No matter how you look at it (or who you ask) mobile search, the model that has effectively retrofitted Internet search for mobile devices, is riddled with shortcomings This was the message that came across in the interviews I conducted for Mobile Advertising Research UK, the presentations I and other search authorities made during the recent Mobile Search Masterclass in London, and, more recently, in the mobile search assessment white paper (Pump Up The Volume: An Assessment of Voice-Enabled Web Search on the iPhone) I co-authored with Peggy Albright. (DOWNLOAD)

Is mobile search broken? More importantly, how can we fix it? These are the questions I put to a variety of executives representing companies from across the mobile search and advertising business ecosystem. Read between the lines, and their answers – along with my own conclusions – point to areas of improvement and opportunity in mobile search.

MOBILE ADVERTISING RESEARCH UK

Primary research and C-Level interviews with agencies, brands, operators and third parties reveal mobile search is missing the mark. Their gripe: the poor quality of mobile search (specifically universal search powered by keyword queries and PageRank algorithms) is to blame for a lack of interest and investment in paid search advertising.

As a leading executive at a global brand put it: “Just between the two of us, our spend for search is by far not in the [single] digits yet – and it won’t be….We do a lot in mobile, but the basics of search are not yet at the level of sophistication consumers would expect from us.”

At the other end of the spectrum, agencies are far from upbeat about the short-term outlook for mobile search. As one managing director at a mobile marketing agency put it: “Just the way the content is indexed prevents advertisers from creating a cohesive plan to integrate search in their [mobile] advertising strategies. There is just not the volume to get in and really do some targeted search [advertising], and that’s what brands want: to make advertising personal and relevant to every search the consumer makes.”

Against this backdrop, many sources questioned whether the U.K. adspend figures for 2008 released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) – the trade body for digital marketing – and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) didn’t overplay the importance of paid search advertising.

The study – a U.K. first – shows that mobile adspend bucked all market trends, increasing by 99.2 percent year on year to reach GBP28.6 million. Mobile display advertising – which includes banners, text links, tenancies pre/post roll and in-game – accounted for GBP14.2 million in 2008, 49.8 percent of all mobile advertising spend, while paid-for search advertising was estimated to account for GBP14.4 million, 50.2 percent of all mobile advertising spend.

As Harry Dewhirst, Co-Founder & Operations Director of RingRing Media Ltd., an independent media agency in the U.K., pointed out during the conference Mobile Advertising Research UK and again in a private briefing with MSG: the amount spent on paid search (from his vantage point) is considerably less than display. The reason: mobile search is “not up to scratch” and fails to deliver people “information in a digestible format as quickly and as conveniently as they need it.” (During the conference Harry raised eyebrows when he identified mobile search as a chief obstacle to mobile advertising – period.)

Harry further tells me the poor mobile search experience means fewer people use search, and that has resulted in a “lack of depth” in search terms. While the terms “plumber” and “London” might draw crowds of online searchers, they can’t pack them in on mobile – yet. “And until they do, search queries will continue to be focused on branded terms like ‘Facebook’ and ‘MySpace,’ and used as navigation.” Despite these issues, Harry reports conversion rates for search are higher than display. “This indicates a positive future for mobile search advertising, but the repeat usage and quality of results isn’t good enough yet.” (Ironically, this sentiment is echoed and documented in the summary analysis of the Masterclass below.)

But there are some bright spots. Harry, who knows mobile search inside out from his previous experience at Medio Systems, a mobile search provider, gives high marks to Taptu, a socially-assisted service that tackles issues such as poor quality results and even worse rendering by summarizing the content/search results in a page that allows people to pre-screen the results before clicking. He is also upbeat about other vertical solutions such as directory assistance search services that are designed from the ground up to give searchers what they need on the move.

MOBILE SEARCH MASTERCLASS

A summer highlight for me has been participating for the second successive year in the mobile search masterclass, a course delivered as part of The City University London’s Masterclass series. Once again I joined an impressive roster of industry authorities from companies, and once again Colin Bates, CTO of Mobile Commerce Ltd., presented some amazing insights into mobile search usage, trends and behavior.

It’s worth sitting up to take notice because Mobile Commerce, like an honest broker sitting between all the major U.K. mobile operators and all the mobile search engines, effectively powers customers’ search boxes. In a nutshell, Mobile Commerce takes the search terms people type into operator portal search boxes and federates them out to a variety of information retrieval sources to deliver a results set made up of  regular Internet search results (Google, Yahoo Microsoft), specialist mobile search results (local search and a variety of verticals), and paid search advertising linked to keywords. Mobile Commerce also offers an increasing number of content owners/publishers a similar service through its Monetised Mobile Search solution, a plug-in service that allows client companies to put a search box on their mobile site and generate revenues from paid search advertising.

As a result, Mobile Commerce has an invaluable insider’s view into what people search for and the results they receive. The bottom line: Nearly 12 months on from Colin’s last presentation and mobile search is still (!) broken.

VOLUME

The surprise: mobile search volume has doubled and in some cases tripled. However, part of the reason for this meteoric rise could be Mobile Commerce’s own success in signing up customers (such as major U.K. newspapers and Virgin Media). Colin put it down to growth in mobile publishing and the number of publishers that placed a search box on their pages. [Hmm - will more publishers take charge of content (and advertising) by controlling the search box?] And let’s not forget the impact of the iPhone and other cool handsets that make the Internet fun to surf on our phones.

What are people searching for? The stellar growth Colin sees – partly because Mobile Commerce powers mobile search for The Sun – is in a category he calls “Glamor,” a term that comprises all the hot half-nude models (Page 3 girls) featured on the newspaper’s third page.

More people are using mobile search. Are they getting what the want?

In a word, no.

Colin’s road test of mobile search services offered by Google and Yahoo (similar to last year) makes it clear mobile search has a way to go. While the search engines excel in Internet search on a mobile phone, their mobile-specific results are – well – “rubbish.” A search for directory assistance delivers a link to the media relations department for World Aids Day, and a simple search for nearby post offices delivers a list of locations no longer in operation. As Colin put it: “The tools (such as Google Maps) are great, the data is out of date.”

Why are mobile search results served up by Internet search engines so poor?

1)    Mobile robots can’t spider the “mobile Web.” There is no sure-fire way to identify a site by URL (for a while .mobi or m.sitename. was a help). The advance of the iPhone and multi-mode sites that adapt content and change markup to match the incoming device type also muddy the waters.

2)    Indexing mobile pages – where information is dynamic, spread across multiple pages and impacted by user input and user-generated content – is a nightmare to index.

3)    The existence of data silos (such as downloadable content) and the lack of cross-linking data make it difficult to rank results and power PageRank algorithms.

4)    People have little say in their search results. On the Internet what we click on (or don’t) is important feedback (an indication of what we find relevant) that fine-tunes rankings and results. We do this on mobile too, but relevant results are often too many clicks away to be seen, used or appreciated.

PERSPECTIVES

Despite the many shortcoming of mobile search, people are using it more than ever before.

What are the drivers?

For one, supply. More players offer mobile search this year than last.

All the U.K. operators offer mobile search on their portals and an increasing number of publishers have also implemented Mobile Commerce solutions.

(In fact, this flurry of activity prompted Mobile Commerce to launch its Monetised Search service in the U.S., where U.K.-based search engine Taptu has signed up as the first client. Bob Last, SVP of Business Development at Taptu, said in a statement: “Working closely with Mobile Commerce since last year, Mobile Commerce significantly improves the availability of relevant ads for our users. The U.S. is our busiest market for mobile searches at Taptu and we are very pleased to be extending our involvement with Mobile Commerce to monetise more of this U.S. search traffic.”)

