and experiment for free, and only pay a one-off charge for the service when they actually send to a phone -- the consumer and media debate about subscription-based mobile services and their opaque charging structures is still gathering momentum and shows no sign of peaking.

And all the more compelling when IM is on mobile, a feature which has many detractors who doubt its worth and potential popularity - but for reasons including those above IM (including presence) will be a hugely successful mobile application as one component of communications for the target demographic.

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

CNET Japan mobile search notes from SEJ

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CNET Japan's Search Engine Conference is covered by Search Engine Journal with several entries centered on mobile search, covered by Loren Baker:

Ryuichi Ishida, Editor in Chief of CNET Japan, kicked off today’s conference with a review of the Innovation Conference and this fall’s theme of search technology. Search Engines presenting at the conference include Yahoo Japan & Overture, Google Japan, Ask Japan, Goo, Big Globe, MSN and LiveDoor.

...The underlying theme of the conference is blogs, Web 2.0, and the user controlled Internet experience. Microsoft Corp’s Derrick Connell followed CNET’s Ishida with his presentaton: Beginning of the Beginning for Search and Digital Marketing.

Has search innovation reached its peak? No, we’re at the beginning and Derrick feels energized by the future of search. Users are becoming less and less satisfied with complex queries and time taken to find relevant answer in search.

Other entries, all worth reading:

Mobile & Local Search Japan

...most Japanese mobile portals here today are offering additional mobile search services such as mobile RSS aggregation, mobile blogging, news search and other advanced mobile offerings which are more popular in Japan than traditional PC based web search.

Yahoo Japan : Search Social Media

...the presentation showcased Yahoo Mobile (quite advanced) and news search.

Ask Jeeves Search and Web 2.0

...Ask.jp recently launched a new blog search which is an important next step which Ask plans on integrating across all Ask properties. Note : As popular as blogs and mobile Internet are in Japan, search is still very basic, leaving a huge market for these Search 2.0 offerings from companies like Ask and Yahoo. And given the high level of adoption by the Japanese market of personal blogs and user reviews, the Search 2.0 offerings are sure to be successful.

Google Global : Open Source, API, Mission - CNET Japan

Blog Session

... from LiveDoor, an extremely popular Japanese portal with blogging offering and blog search. Blogs are 35% of LiveDoor’s traffic. 45% of LiveDoor bloggers are women, as blogging is much more popular among Japanese females, especially moms & housewives, than Americans. As stated by Daniel from Ask Jeeves, personal blogging is very popualr in Japan, but the market for business, news or product review oriented blogging (Pro Blogging) is a bit weaker than the United States or Europe.

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

US adults dominate mobile for email, weather and web search

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A report by Telephia shows that email, weather and search websites are the most popular categories among US consumers logging online via their mobile phones.

According to Telephia’s recent Mobile Internet Report, 4.8% of the 191 million US wireless population accessed web email sites in June 2005.

Weather-related sites posted a reach of 3.9% of the total wireless audience, while the Search category attracted 2.9%. The Sports category came in at the No. 4 spot, with a total reach of 2.5%, while the News/Politics category attracted 2.1% of wireless consumers logging on via their wireless devices.

What I found very interesting in the survey was that except for entertainment, games and portal websites the audiences for top mobile Internet categories - Email, Weather and Search - skew towards the 35-54 year-old demographic!

Forty-one percent of Email website visitors were in the 35-54 age group, as were 43% and 32% of Weather and Search website visitors, respectively. The same is true for Sports (41%), News/Politics (45%), and Business/Finance (41%) audiences.

What this says about the US mobile market I'm not sure - but it does say something important to those smart enough to work it out.

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