MSearchGroove

[The Msearchgroove exclusive mobile advertising podcast series – in close cooperation with VisionMobile – continues with AdMob CEO & Founder Omar Hamoui. Special thanks to Paul Nash, creative director at fifty50, for designing the cheat sheet for mobile publishers based on input from AdMob’s best & brightest. Paul, together with his colleague Matt Harper, is also driving our new design, and a long list of innovations in navigation and site usability that really rock!]

AdMob has gained some serious traction since it broke on the scene just two years ago, building up the scale and the clout to take on major league players including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. In fact, AdMob effectively enables the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, having just reached its mega-milestone of delivering over 5 billion ads in the last 20 months – one billion of those in the last month. (We covered it here and calculated AdMob generally serves more than 370 ads per second.) Since then the company has quietly and cleverly launched a new advertising unit focused on the iPhone. In plain text, AdMob ad servers will recognize iPhone users and serve up iPhone-specific advertisements, paving the way for the company’s network of 2,000+ publishers to monetize their iPhone traffic and develop iPhone-specific content.

And speaking of reach, AdMob has sewn up a slew of deals – most notably a tie-up with CBS Mobile, which made AdMob one of its “gang of four” advertising-enabling companies to provide clients ad options ranging from text and banner ads to video interstitials. More recently, AdMob struck a deal with Contec Innovations to deliver ads via Contec’s BUZmob mobile publishing service. Of course, enabling mobile advertisers to place more ads with more publishers creates inventory for all and solves the bottleneck of having more ads to serve than sites to show them on…

I caught up with Omar Hamoui, AdMob CEO & Founder, to talk about the stellar stats, the competitive landscape and pose the all-important question: When are you going to be acquired and by whom?! The answer: AdMob will stay an independent company for now, but would consider the option more seriously if and when it runs out of steam. (Not likely to happen any time soon since Omar told me off-line that he predicts “on a revenue basis [by next year] we’ll make 6x what we did this year. If I annualize our revenue last year, the year was probably 10x of what we did last year.”

Listen to the podcast here. [23:51]

And a special feature for novice mobile publishers: AdMob agreed to share the secrets of site optimization with our readers. It’s free and fact-packed – and you can download it here.

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• Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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[Note: Msearchgroove is proud to team up with VisionMobile to present this series of podcasts with mobile advertising thought leaders. I have long admired the work of Andreas Constantinou, Director of VisionMobile, Ltd. His think tank consistently delivers valuable industry research and strategy advisory services to mobile companies – and he was the lone voice that picked up on the tectonic shift to client software content discovery solutions. Our deep friendship and mutual respect rests on the fact that we are both pioneers in our respective industries: I was the first to research and write a comprehensive report on mobile search, and Andreas published the first report on on-device portals. In fact, he coined the term ODP that we use as second nature now.]

Continuing with our mobile advertising podcast series, we take a look at Millennial Media, the cross-platform mobile advertising company that covers all the bases – and then some. I’m thinking here of its broad offer that includes Millennial Motion (encompassing animation and allowing brands to combine audio, video, and interactivity) and Decktrade, a performance-based auction service and marketplace for advertisers and publishers. The company has been on my radar since it raised a $6.3 million first round from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, and Acta Wireless in January. Another eye-opener was the partnership with CBS, which we covered here. (The four-way tie-up also involves AdMob, Rhythm NewMedia, and Third Screen Media.)

I caught up with Eric Eller, senior vice president of products and marketing, to talk about Millennial’s road map, as well as the roadblocks that have so far kept spending – and conversions – down to such modest levels. Sure, Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts worldwide spending on mobile advertising could reach more than $11 billion annually by 2011 – but a lot has to happen first. Eric identified three things that have to change – fast.

Reach – More people have to use the mobile Internet. “It’s about forty million uniques in the world today, versus 180 to 190 million online, so we’re still 20 to 25% of online reach, and that has to increase.”

Standardization – “The mobile experience varies greatly from carrier to carrier, from platform to platform, and even though companies like ours address that layer for the brand and agencies, there still is a huge difference in the consumer’s experience.”

Metrics - “The more data that we can get, the better….And more effective programs can be developed to really achieve the targeting and the results that the brands want.”

Listen to the podcast here. [20:42]

Yes, I hear you (!) and will make complete transcripts available as part of the new design…

CLICK TO READ MORE

• Posted in
• Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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In the midst of all the changes at Msearchgroove I’m also preparing for what I’m sure will be one of the most exciting speaking engagements on my calendar: The MobileHCI’07 (stands for Human Computer Interaction) in Singapore (September 9-12).

My role will be to lead the discussion on the future of mobile search and participate in a session with Leland Rechis, Google user experience designer, and Carol Taylor, InfoSpace Mobile director of user experience. Scott Weiss, Principal of Usable Products Company, will chair the panel and – based on his reputation as an outspoken critic of mobile device usability – push us for straight answers to tough questions. I look forward to the challenge – and to sharing all the high points with you.
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• Web 2.0, Mobile Search, Mobile Content, Mobile Advertising

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The new IBM Institute for Business Value’s online survey of more than 2,400 people over 18 years of age in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Japan, and Australia is out and chock-full of figures on global usage and adoption of new multimedia devices and media and entertainment consumption on PCs, mobile phones, and other portable devices. (You can download it here. More details in this release.)