Demand is also a factor.

People are using mobile search – but it’s not the way they use it on the PC. It’s more about snacking, snippets and quick answers than research and information retrieval. This is what Mobile Commerce concludes (and proves) after a thorough analysis of search terms, search results and what people clicked. Because it powers the complete process it can make the connection between what people query and what they consider a valuable (accurate) result.

The company has developed a system of some 20 categories, ranging from Single User Search (which comprises all the Long Tail terms that literally only came up once in 12 months) to Social Networking (which accounted for a 16 percent of searches over the last year).

Connect the dots, as Colin did, and specific categories (such as Social Networking) are about navigation. In other words, people are typing them in order to find the mobile site. This is further supported by the dramatic dip in searches for Facebook plummet right around the time the social network launched a proper mobile property.

REVENUE

Mobile search may broken but paid search advertising – at least for a few categories – is paying dividends. Specifically, the categories Adult, Games and Personalization (downloadable mobile content) received the largest ratio of clicks against paid search adverts in the results set.

Read between the lines, and we have a confirmation of the pivotal role of paid search advertising in content discovery (a trend I have tracked and documented in articles such as this one for New Media Age – subscription  required).

Why should mobile content companies harness paid search ads to promote their content? Because it works. As Colin put it: “The mobile search model is broken, and publishers have very little control over how their sites appear in the results set – if at all.” In practice, using advertising – specifically text and banner ads – enables content discovery and drives results. It’s also cheap discovery since (at least in the U.K.) CTRs for display ads have tumbled from GBP 15 per CPM to “around GBP 5.”

The avalanche of mobile content – and now mobile apps – turns up the pressure on publishers and developers to rise above the noise and make their stuff findable and buyable. Until companies fix the bugs in mobile search, display and banner ads remain the only sure-fire way to get the message out.

BETTER MOBILE SEARCH

But publishers and brands don’t have to limit their focus to the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). The real excitement is in search tools and technologies that make the most of mobile and even harness other people to improve the overall experience.

An example Colin offered is Shazam, which he described as “mobile content search without the box.” The phenomenally popular mobile music discovery provider grew from 20 million users (in September 2008) to 35 million worldwide (in February 2009), with over a million tracks now being tagged every day across the world. (Release) It has deployed by 75 carriers across 60 countries, and is a popular application in the Apple App Store, the Android Market and the BlackBerry App World.

In Colin’s view, “mobile-specific search tools” that enable made-for-mobile search (as opposed to universal Internet search) are bound to improve mobile search and make money for the companies that develop them.

In my own Masterclass presentation (and ongoing mobile search research) I have taken it a step further, identifying 10+ categories of mobile search and assembling a list of super-cool companies harnessing context, location and the wisdom of crowds to improve the precision of search results and the quality of our mobile search experiences.

A welcome addition to the list is Alabot, a mobile search provider based out of Pune, India, with offices in Kuala Lumpur and London. I first met Akshat Shrivastava, Alabot founder, at a mobile search conference, where I had the pleasure of presenting him with the Bronze in the category Best Technology Innovation – Software. Earlier this week Akshat sent me a DM via Twitter (@peggyanne) with the great news: Alabot has secured funding from a global innovation fund and sealed a deal with a Malaysian mobile operator to develop a multi-lingual (English, Bahasa, Chinese, Tamil) mobile content vertical search service.

The text search service will start off serving up ringtones and wallpapers from the operator’s online content stock, or “low hanging fruit” Akshat tells me is just the beginning. As he put it: “Content services that require a syntax or Internet access aren’t getting traction [in that region] because they are not intuitive or interactive.” Moving forward, Akshat tells me plans are to extend the service to other content verticals and expand reach via deals with several OEMs. Rock On!

SEARCH AS CONVERSATION

Strong demand for more interactive (translated: natural language search services) isn’t limited to emerging markets.

In North America, ChaCha, a people-powered search service that uses specially trained individuals ChaCha calls “guides,” has answered more than 150 million questions via mobile phones and the Internet, making it one of the leaders in SMS search.

Intrigued by the power and potential of voice search on the iconic iPhone, Peggy Albright and I recently completed Pump Up The Volume: An Assessment of Voice-Enabled Web Search on the iPhone, a performance analysis of voice-enabled mobile search services offered by Google, ChaCha and Vlingo (a spoken interface to the Yahoo search engine). Download the free white paper here.

A chief finding: ChaCha “proved superior” to the two other voice-enabled search options for the iPhone. Specifically, ChaCha proved to offer exceptional results, with its human guides interpreting the search query accurately in the majority of cases.

To be clear, the study was not a road test of speech recognition technologies. To evaluate the overall performance of voice-enabled mobile services offered by ChaCha, Google and Vlingo for iPhone with Yahoo!, the researchers asked a series of 18 queries representative of six typical mobile search categories (Navigational, Directions, Information Local, Information General, Social, and Long-Tail). For each query the researchers evaluated nine performance characteristics including response time, results accuracy, voice recognition accuracy, number of results received, keytaps required, relevancy of the result, location awareness, use of advertising, and presence of other value-added features.

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.

A clear finding that emerged is the importance of people-power. As Peggy Albright pointed out: “The use of human agents [by ChaCha] to help interpret spoken queries and conduct searches makes a positive difference in the quality of results delivered when compared to traditional search engines that use algorithmic software to find requested documents or information on the basis of keyword matches.”

In the report I also identified a key advantage ChaCha has over its competitors: Its keen focus on social search, an approach that effectively infuses human preferences and human judgments into computer algorithms to pinpoint truly relevant information and potentially better answers.

Beyond tipping the scales back in favor of results that are relevant rather than search- engine optimized, social search also lays the groundwork for a conversation with people on their terms, paving the way for the delivery of mobile advertising that is relevant and more likely to be appreciated.

MY TAKE:

Universal mobile search has significant shortcomings, weaknesses that brands and agencies tell me has convinced them to put paid search on the back burner. (There are exceptions: Colin from Mobile Commerce reminds us that for some segments – specifically mobile content – paid search is a potent means to encourage content discovery.) We have a choice: we can wait for providers to improve universal mobile search, or we can harness tools and technologies to deliver a better experience NOW. An obvious and excellent alternative is social search, often called “people-powered search” because it harnesses people to deliver results tailored to searchers on the basis of who they are and what they like. The interviews and insights collected in this analysis outline where mobile search misses the mark and reveal a huge opportunity for companies (such as ChaCha) that give a personal touch to search results (a perfect fit with the mobile phone, which we’ve already established is an intensely personal device).

It’s still in the early days, but the place and the power of people in mobile search is clear. As the worlds of mobile search and mobile social networking collide, they produce opportunities for companies to tap the community – both implicitly and explicitly – for much better quality results and the delivery of much more relevant advertising.

Disclaimer: The complete report is available for free download from MSearchGroove. This white paper is published by MSearchGroove. It contains the findings of independent research and analysis carried out by Peggy Albright, Albright Communications, and Peggy Anne Salz, MSearchGroove in January 2009. The research methodology was developed by Peggy Albright. The research was sponsored by ChaCha. The opinions expressed in this white paper are those of Peggy Albright and Peggy Anne Salz, and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations referenced in this paper.

Related reading:

Context, Social Media, And Cool Interfaces Rock Mobile Search; MSG Teams Up With mTrends To Map Out The Brave New Landscape

Mobile Search Masterclass: How Google & Yahoo Really Measure Up; Is Paid Search The Path To Discovery?

Mobile Social Search Makes Its Mark; Will Group Searching, Sharing & Collaboration Take Social Networking To The Next Level?

