Tegic, the company which invented predictive text and helped to drive the $40 billion a year text message industry in the process, is now eyeing mobile music and believes it has the answer to the frustrations of song searching on handsets.
Mobile search engines are a potent way to generate value, but recommendation engines, which encourage users to keep coming back for similar content, might pay bigger dividends in the long term.
Plain-vanilla mobile search – the approach that delivered a long list of blue links to users’ mobile phones – is yesterday’s news. Now both branded and white-label mobile search providers are scrambling to do one better: deliver the right results to the right users based on the clues they leave, such as their query patterns, download history, location and time of day.
Enter recommendation engines, and a variety of new technologies and techniques, designed to play matchmaker between mobile entertainment content and fans.
Two articles: An examination of path-breaking apporaches to mobile location search & How best to serve the senior market for mobile services.
Finding content on the mobile internet is easier if someone else has recommended it. Peggy Anne Salz reports on the ways operators and providers are putting peers first.
