Mobile Groove

In brief: Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, recounts the key takeaways of the new report showing the growth of Mobile Touch Web sites outpaces the growth of apps in the Apple and Android app stores why commerce rocks on the Mobile Touch Web PLUS a look a the Virtual Roundtable and what mobile industry entrepreneurs, authorities and pundits think about the Mobile Touch Web and the potential impact on how we live, work and shop.

Taptu, the search and discovery engine that indexes touchscreen content, reports that the Mobile Touch Web – websites and destinations created specifically for access via touchscreen devices such as the Apple iPhone – has grown 35 percent since last quarter. Unlike other mobile Web content, this content stands out through finger-friendly layouts and light-weight pages that are faster to load over cellular networks. The report, which covers January 2010 thru April 2010, also shows Mobile Touch Web sites rose to 440,100 from 326,600 in January.

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We’re back! It was a bumpy ride, but I used the traditional summer slowdown to move to a new host and connect with an experienced team of professionals specialized in helping businesses develop converged Web and Mobile solutions in preparation for a new-look MSearchGroove.

But the real news is Pump Up The Volume: An Assessment of Voice-Enabled Web Search on the iPhone, MSearchGroove’s new-release white paper assessing the performance of voice search on an iPhone offered by ChaCha, Google and Vlingo (using Yahoo!), which you can download here. The report is especially timely, coming on the heels of today’s announcement by Google that it has fine-tuned the mobile app versions of its Google Voice service for Blackberry and Android. (More on the user experience via this detailed post at GigaOm.)

The top-level findings: ChaCha, a fast-growing SMS mobile search service available in the U.S. in the industry, “proved superior” to two other voice-enabled search options for the iPhone: the Google Mobile App with Voice and Vlingo for iPhone, a voice enabled application that allows users to direct their spoken queries to Google or Yahoo! (For the purposes of this study Vlingo provided a spoken interface to the Yahoo! search engine.)

ChaCha proved to offer exceptional results, with its human guides interpreting the search query accurately in the majority of cases. According to the study, ChaCha interpreted natural language search queries, that is, queries asked as questions, accurately in 94.4 percent of the tests and delivered an accurate search result in 88.9 percent of cases. The Google voice recognition technology interpreted queries accurately in 16.7 percent of tests and delivered accurate search results in 22.2 percent of tests. The Vlingo for iPhone voice recognition technology correctly interpreted queries in 72.2 percent of cases and delivered accurate results (via Yahoo!) in 27.8 percent of tests.

An exclusive podcast with Bob Rosenschein PLUS a look at some recent mobile advertising stats from the U.S., Vietnam, and Japan.

The 450+ attendees at Think Mobile that descended on NYC in March can count themselves lucky. We were treated to an excellent line-up of 60+ top-notch speakers, chosen by my esteemed colleague Matthew Snyder, Founder & CEO of ADObjects, a strategic cross-media consultancy, for their insights, ideas, and willingness to share both. Feedback from my panel on Mobile Search & SEO has been overwhelmingly positive, in part because Matthew and I brainstormed and purposely brought together an eclectic mix of individuals passionate about their work and the mobile industry at large.

Today I kick off this “mini-series” with Bob Rosenschein, Answers Corporation CEO and mobile search “guru” (my description- he’s far too modest). The company’s social search service WikiAnswers.com has seen some stellar growth, according to comScore. In March, the measurement and market research firm reported that WikiAnswers.com U.S. unique visitors reached nearly 19 million in January 2009, compared to 729,000 in December 2006. I caught up with Bob to get the inside track on his company’s mobile ambitions, discuss the key criteria for an optimal mobile search experience, and the role of mobile advertising in the scheme of things.

Listen to the podcast. [16:18]

Mobile social networks (or at least the clever ones) are mapping out business models that allow them to transition from being meeting places for communities to being marketplaces for commerce.

It’s early days and there are no easy answers – all the more reason to attend Mobile Advertising & the Rise of Social Networking: What does it mean for Brands, Agencies and Service Providers?, a Knowledge & Networking Seminar organized by AIME, (The Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment), this Thursday in London. The seminar provides the perfect opportunity to explore key learnings with industry pioneers and network over drinks. (The event begins at 6:30 p.m. and wraps up around 11 p.m. More details on the program and venue here.)

One company I look forward to hearing is Flirtomatic, a pioneer mobile flirting service that has had great success monetizing mobile users through conversation with added fun and great content such as virtual flowers and kisses. The company recently extended its reach to enable members to give the objects of their affection real gifts including chocolate and sexy underwear. As Matt Dicks, Commercial Director for Flirtomatic, put it in an interview with AIME’s Andrew Darling: The approach to mobile advertising is about marketing entertainment and content services as part of its mobile social network. “It’s about integrating ads and brands into the fabric of a social networking service – enabling premium gifting between users and using advertising to support content.”

In theory, it should be a breeze to deliver the right content to the right user over mobile. The mobile is a personal device and marketers can dive deep into data collected by mobile operators and the growing number of companies staking their turf in the mobile services and advertising value chain based on their ability to gather and wield analytics.

But a recent Media Post interview with Bob Walczak, CEO of mobile ad network MoPhap, points out that behavioral targeting (BT) has quite a few hurdles to c…

With all the excitement around BREW 2007 it was easy to miss the formal launch of the BREW Consumer Portal, which pairs content discovery with a storefront where users can buy and download content they like. (Details in this release.) However, it speaks volumes about Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS) and what we can expect of its on-device portal (ODP) strategy. The core of the offer is uiOne, the customizable user interface platform QIS inherited from Trigenix, following the company’s acquisi…