EXCLUSIVE & EXPLOSIVE: New People-Powered Mobile Search & Advertising Solution Puts Mobile Operators Back In The Driver’s Seat; Will Search Giants Have To Watch Their Backs?

Will Tapping The Wisdom Of Crowds Outsmart Mobile Search Giants?

Regular readers will recall that MSG was commissioned to conduct Mobile Advertising Research UK, a project research endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K. and identify growth opportunities in the emerging mobile advertising marketplace.

The report — which combines valuable consumer insights gathered by ÆNEAS Strategy Consulting and Management (coordinated by my esteemed colleagues Tarik Fawzi and Atva van Zanten) and qualitative research based on more than 20 interviews with operators, enablers, agencies and brands contributed by MSG — marks the first in a series of region-specific reports that will include Germany (2009) and North America (2010).

During the inaugural event (Mobile Advertising Research U.K.) last week in London, Tarik and I presented an overview of key findings (documented by MSearchGroove here) and revealed the results of an online survey of over 1,000 British. consumers. Pricing is GBP 2,999 ($4,866) for the report, and a 500 GBP discount is available for MMA/IAB members, and people who attended the event. For more details, click here.

And speaking of reports, I am pleased to announce that I will provide a sneak-peak at the results of a performance analysis of voice-enabled mobile search services from search giants Google, Yahoo! & ChaCha during a special Mobile Search Masterclass in London on June 30.

By way of background, this course is part of The City University London’s Masterclass series, a collaboration between the giCentre and the Centre for Interactive Systems Research at the University. It will be run for the second year following from feedback last year and is endorsed by the Mobile Data Association (MDA). Registration is GBP295 and the organizers tell me there are still a few seats available, so email Mark Firman (mfirman@soi.city.ac.uk) to reserve your place.

The complete findings will be released in July, but I can say that ChaCha, a fast-growing SMS mobile search service available in the U.S., “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.

To evaluate the overall performance of voice-enabled mobile services offered by ChaCha, Google and Vlingo for iPhone with Yahoo!, we asked a series of 18 queries representative of six typical mobile search categories (Navigational, Directions, Information Local, Information General, Social, and Long-Tail). For each query, we evaluated nine performance characteristics including response time, results accuracy, voice recognition accuracy, number of results received, keytaps required, relevancy of the result, location awareness, use of advertising and presence of other value-added features. The study further took into account that a service could deliver its search results in the form of answers (as ChaCha offers) or as links to Web pages (which Google and Vlingo deliver); for each query tested, an accurate result could be achieved in either form.

In addition to going over some high-level results, I will also present an overview of the mobile search landscape, focusing particular attention on the 10+ categories of mobile search gaining significant traction, including multimodal (voice/visual), mobile vertical search (music/games) and social search, a people-powered search approach that effectively infuses human preferences and human judgments into computer algorithms to pinpoint relevant information and better answers.

This presentation is based on the work I did with Rudy De Waele, blogger at mTrends and dotopen founder, in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission).

Other masterclass speakers and sessions will examine a range of topics and developments, including: mobile search statistics and surveys, key trends and developments, location services and search user interfaces and usability, and the range of content and advertising monetization models involving mobile search. I’m honored to join an impressive roster of industry authorities from companies including AmbieSense Ltd., a provider of ambient search services; Microsoft Research (Cambridge); g8wave Ltd., a mobile marketing company; and Mobile Commerce Ltd., a provider of location-based services that also possesses what the founders call a “piece of enablement” that gives them deep insight into the search queries passed through the operator portals in the U.K., and the results set returned to the user. This central position, combined with the company’s prowess in search advertising, makes MC a top address for the inside track on the quality of the mobile search experience offered by Google and Yahoo!, as well as their ability to deliver relevant results to users’ queries.

Last year, the case studies and analytics provided by Colin Bates, Mobile Commerce CTO, data also reported on MSearchGroove, provided invaluable insight into the most popular categories of mobile search queries and what users really want from their mobile search experience. The eye-opening observation: “Users are grazing, not researching. They are looking for time-fillers rather than facts, and they are using search boxes for site-finding rather than data-finding.”

It will be exciting to explore how mobile search has moved on and discuss where it is going. If you plan to attend and would like to meet up or catch up, please contact me directly (peggy@msearchgroove.com) or arrange an appointment with Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com). I hope to see you soon and will circle back with analysis after the event.

The bottom line: It’s encouraging to see traction for this particular approach to mobile search. Peggy adds: The question remains: Will mobile-only search, which essentially promotes a subset of wealth of content/apps/stuff out there, continue to flourish? Or will it be Web search scenarios, enabled by the usual list of suspects all over again. I have some positive views on the potential of social search in mobile, and share these via podcasts (such as this one) and my contributions to mobile search white papers.

And while we mull over the prospects for mobile search, I invite you to consider the graph below from StatCounter Global Stats (based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites) showing the companies that lead in online search . Charles Knight – my esteemed colleague and the “voice of alternative search” at MSG partner site AltSearchEngines - has launched a contest and asks: What is the one word that best describes Google’s lead? (Google is the read line at the top.) “Alarming” is my pick…

Since AltSearchEngines doesn’t focus on mobile search (which is why we have partnered), allow me to share the StatCounter Global Stat chart for mobile search, and likewise ask your views. Why does Google lead the pack? (Particularly when the mobile experience offered by Google is known to be unsatisfactory…) What do YOU think?

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OPERA BROWSER EDGES OUT iPHONE IN MAY, according to Web-analytics firm StatCounter.  The Norwegian browser firm Opera Software saw its mobile browser surpass the iPhone’s popularity last month. Based on aggregate data findings on a sample of over 4 billion page views per month, the study said 24.6 percent of Internet pages downloaded to mobile devices went through Opera’s mobile browser, and 22.3 percent through the iPhone. Source

The bottom line: Although Opera would likely have lost out if the iPod Touch had been counted, these figures are still significant. It can also be read as an indicator of BlackBerry’s mobile Internet dominance.  The American smartphone is widely perceived as THE corporate device, so while Internet appetite might wane after some time for the casual user, maybe it’s BlackBerry’s leagues of loyal prosumers that keep Opera that little bit ahead of iPhone.

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MOBILE ADVERTISING IS EXPECTED TO BE WORTH $5.7 billion by 2014, according to Juniper Research. The report says a need for customer engagement and a quantifiable return on investment will drive growth in mobile advertising, but brands are still doubtful that “mobile has sufficient reach to warrant substantive ad spend.” 

Mobile will still account for only 1.5 percent of total global ad spend by 2014. Jupiter points out that, although this year will see the mobile Internet become the most popular delivery channel for advertisers, CPCs and CPMs have fallen sharply over the past year.  But there is a bright side: Response rates in mobile advertising remain substantially higher than those in other media. Source

The bottom line: A mix of good and bad news on mobile advertising from Juniper, and another voice supporting changes many in the industry agree are critical:  More engaging mobile advertising campaigns and agreement on key performance indicators and measurement tools. Let’s hope Juniper’s advertising spend proportions are a just a miserly prediction.  Peggy adds: After all, word is – and this was expressed at this week’s Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) event in NYC – that the industry is only waiting for a few solid success stories to drive significant ad spend. More on the mood/news at the MMA event in a special report from Jim Levey, a former mobile advertising executive at Amdocs, whom I am proud to report has joined our roster of authors and correspondents. Jim will be tracking and commenting on mobile advertising industry developments that matter.

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AVERAGE MOBILE MARKETING BUDGETS WILL INCREASE 26 PERCENT this year, even as overall marketing expenditures decline by 7 percent, according to new Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) research presented at its New York conference. 