Empowered users don’t just want to take charge of their content experiences; they demand “consolidated, trustworthy content, recognition, and community when it comes to mobile and Internet entertainment,” the report said. This shift turns up the pressure on ad agencies to become brokers of consumer insights.

But the real surprise is user excitement about mobile search - or rather the lack of it.

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• Posted in
• Recommendation, Personalization, Mobile Search, Mobile Content, Mobile Advertising

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Matt Marshall at VentureBeat gives an up-close look at vTap, a brand-new mobile search service provided by Veveo and slated to launch September 10. The client-server search solution is made up of an an embedded thin-client at the device level that sends user queries to the Veveo Search Complex. Once received, the Veveo Search Complex processes the request and then relays results back to the device where the thin-client converts them for display. The service will launch “with support for Windows Mobile, along with an Ajax application for the iPhone. A few weeks later, it will offer support for J2ME.

In a nutshell, vTap searches a major index of video-related sites, letting users search for videos on their mobile phones. The app does this at “blazing speed,” Matt tells us, due in part to the fact that vTap uses predictive technology. (Typing in “gwy” returns a listing of content related to Gwyneth Paltrow. The service also delivers even when you get the spelling wrong.) According to Veveo CEO Murali Aravamudan “the trick to making it so quick is in indexing content by individual letters/characters, instead of words, like most search engines do.” (Veveo has raised $28 million in venture cap – this sum includes a $14 million the company received in May and key under wraps until now.)
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• Posted in
• Mobile Social Networking, Mobile Search

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This post in CBC News seems to think so. It suggests Google decision to introduce ads to YouTube videos can be read as an indication that Google is indeed gearing up to introduce an ad-supported mobile phone. The speculation follows yesterday’s announcement that the search giant was attaching semitransparent “overlay” advertisements to the bottom of selected YouTube videos. (Even better, these ads –- which take up a small portion of the screen — are designed to be relevant to the user’s interests and simply disappear after a few seconds if the user doesn’t click on them.)
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• Posted in
• Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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White-label mobile search provider FAST has been working with Japan’s Rakuten — the Internet service group known as the eBay of Japan — for several years, so the news that they have made it official and established a formal joint venture doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The 50:50 JV (called Rakuten FAST Mobile Search Inc) is aimed at developing and provisioning mobile search and advertising services in Japan. It will have total capital and capital reserves of 800 million yen and “further advance the development of additional mobile business and technology innovation.” (More detail in this release.]

I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Torbjorn Kanestrom, FAST’s head of International Operations. (He’s usually in San Francisco, but today he was in the Oslo office – and my thanks to Carine Zeier for setting this up on short notice!) He was predictably tight-lipped about future strategy and the road map for rolling out mobile search services to Rakuten mobile sites this year and later to “third parties on an OEM basis.” But he did divulge a few details you can’t find in the press release.
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• Posted in
• Mobile Search, Mobile Content, Mobile Advertising

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Several surprises come out of a new report by Usable Products, a New York-based company focused on UI design and usability testing. The vast majority (79 percent) of users surveyed felt advertising-supported banners enhanced their mobile search experience. Conversely, 37 percent said paid and sponsored text-based ads “proved most detrimental to user experience.” (More details in this release.)

No further explanation on this interesting observation, but Scott Weiss, president of Usable Products, will join us next week in an exclusive podcast to outline his research and delve into more details and best practices. (His full report, Mobile Search User Experience Benchmark – which tested InfoSpace WAP, JumpTap Java (Alltel Axcess Search), Nuance Voice Control, and Yahoo Go - spans a whopping 179 pages, so there’s a lot to tell.)

The usability report also underlined the pivotal position of voice as a no-brainer interface to content and services. Scott reckoned participants would be put off by voice search – but the opposite was true. “In final usability, it performed better than expected. We were surprised that participants enjoyed voice search, and how much more they liked it than searching via phone keypad.”
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• Posted in
• Multimodal Search, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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White-label mobile search provider Medio Systems has snapped up Suhari LLC, a mobile advertising firm Medio says is “strategic to Medio’s effort to extend its on-deck search solution …to off-deck publishers as an extension of the Medio MobileNow Ad Network.” No terms were disclosed.

As Medio’s chief advertising officer Omar Tawakol put it in a statement: “Suhari’s deep expertise and technological intelligence in the off-deck advertising world, married with Medio’s existing search technologies, will result in a strong, competitive search solution that enables off-deck publishers to offer content discoverability to its audience while generating ad revenues from the mobile ecosystem.”
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• Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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That’s the vision that comes through in this post (via MusicAlly – good catch!). It details plans by the BBC to develop a new twist on an old radio technology. The media company has hired design consultancy Schulze & Webb to create a prototype DAB digital radio that will function as a “stand-alone, fully operational, social, digital radio.”
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• Web 2.0, