Mobile Groove

From searching for retailers and businesses nearby to conducting commerce and transactions, we have clearly come to rely on our mobile phones to access advice and make the right decisions.

We can do more with our screens — so it follows we will also come to expect more from our screens. It’s a dependence that spells opportunity for small business and companies that leverage mobile to deliver us information and experiences that are personal and engaging (hence valuable). Even better if com…

Voice — speech recognition and natural language understanding — are poised to transform our daily lives and disrupt all industries — not just mobile. Thanks to companies like Nuance Communications — which is also the speech-recognition engine behind Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the Apple iPhone — we are rapidly moving toward a voice-enabled future. We catch up today with Vlad Sejnoha, Nuance Chief Technology Officer, to get an inside track on the topics he will address at M…

We continue our series of alternative mobile search app reviews and road tests with Hipmunk, a vertical search engine taking the agony out of travel planning. Instead of horizontally searching across the entire web like Google, Bing and Yahoo! (GBY), Hipmunk searches up and down through one topic area at a time. This laser focus on doing this one thing — and doing it well — allows Hipmunk to play in the major leagues.

Hipmunk was built from the ground up to search for hotels and fl…

In this companion post to our Hipmunk mobile search app road test I connect with Steve Huffman, Hipmunk Co-Founder, to discuss features in the pipeline and opportunities on the horizon.

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Hipmunk is a travel search engine, but there are other alternative mobile search apps and engines that also focus on travel. What makes you different?

At Hipmunk, we are trying to optimize the amount of time you spend on Hipmunk, and we want you to spend as little time as possible on Hipmunk. We’re not trying to …

In this companion post to our Biznar mobile search app road test we catch up with Abe Lederman, CEO of Deep Web Technologies to explore his mobile roadmap and aim to open up more to third-parties and app developers.

Let’s start with a high-level view of Deep Web Technologies…

Deep Web Technologies started in 2002. We’re about 20 people, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we started out by building public federated search applications for federal government clients. Our best known app…

Should we brace ourselves for a new battle as companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance) jockey for position to control the voice interface and our personal search/assistance experience? We continue our look at the opportunities and competition around mobile voice with Roberto Pieraccini, industry veteran and author of The Voice in the Machine.

In other segments we discuss the wider issue of personal privacy, following the news that social app Path has been uploading user data to its servers without our consent. Rob Woodbridge recounts a checklist of things to consider when building privacy into your minimum viable product. And we both find a perfect fit with a brilliant presentation— whose time has come (again) — from Jonathan MacDonald, a thought-leader and entrepreneur in digital media perhaps best known for his passionate views on the 3Ps (Permission: people will decide what brand messages they interact with; Privacy: people will decide where their data is collected and how it is used; and Preference: people will decide what content they find relevant). More about that further down in this post.