But although mobile is fighting against the downward momentum of spending, at 1.8 percent it still only makes up a small fraction of total marketing budgets. The MMA projects that mobile ad spending will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010.  MMA says SMS campaigns remain the most common at 66 percent, followed by having a mobile Web (53 percent), and mobile email marketing (33 percent). Source

The bottom line:  This research puts a more positive spin on the state of the market (as opposed to Juniper’s rather sobering report above). That mobile marketing spends are going up during a generally down time can only be encouraging.  However, the challenge must remain in convincing brands to dedicate a greater proportion of their budget to an exciting new medium, whether that’s through tried and trusted messaging campaigns, or using richer new mobile media.  Growth and innovative mobile development still needs risk-takers and brave allocation of budget from the big-name brands.

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GLOBAL MOBILE VIDEO USERS WILL total more than 534 million by 2014, according to a forecast issued by Pyramid Research.  It says a strong percentage of mobile net additions will come from emerging markets. The study adds that mobile video subscribers will rise roughly 8.5 percent by 2014, citing the availability of improved devices and networks as the keys to driving adoption. The Asia Pacific market will lead the mobile video growth spurt, claiming 281 million subscriptions by 2014, and India will also experience a dramatic uptake. Source

The bottom line: Mobile video has only very recently begun to penetrate western markets, thanks to the improved user experience and larger screens available with the latest smartphones.  Although eastern markets are ahead of the game in this respect, and the projections largely focus on these geographies, the predictions still seem bold. The provision of adequate bandwidth and the development of LTE technologies will be critical for the global take-up of mobile video, whether it’s accessed via streaming, downloads, or by accessing the 3G Video Call channel.

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NOKIA’S POPULARITY IS FADING FAST AMONGST TEENS reports online teen hangout, Habbo Hotel.  A survey asked 112,000 teenagers in 30 countries to choose their top cellphone brand, and just 21 percent of respondents chose Nokia, down from 29 percent last year. Source

The bottom line: The Habbo survey numbers are reported to have excluded key emerging markets (such as India and China, where Nokia is market leader), and may also have had a strong bias towards respondents from America, where Nokia’s market share is much less.  However, there’s probably some truth in the suggestion that Nokia could do with re-energizing their brand for the global youth market.

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NEARLY 60 PERCENT OF U.S. MOBILE PHONE OWNERS TEXT, with 94 percent of teens the largest user group, and 20-somethings at 87 percent.  So say results from the second annual Vlingo Consumer Mobile Messaging Habits Report. Among those in their 40s, usage jumped from 56 percent in 2008 to 64 percent this year, and for those in their 50s it jumped from 38 percent to 46 percent. The report explains that texting is also gaining on sending/receiving calls as the primary use of mobile phones, with 35 percent of all respondents using their phones for texting more than for calls. Almost half of respondents do both in equal numbers.  Text message volumes have risen across all age groups, although the 13 to 19 age group remains the most active with an average of more than 500 texts per month.  It also claims that more than a quarter of mobile users drive while texting. Source

The bottom line: The rise of messaging in the U.S. appears undaunted in this report, with ever-climbing numbers not always reflecting responsible use of America’s favorite non-voice mobile communication channel.

What to do with a people-powered, user-generated index of the world out there? Follow in Google’s footsteps and sell advertising on top of it.

As I wrote in my last post, GyPSii has cleverly harnessed PlaceMe, a primary function of GyPSii that allows you to create a point of interest (POI), add your content (image, video, audio, text), add your current or last geo-location, categorize/tag/describe the POI, and submit to the server in real time to a personal or publicly designated folder in your MyPlaces (your record of points of interest).

To get this to Google scale, GyPSii needs a lot of people out there indexing the world with their mobile phones. It’s an ambitious strategy, but not far-fetched. Dan’s forecast models tell him that a company with 7 million users, each doing 2 PlaceMes a month would produce an index in the first year that would be “significantly larger than the Google file system in its first year.” (Dan expects GyPSii to be on “between 80 and 100 million devices in the coming 12 months.”)

There are no stats on active users as a percentage of that total. But GyPSii members tend to be hyperactive when it comes to PlaceMe, creating and tagging “15-20 PlaceMes per month.” Every time GyPSii members do that, they are adding a new indexed item to what the company calls the Osmotic File System (OFS).

Where does mobile advertising come in? It’s already work in progress in China. In fact, GyPSii has a lot of progress to report in China – period. As Dan sees it: “To have an ad-based model, you have to have an audience.” To reach more members (and encourage them to index the world around them) GyPSii’s has this week launched the Java version of its application, with both Chinese and English language support.

The expectation, according to the press release, is that the new app will “appeal to the 70 percent of the 650 million phone owners in China who own Java-based phones.” By way of background, GyPSii is already locally available in China for the major operators China Mobile and China Unicom, for download on compatible Java phones.   GyPSii is also available globally across a wide range of devices, including Samsung, Nokia, LG, Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry smartphones.

How does GyPSii plan to make the jump from critical mass to relevant advertising? What is the rev share model for partners (handset makers and carriers) who get on board? And what is the experience for members that use the ExploreMe function to search the world around them (and so trigger the delivery of an ad on their mobile device)? These are just a few of the questions I explored with Dan in this final segment of our podcast interview. (It’s a little longer than my usual interviews, but I felt detail was necessary to fully understand the interplay between search and advertising GyPSii-style.

Listen to the podcast here. [20:27]

Excerpts from the interview:

PEOPLE-POWERED SEARCH: Dan is a great believer (as I am) in social search on mobile. As he pus it: “This is the ultimate user generated content business model ever.” With patented technology in place (as part of the PlaceMe function), the next step is scale. “It’s got to be at scale because if our goal is to build that index, we’ve got to get lots of people to use the app.” Downloading is only part of it. Bundling is the business model that drives results.

WATERFALL MODEL: This model sits at the core of how GyPSii does deals and shares the money. “It starts with OEM manufacturers, and then to ODM manufacturers. So we go and get bundle relationships with them to get on-deck.” After GyPSii seals the deals to be on the phones, “the water falls, [and] the next layer is the carrier layer.”  Then, as you begin to get scale, you use something like Open Experience, the API, to further connect all of the social networks.” And what do handset makers get? Future revenue. As Dan puts it: “If you’re a phone manufacturer, for example, once you sell your phone, it’s a done deal. You have to make a new one and sell it.  We’ve got a business model that enables a phone to be an annuity generating device for a manufacturer, and that’s all the downstream advertising that results out of any given phone. So, that way, every device they make is an investment in a future revenue stream.”

MOBILITY AD DELIVERY: “In selecting GyPSii, they’ve not just selected this app to be bundled; they’ve selected the whole GyPSii back- end system, which also is a contextual search and add delivery system.  So, strategically we’ve been selected for mobility based advertising delivery by some of the world’s largest manufacturers and I think that’s kind of a strategic place to be because they believe in this vision….They understand mobility, [and] they don’t appreciate a top-down play from other companies coming in trying to do a land grab on their customer base.”

ADVERTISING EXPERIENCE: It’s a lot like the mobile search we know, except the index is created by people and the ads – well – don’t look like ads. It all starts with a function called ExploreMe. From the website: “ExploreMe allows you to find places by keyword, category, proximity based across the general public, by your friends in your social network, or limited to your own personal points of interest. The resultant places allow you to see full context of photos, video, audio, text and ratings by the owners, contact the owner of the place (dependent on user settings), allow you to map the place, and with navigation allow you to get to the place.” Essentially, ExploreMe is what Dan calls the first step in “planet search or experience search.” You get search results and ads that are sold into that index in the same way that ads are sold into the Google index.  How do the ads look? A lot like content. But you could also get a coupon. No matter what you get, when you make a selection it triggers an advertising-based transaction – and a pay-off to the handset manufacturer.

