Mobile Groove

Famously known for its retail price slashes, Black Friday has again drawn consumers to both the high street and online sites. However, there has been another contender in the retail sales – Thanksgiving. According to a recent reports by IBM, 2012 saw mobile traffic grow by more than 67 percent, with Thanksgiving turning out to be a huge shopping success for consumers as they responded to retailers’ early Black Friday promotions.

• Online sales on Thanksgiving grew by 17.4 percent followed

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Is voice the new battlefield as companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance) jockey for position to control the voice interface and our personal search and assistance experiences? Roberto Pieraccini, industry veteran and author of new book The Voice in the Machine, looks and the evolution of voice in computing and communications and maps out the future of mobile voice and beyond.

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If you watch Kubrick’s 1968 classic movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” today, you will certainly notice that ma…

What do you get when you bring together the intellectual resources of Rudy De Waele/ mTrends and dotopen, an open innovation consulting firm known for its insights into the emerging mobile Web 2.0 ecosystem, and MSearchGroove, a knowledge resource dedicated to the analysis of mobile search (and all things mobile at the intersection of context and content)? In a word, impact!

Since teaming up with Rudy De Waele, blogger at mTrends and dotopen founder, to develop mobile search case studies in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission), and seeing the positive response to our work to date, I’m convinced mobile search is back again at the top of the industry agenda. And with good reason: Search is the de facto interface to all things digital in the online space, and there is every indication that it will be the same in mobile.

From mobile advertising, where our queries trigger the delivery of related advertising (in the best case scenario, we’re not there yet), to social media, where the content we appreciate and discuss across destinations ranging from MySpace to Twitter allows us to restore balance in an otherwise purely algorithmic approach that tends to promote search engine optimized websites over what we find genuinely relevant and useful, mobile search is where the action is.

But as Rudy and I have both pointed out in our recent presentations, mobile search is not about the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). Rudy spoke at Next09, and you can find his slides further on in this post; I spoke at the European Mobile Media Conference, and my deck can likewise be found after the jump.

Indeed, context and personalization change all the rules (!)

A highlight of our recent presentations: A comprehensive overview of the market and (thanks to Rudy) a SWOT analysis of the players that stand out in their category such as Google (universal search with a poor mobile offer and an even weaker grasp of social search), and Twitter (a case of mobile search + social media = real-time results that really reflect what we discuss/share).

In my own mobile search research – an on-going project that began back in 2004/2005 when I wrote the first report on mobile search and content discovery, a 220+ page report published by Informa Telecoms & Media – I have recently identified some 60+ companies and 10+ categories of mobile search I would like to share with you (below) for your feedback.