Mobile World Congress: White Label Mobile Search Provider Medio Partners With SurfKitchen; Reports Downloadable Mobile Content Isn’t The Main Attraction When It Comes to Search » mobilegroove

In-Brief: Medio teams up with SurfKitchen to deliver search, recommendation and targeted advertising via the on-device portal. Medio also draws from internal research to reveal search stats and CTRs.

The news today from Medio – that it has partnered with SurfKitchen around an on-device portal (ODP) offering – is both vague and unexpected. I’m left with more questions than answers, but that could change later today. I’ve received an email that Michael “Luni” Libes, Medio Chief Architect and co-founder, is available for a briefing.

According to the press release, Medio, which just launched an ODP based on its own technology, has today teamed up with SurfKitchen to “offer a seamless search experience.” According to the companies, the partnership will “enable consumers to discover and use a broader range of services, as well as search for relevant online content within an integrated on-device experience.”

It’s not clear how this fits together, but, for the moment, it looks like a case of more is better as far as Medio is concerned.

Medio clearly embraces the ODP model and has chosen to release its own ODP as well as extend its reach and bring search, recommendation and targeted advertising to a wider audience via SurfKitchen. After all, SurfKitchen does count an impressive number of operator wins. It isn’t an exclusive relationship since JumpTap, in this exclusive Q&A, emphasized its partnership with SurfKitchen and stressed the merits of melding mobile search & advertising with the active idle screen. (Does this mean AIS beats ODP – or is it horses for courses?)

It’s also noteworthy that SurfKitchen recently launched SurfKit Phonetop, an integrated suite of on-device applications that “offers extensive service choice for users and ‘zero click’ discovery.” I’m fortunate to have a briefing with Dave Evans, SurfKitchen CTO and widget guru, and will be sure to get his side of the Medio partnership as well as his take on the role of the Phonetop product in the scheme of things…

In related news, Medio has released some internal research that indicates users are finally using mobile search to do more than find mobile downloadable content such as ringtones and games.

Don’t break out the champagne just yet, but 2H07 research “illustrates the evolution of mobile search away from downloadable content towards information on the Mobile Internet.” The wording is a bit cryptic, but the bottom line is mobile downloadable content terms no longer dominate search queries. Sure, they are still the most popular query type in mobile search, but Medio reports that the “prevalence of this type of search has shrunk by just over 10 percent to [account for] 60 percent of all searches since July 2007.”

Another interesting stat: Medio reports the average click-through rate on search ads to be as high as 29 percent. For pay-per-call advertisements, Medio has measured call-through rates as high as 22 percent. It’s tough to judge numbers in isolation, and it’s even tougher to tell the exception from the rule. [Translated: is 22 percent CTR a one-time fluke or par for the course?] In any case, it’s important to track key data points and it’s great that Medio shares its research with the rest of us.

As Brian Lent, CEO, Medio Systems, put it in a press statement: “Our recent findings support the notion that the Mobile Web is primed for rapid growth. Users are beginning to see the mobile platform as not only a way to find a growing range of mobile downloadable content including music, wallpapers and games, but to the wide universe of information that is out there on the Mobile Web. By making the search experience as simple as possible, and by delivering highly relevant answers based on the search query, we hope to drive further growth in the adoption of mobile search as well as the more widespread implementation of search-based advertising, benefiting both user and operator alike.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Research, Mobile Search, Recommendation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.