MORE THAN MOBILES: Who said mobile advertising has to be delivered to mobile phones? GyPSii’s goal is to be on every device out there. “That’s not just phones, it’s also netbooks. We’ve got a relationship with Intel; we’ve been selected as part of their reference platform for all mobile Internet devices and netbooks.  There are other ways to be mobile besides just your phone, so every mobile device that has an ability to be connected to the Internet, we want to be on.”

MOBILE ANALYTICS: Advertising on a social network (as I have pointed out in my recent release white paper Mobile Advertising For the Masses, sponsored by Bango, which you can download here) provides brands access to key data, such as gender, preference, and whatever else members are willing to share. “For privacy reasons, [GyPSii analytics] will never say who a person is or anything else, but it will report things like gender, age, what other social networks that person is in. Think of a 3-D cluster map of the kind of people that are interested in that product, it helps them [advertisers] in real-time know where they should place their ads.” The feedback loop is simple: “We’ll help them know more about who’s interested in their products.”

WHAT’S NEXT?: “We’ve been in hunting mode and now we go into gathering mode.  So, where are we going? We’re going to continue to hunt relentlessly.  We will not yield until we sign every major OEM and ODM and carrier in the world – that’s hunting.” Execution goes hand-in-hand with innovation. We spoke shortly before the iPhone app launch, which Dan explains in the interview. Beyond that, we can look for a “release schedule that enhances that new user experience on all the other devices we’ve got.” Finally, GyPSii will expand what it calls the GyPSiiPlex, “all the data centers around the world adding capacity and fine tuning our algorithms.” (Dan calls the company’s core algorithm PlaceRank, a word play on PageRank.)

My take: My own mobile advertising research for a variety of projects including Mobile Advertising Research U.K., and MSG’s own publication/online resource MobiAD World Focus, brings me in contact with C-Level executives from a mix of mobile operators, agencies, brands, ad networks, and enablers. The questions on the top of the list: What is the value chain and who are the mouths we have to feed? The advance of companies like GyPSii tells us two things: We have to re-think how we define mobile advertising (Is it about brand message? Or is the end-game for advertisers simply the chance to communicate with social networks like GyPSii?), and the value chain we assume is coming together to deliver it.

Clearly, mobile social networks are making the shift from meeting place to market place, and having search and advertising baked in (in addition to all its other features/functionality) has earned GyPSii a prime position in the emerging mobile search and advertising business ecosystem.

Special thanks (again) to GyPSii for hosting my podcast until I can upload my content to the cloud and make it available to MSG readers via iTunes. It’s work in progress and coming soon!

In the next podcast, I look at a new app store approach from Bytemobile. For background I will also feature the video in the video player in the MSG sidebar.

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Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

In fact, this new breed of services, which combines mobile social networking fun and community with the utility of mobile search, potentially creates new forms of interaction and new opportunities for the delivery of relevant mobile advertising. Granted we aren’t there yet, but there are some signposts that I believe mark the way. One start-up that that stands out is HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com).

The company, based in University College Dublin, Ireland, was founded by Dr. Maurice Coyle and Dr. Peter Briggs, and is a spin-out from the research group of Prof. Barry Smyth, who is perhaps best known as co-founder and Chief Scientist of ChangingWorlds (now a Unit of Amdocs Interactive), a company that has pioneered personalization technology. I recently caught up with Barry for a guided tour of the service and an update on the company’s mobile ambitions.

I am also proud that Barry recently partnered with me to publish a series of thought leadership columns exclusively on MSG. Understandably, Barry took a break from the series (which kicked off with this exploration of the “hidden interaction costs” associated with surfing and exploring the mobile Internet) to develop his path-breaking HeyStaks service – now in Beta. But he’ll be back soon with a typically cool column focused on the intelligent delivery of personalized content and advertising, so watch this space!

What is the problem?

As the company cleverly points out in the cartoon strip below, we waste a lot of time searching for things our peers are also searching for (or may already have found!). To make matters worse, we have a lot of trouble sharing what we find with people once we find it. A solution is to make search a social activity (and that goes double for mobile search, in my view) and provide people the tools to create and communicate the searches that matter to them most.

What is HeyStaks?

HeyStaks is a search utility (a browser toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers) that adds collaboration features and a host of social networking functions to your favorite search engine. (It currently works with Google, but Barry tells me that Yahoo and others are in the pipeline.) The beta service is squarely focused on enhancing Web search, but an iPhone app is also on the roadmap.

In a nutshell, HeyStaks allows people to collaborate while they search. With the toolbar, people can create and share what the company calls search staks, which act as repositories for search experiences. HeyStaks also improves the results list because it promotes the results that have proved to be relevant to friends/peers during similar or related searches. (More further down in the Q&A.) As Barry put it: “A search stak is like a folder of your search experiences. You can create as many search staks as you like to cover your different interests and activities.”

To show rather than tell, Barry, a long-time MSG reader and supporter, has created a search stak around MSG content. In addition to keeping all the searches together in one place, HeyStaks also “reminds” us of searches we have found interesting in the past (and previously forgot to bookmark) by highlighting them within the search results delivered and listed by Google. HeyStaks can also make recommendations by inserting other results that Google may have missed or simply buried too deep in the list of blue links for us to find. (Thanks for using MSG Barry! You’ve given me a great idea. The sceenshots below illustrate this new stak. The next step is to make the MSG stak public and so create an MSG search community where readers can join, add their recent related searches, or simply keep up to date with the search activities of the wider community. After all, knowledge is most powerful/valuable when it is shared.)

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Q: Creating and organizing the searches in HeyStaks is pretty straightforward. How do people share them?

A: Let’s take the example of you planning for a vacation. You create a search stak, call it “Vacation,” and store all your searches there. Suppose the vacation you’re planning will involve family and friends. You can share your Vacation stak with them, so that they can benefit from what you have found as they search, and vice versa. You can do this directly from the HeyStaks toolbar by selecting “Share active stak” in the staks menu. You then enter their email address and each person you invite will receive an email invitation that, if they accept, will add your stak to their own list of search staks in their toolbar. Sharing search staks in this way means that the search knowledge can rapidly grow because relevant searches from your friends and family are added to the Vacation search stak.

Q: HeyStaks can also highlight results in the search results from, say, Google and promote these to the top of the ranking. How is this possible?

A: We have a couple of ways to help people get more out of search. Once you share a stak you have essentially created a search activity feed that will provide you with a live update of searches carried out related to the stak – or staks – you have chosen to share.

At a deeper level, HeyStaks is looking at the various searches that different members of your staks are performing. It’s looking for patterns in those searches, and it’s looking for results that are related to those patterns.  So, you’re not just reminded of results that were clicked for the exact same query by other members of the stack. HeyStaks goes one further and actually figures out that certain results may be relevant to similar queries that haven’t been used before.  So, it’s a way of helping people to understand the sort of things that you’re finding interesting in a particular context, and making sure that everyone else who is sharing in that context is getting the benefit of your finds and you’re getting the benefit of theirs. Put another way, the stak is gradually learning more and more about your interests and is able to better predict those interests and better highlight the results from Google that are likely to serve those interests.

Returning to the Vacation stak example, the  screenshot below shows a typical search using Google and how HeyStaks has highlighted two particular results and promoted these to the top of the ranking. These results were previously selected by other members of the stak for similar queries. HeyStaks has picked up on these being results that others in the community have found interesting and therefore promoted these at the right time and within the right context.

Q: How else can I promote results in what Google delivers to me and others in my search community?

A: Using the toolbar’s tagging function, users can manually add any Web page to a stak. This makes it easy for users to add important pages that would not normally appear in Google’s results, for example. So, going back to the Vacation example, let’s say you find an offer at a hotel after clicking down deeper into the site. Finding this result again is going to require some extra effort, and the others in your community are sure to miss it. How do you make sure the result you found will catch their attention? HeyStaks solved the problem by letting you tag the page from the toolbar, using a tag you choose. You add it to the Vacation stak and – when you search using similar queries in the future or your fiends and family search – HeyStaks will promote this previously hidden result for all the stak members in the search community to see. This tagging feature is a practical way for HeyStaks to mine the deep Web that is all too often invisible to major search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Q: What are the opportunities and use cases highest on your radar?

A: There’s a very important enterprise search opportunity here, particularly when we look at those enterprise 2.0 tools that promote collaboration within the enterprise as a side effect of capturing certain important pieces of knowledge. Some studies estimate as much as 10 percent of salary costs are effectively wasted because people aren’t able to find what they’re looking for easily. So, there’s lost productivity there and a huge opportunity for HeyStaks.

Using HeyStaks in the enterprise would allow an organization to capture all of that latent search knowledge that is lost as people perform the searches. HeyStaks allows searchers to share that knowledge, so that novice searchers in the organization can benefit from the expertise of more practiced searchers. It’s a way for organizations to start to parcel up the various different types of search knowledge that they have. You could also imagine that, as a new project starts in an organization, it’s just a matter of creating a new search stak to capture the relevant information that is found during the course of that project.

Q: Search results become content. Do you see opportunities in publishing and social media?

A: Yes, there are also huge opportunities in what I’ll call the consumer space. Individuals can create a small number of staks and share them with a small number of friends. You can even envisage larger staks being created by special interest websites or media portals, for example. They could create a stak, populate it with relevant search results, and share that stak with their subscribers, readers, or website visitors.

In the context of MSearchGroove, for example, you can create an MSearchGroove stak, feed that stak with relevant information, and share it with your readers. This way, any time they perform a search which happened to be relevant to MSearchGroove, MSearchGroove results would be promoted within the result list that comes back from Google. So, it’s a way of helping your subscribers get a more personalized version of the Google results list that takes account of the sort of interests they have as subscribers to your site.

CREATE MSearchGroove stak

TAG cool content

PROMOTE pages in Google results for everyone to share

Q: You are focused on your Beta, but iPhone is also in the pipeline. Describe the fit with mobile and how it might intersect with social networking.

A: HeyStaks has created a whole social networking site based around your search activities and if you go onto HeyStaks.com, you will see the social networking that is built around people’s search patterns.  Just like Facebook provides you with social networking services around your friends and your interests and what you do on a daily basis, HeyStaks.com provides you with social networking around your search interests, what you’ve been searching for, the various stacks that you have created, the people that you’ve shared stacks with, and what they have been searching for.

That sort of information can be readily made available as part of a mobile interface so that people can have access to their search communities on the go and they can keep up to date with what other people [in their community or organization] have been finding, for example, especially in projects that are related to their work interests.

Q: What are the business models that would make this possible?

A: I think what’s appealing is the sort of software as a service model. We would envisage keeping the basic service free of charge for all to use. However, for certain types of users who wanted to take advantage of more sophisticated services, if they wanted to create a very large stack and potentially share it with thousands of users; there might be a subscription-based charge.  Ad-funded is another potential source of revenue.

My take: There is plenty of room for innovation in the search space. HeyStaks provides us a glimpse of the future of social search and an important confirmation of the increasing importance of people in the equation. HeyStaks isn’t mobile yet, but when it is it could be game-changing. (Indeed, social search, sharing and community go hand in hand. Taptu, a socially-assisted search service “gets” this – which is why it has recently introduced features and functionality that allow people to share their search results.) Although HeyStaks is aimed at turning our simple search queries into serious content, I also see opportunities for brands to enhance (rather than interrupt) the information flow. In this scenario, search queries and results, created and maintained by tight-knit social networks passionate about their quests, could provide a starting point for brands to get actively involved in the exchange, and even lend a hand in the search by suggesting related answers/products/services members are likely to appreciate. But why stop there? Brands could also post search staks around topics where we need and appreciate some solid advice (such as recipes for food manufacturers, how-to tips for repairs around the house, or remedies for colds/flu or whatever ails us). What a great way to add value for a change!

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.

I was so impressed by the caliber of speakers (Michael Slinger, Manager, Google: Rachel Pasqua, Director, Mobile Strategy, iCrossing; and David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy at 360i) that I have decided to showcase each individually on MSG. (I had the opportunity to do a video interview with David and will be back with more on that, and his views on social media and mobile search, once the bnetTV team has edited the footage and posted in the video player in the sidebar.)

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. During this time period, WikiAnswers.com’s market share increased from 4 percent to nearly 35 percent, vs. Yahoo! Answers, based on U.S. unique visitors. Overall, WikiAnswers.com was identified as the fastest growing top 200 U.S. domain for all of 2008.

Another milestone: Answers Corporation counted 10 million questions in the WikiAnswers.com Q&A database. (Answers Corporation acquired the WikiAnswers.com database in 2006, and since then questions have increased over 35-fold.) As Bruce D. Smith, Chief Strategic Officer of Answers Corporation, who leads the Community Development team, put it in a recent release: The WikiAnswers community is “experiencing exciting growth,” with over 500 volunteer supervisors and millions of contributors, supported by our 12-member Community Development Team.

Social search meets mobile? Regular readers will know I am excited about this combination. (In fact, I commented on this emerging business model in recent-release white papers from mobile search companies Taptu and abphone.) In view of WikiAnswers.com’s increasing popularity, I decided to take a closer look at the company’s future roadmap. 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]

By way of background, Answers Corporation, founded in 1998, was formerly known as GuruNet. It changed its name to Answers Corporation in 2005. The company is best known as the owner of the popular social knowledge Q&A site WikiAnswers.com, and the “encyclodictionalmanacapedia” Answers.com. Answers is a Google AdSense partner, meaning thatAnswers.com and WikiAnswers.com show Google performance ads on their pages.

WIKIANSWERS.COM: It’s a fast-mover. “On WikiAnswers, people type in the questions; other people answer them; and hopefully, over time, we get the best possible answers. Our goal is to give the best answers anywhere on the Web, for any kind of question.”

MOBILE SEARCH: Bob can’t give specifics and I respect that. But he can give us an indication of what is in the pipeline. As he put it: “I will say that the area of delivering our answers on mobile is obviously of enormous interest to us this year and next year.” While companies can tailor their services to specific platforms and devices, Bob doesn’t recommend it and hints that his company is focused on “adapting our product lines over time to work on all of the mobile devices, and of course we mean smartphones, but not only smartphones — anything with a Web browser.”

OPTIMAL USER EXPERIENCE: Quick answers in fewer clicks is the algorithm for mobile search success. “We believe that there’s too much information overload.” The problem is that search engines are really good at searching the Web, but what do they deliver? “A page of links; of links to other sites, but you know what? The mobile world still has slow browsers….If you get a list of links to pages that are mobile pages, you’re almost afraid to click on one of them. How do you know if it’s going to be a 5 second page or a 25 second page?” You don’t know. “Our goal is to give people useful information in fewer clicks. And so that’s actually a very good hint towards how we see the mobile world evolving and what we think we might be able to add to it.”

MOBILE SEO: Is the end-game about delivering answers on the go? If so, then what is the potential impact on SEO? In a word: Profound. Bob points out that Google’s introduction of a canonical element aimed at assisting SEO clearly recognizes mobile content is different from the Web. “In other words, you can now make a page that exists in different forms, give it a canonical name, and tell Google that this is the canonical page. This is the real page, and all these other things are just adaptations of it for different user experiences and phone factors, especially mobile. So, Google is being advised that this is the same page as another page in a legitimate fashion such that it doesn’t hurt SEO.

PUBLISHER TIPS: Brand is everything, which is why companies must deliver a quality user experience that begins with the basics, such as presentation. “Users will have even less patience on a small device. You have to get it right and it’s a really different ballgame in terms of presentational dynamics.” Google and Yahoo will continue to be important, and I think the challenges for the rest of us [will be] to find our place in this new world…. [It] will boil down to user experience. In the words of Tim O’Reilly; ‘How do we get users to visit our content in an age where they are free to choose content?’

MONETIZATION & MOBILE ADS: Google changed the rules when it introduced text ads on their pages that didn’t look like text ads. “Google zagged when everybody else was zigging, and they did something very brilliant.” But the real lesson we must apply to mobile is relevancy.  ”It is attractive to the user; it’s more trustworthy. But if that weren’t enough, it is informative and not interruptive.” But even relevant ads might not convince users to accept mobile advertising, according to recent research from Nielsen Mobile (via Citi Investment Research, a division of Citigroup Global markets). Bob was kind enough to share a short excerpt and some surprising stats from the client report, written by analyst Mark Mahaney. Under the heading: “There is a material consumer resistance to mobile advertising,” Mahaney states privacy concerns and users’ skepticism are holding back mobile advertising in the U.S.

Meanwhile, we learn from the Thanh Nien Daily that mobile advertising is booming in Vietnam. Quoting Aaron Cross, managing director of The Nielsen Company in Vietnam, who spoke at a two-day conference on Integrated Marketing in Vietnam which wrapped up last Friday in Ho Chi Minh City, the post reports (according to the Nielsen Mobile Insights Survey 2008) almost half of mobile owners in Vietnam receive advertisements via SMS each month.

The majority of those ads are read by consumers. The survey also said 74 percent of people in HCMC and Hanoi, the country’s two economic hubs, own a mobile phone. Over half (58 percent) of the country’s urban population, and a third (37 percent) of rural residents own cell phones. But the way isn’t clear for mass marketing yet. Cross pointed out the new anti-spam government decree, which took effect last month in Vietnam, protects consumers from receiving unwanted messages on their mobile phones. However, cost-conscious Vietnamese consumers are open to “hot deals and great value to relieve pressure from their monthly budgets.”

Mobile advertising is also gaining traction in Japan. This post, quoting Tom Bowman, BBC.com’s VP international ad sales who spoke at the Digital Symposium hosted by Habari Media last week in the Western Cape, argues consumers are “almost twice as receptive to mobile advertising as to magazine advertising, making it the highest priority for prospective advertisers.”

WHAT’S NEXT?: The industry has to sort out business models. Is it sponsorship? Is it an animated display ad? Or is it some kind of click-through only on performance ads? “But I’m going to say something very flippant now: “Who cares? …It’s a branding opportunity… and sometimes you subsidize one part of your business with another.” Bob would rather “get the service right and figure out how to monetize later.”

Special thanks to Alison Minaglia at Technology PR for the image of Bob addressing the ThinkMobile audience!

I have had this trend high on my radar for several years, a passion that received its first outlet and accolades when EContent magazine gave me free reign to write an in-depth cover story on the state of Social Search (which appeared in the November 2007 issue). I loved researching and writing the article, a work I still regard as one of the best in my career. The good news: I’m told the article had – and continues to have – an impact on the content industry. The not-so-good news: When I wrote the article I was disappointed that so few companies “got” mobile, and today – nearly two years later – only a handful of companies have really have caught on.

To be fair, I wrote the article, aptly titled Teams Work: Social Search Gets Results, before companies such as abphone, ChaCha, Hiogi and Taptu broke on to the scene with strategies that draw on social search approaches and algorithms to improve mobile search results ranking and relevancy. I invite you to read my comments in new-release white papers from abphone and Taptu, and MSG’s own soon-to-be released assessment of the user experience delivered by search engines (among them ChaCha).

But progress is progress, and I am confident that more online social search companies will sharpen their focus on mobile as the advance of mobile social networks and other communities pushes people-powered mobile search to the top of the agenda this year. (In fact, recent reports/stats on Twitter, Facebook, and my own discussions with social networking companies confirm an exciting new trend: We have begun to search in communities – and today the number of queries even exceeds our searches in Google. Connect the dots and a game-changing search paradigm emerges. The power of people + the power of mobile = a power shift in favor of new mobile players who harness the wisdom of mobile crowds.

Where does all this leave mobile operators?

Well, just a week ago I would have said they can watch if they are stupid, and open up their analytics to third-parties (to give critical context to search results) if they are smart. Now, I can say they have a third and far more lucrative option: They can offer a people-powered search service provided by an infrastructure vendor (building on existing front-end analytics capabilities that capture the interests, passions, and profiles of users) to deliver subscribers genuinely useful and relevant search results. And if mobile operators chose to bolt on the mobile advertising module, they can position themselves to offer paid search advertising from a variety of ad networks and keep the lion’s share of the revenues.

You’re reading it in MSG first: Watch for a mobile infrastructure provider to launch a solution that joins existing analytics at the front-end with search and advertising, potentially allowing operators to be equivalent to Google. And watch a mobile operator customer to implement it this year.

I am under NDA and therefore cannot disclose the name of the vendor company, but I can share the details of the search technology and the recent results of a trial test the vendor company conducted with a mobile carrier (a pilot that effectively proves the business case for mobile search powered by mobile searchers (subscribers) and enhanced by operator analytics).

Let’s examine the business case for operator-managed mobile search and advertising.

First, mobile search is not rocket science, nor is it a service that only search engine providers can offer. Search can be broken down into two basic tasks: Indexing the Web to include domains and fresh content in search results; and developing algorithms to assist in ranking and rating the results. It’s not impossible and white-label search providers have shown how this can be accomplished. (They just lost the plot when it came to finding and indexing the content on the wider Web, which is why white-label has lost momentum.) However, for reasons I outline below, mobile operators are positioned to go one better than the solutions that have gone before.

Second, PageRank is not the only game in town. There are many techniques available, not just PageRank, a one-size-fits-all approach pioneered by Google (that as I point out in my post suffers from serious limitations in the mobile space). Operators, because they are close to the customer, can harness social search concepts to improve the experience and the search results. (One to consider is BrowseRank, a new algorithm developed by the vendor company that represents a vast improvement on PageRank because it focuses on the pages people click most often, and correctly assumes that we click these pages because they offer the content and answers we value most.

Third, mobile operators alone have access to the data that matters - directly from us. They know our location and context; our profiles and purchases; the sites we browse; and the search results we think rock (!). As a result, mobile operators don’t have to index the whole of the Web because they know from their usage logs the sites we browse and click (not as individuals, but as a group), and can simply make sure these domains figure prominently in the mobile search results.

Finally, we don’t need the whole of the Internet on our phones. If people really do want/demand the whole Web on their phones, then it makes sense to leave mobile search to the search giants who can handle the mammoth task of organizing the world’s information. But do we want it ALL? Not if we consider a recent trial involving the vendor company and a North American carrier. As the source put it: A review of a month of mobile search usage and queries revealed that “millions of users had only visited 34,000 domains.” Drilling down, the source found that a whopping “96 percent of transactions were covered by 14,000 domains.”

Hmmm… So, is there really a Long Tail in mobile search? Or have bad experiences – poor content adaptation, broken links, and other shortcomings – already dampened our enthusiasm for the mobile Web? Or are we just gravitating to our favorite destinations (such as social networks) on the move, and leaving the Long Tail searches to our PCs where we have access to a large screen and a full keyboard? So many questions we can and must address…

I pose a devil’s advocate question: But what if users are flocking to a cool new site, not already in the index? The answer: “A single page request can flag a new site to be included in the search index, giving unprecedented speed of index updating.”

But doesn’t that somehow at some level limit choice? Not really. To introduce an element of serendipity, the solution comes configured with a “throw external” feature that will redirect to GYM search engines if the results delivered by the operator search engine are below a given accuracy. (Settings for SafeSearch also allow the mobile operator to exclude harmful content from the search results.)

The source and I then debated the extent to which analytics and behavioral data could actually enable the creation of new and more personalized mobile search services. Our conclusion: It certainly covers all the bases to achieve this because it would only index the sites the subscribers like best. Take a mobile operator with a prosumer customer base such as O2. They would likely value straightforward results that help them plan and execute their daily routine, and the mobile search results would reflect this. A consumer-focused operator, such as Virgin Mobile, may find that its users prefer entertainment sites and social networking/moblogging destinations, and likewise give them top-notch placement in the mobile search results.

Beyond identifying sites to index tailored to the preferences of the subscriber base, the solution would pave the way for mobile operators to refine search results based on meta data from browsing activity. For the first time ever, mobile search results could be ranked by device type, time of day, or day of the week. As the source put it: “Initially we have  focused  on domain and page popularity within a given data set, however this can be further optimized, for example by refining result ranking based on  time of day or device – people  browsing in  the morning preferred a particular destination domain, while people with a Nokia N95 preferred another.”

Likewise, the solution would allow mobile advertising (which the industry is finally beginning to recognize is another form of content) to be refined and targeted to the preferences and profiles of the subscriber base. What’s more, the mobile operators could keep the lion’s share of the paid search revenues.

My Take: Operators – through their enviable position at the center of our mobile experiences – are perfectly positioned to tap into the wisdom of invisible crowds (us). With the right tools and technology mobile operators can follow our virtual breadcrumb trail to optimize our mobile search (and advertising) experiences, using our actual usage patterns to give us the answers/results we will most likely appreciate. What better way to compete against search engine giants and even win?

While a new report from Bernstein Research may argue that (at least in the US) Google wins the mobile search battle hands-down on the strength of its brand, I believe that other factors (specifically, the quality of the user experience and the tie-up between mobile search and mobile social networking), will pave the way for other companies (and business models). BTW: I am scheduled for a podcast interview this week with Jeffrey Lindsay, Senior Analyst, Bernstein Research, to discuss the key findings of his milestone report, Google, IAC, Yahoo!: Mobile Internet – the Next Advertising marathon – Google and Yahoo! Moving to Front of Pack. In the meantime, I recommend you read Dianne See Morrison’s worthwhile summary post at MoCoNews.

In my view, social search – search that enables people to add their personal knowledge, opinions, and experiences to search results – has arrived in full force in online. (The market is already teeming with people-powered search engines – ranging from Wikipedia, which recently took the wraps off Wikia, a search service that combines computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing to Mahalo, a company building – and paying – contributor communities to direct searchers to relevant results, to nimble newcomers like NosyJoe, a private beta social search engine that relies on people to “sniff the Web for interesting content.”)

The mobile phone – a personal device we have with us at all times – represents the next frontier for social search.

We not only use our mobile phones to capture and share content; we also use them to interface with the world around us and connect with social networks on the fly. As cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito pointed out in her milestone book Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: The mobile phone has a pivotal place in our daily lives based on the fact that it is personal (we customize and personalize mobile devices and consider them an extension of our personal identity); portable (even the Japanese name for mobile – Keitai, roughly translated “something you carry with you” – stresses the relation between the user and the device, and not between the technology and function); and pedestrian (because it is portable it’s a perfect fit with life as it happens, and activities that require partial or sporadic attention).

It’s on our mobile devices that we have come to expect – even demand – personalized and context-aware services and applications tailored to our lifestyles and life stages based on the clues we leave behind, such as preferences, past purchases, browsing patterns, and a deep understanding of our interests and passions.  What’s more, the form factors of the device – a small screen and a tiny keypad – naturally limit our interest in browsing the Web as we do on a PC. Put another way, users can’t sift through lists of blue links results; they require answers that are genuinely useful and relevant.

Indeed, Internet search retrofitted for the mobile Web suffers some serious shortcomings.

• First, it is one-size-fits all. Whether you are a student, a scientist, or a silver surfer, Internet search engines (horizontal search engines designed from the ground up to deliver the same results to all searchers based on queries and keywords) deliver a similar set of results, regardless of our individual information needs.
• Second, it tends to promote search engine optimized sites over the truly optimal ones. To complicate matters, the mobile Web remains the rather poor cousin of the real Web. There is no cross-linking data to power PageRank algorithms, which is a major reason why regular road tests performed by companies such as Mobile Commerce Ltd. – a U.K. company that, among its many other capabilities – possesses what the founders call a “piece of enablement” that gives them deep insight into the search queries passed through the operator portals in the U.K., and the results set returned to the user – reveal that Google and Yahoo! fall down on the job.
• Third, it has huge difficulty when it comes to connecting with the indexes that are growing and flourishing under the radar, such as blogs, user-created music and videos, and all the cool stuff that makes up the legendary Long Tail. Mobile users expect these content types to figure in their mobile search results, a variety and freshness of content Internet search engines cannot deliver.

Enter “people-powered search,” social search that harnesses people to deliver results tailored to searchers on the basis of who they are and what they like, addresses these issues.

The introduction of an approach that effectively infuses human preferences and human judgments into computer algorithms covers the bases to pinpoint truly relevant information and better answers. What’s more, the personal touch it gives to search results represents a perfect fit with the mobile phone, which we’ve already established is an intensely personal device.

• First, it recognizes the rise of a participatory culture and the role of people in the equation. These are trends that combine to give individuals more of a say over their content experiences. Book marking, tagging, voting, blogging, and networking – all of this is possible on the mobile, allowing us to turn our conversations into content. The rise of mobile social networks and communities paves the way for us all to have more input into our search results.
• Second, it benefits from the increasing popularity of peer recommendation. A recent survey from Jupiter Research shows 64 percent of users will try a service or content recommended by a friend, and 69 percent will pass what they like along to between two and six friends. Naturally, search results – particularly those in response to queries seeking cool new music or good restaurants nearby – would benefit from some crowd-sourcing.
• Third, it taps into new mobile search behavior trends. Mobile search is no longer an action-oriented activity; it has become a recreational pastime. Recent user surveys conducted by comScore, and new research from made-for-mobile search engines Taptu and Abphone, reveal the main emphasis is on content discovery and new ways to amuse ourselves during long commutes or breaks in our daily routine. We do search for information, but we are also interested in cool new stuff, interesting trivia, and ways to have fun.

In summary, the idea of people helping people isn’t about idealism; it’s the basis for an ideal business model. In mobile search, where algorithmic search can deliver neither personalized search results nor peer recommendations, social search and variations that tap the wisdom of crowds to deliver the right mix of answers and entertainment have a clear competitive edge over the plain-vanilla search we know from the PC.

This post sets the stage for an in-depth look at cool new mobile search services – some in beta – sure to leave their mark, so please check back regularly.

Disclaimer: abphone, ChaCha and Taptu have collaborated with MSG on white papers and research.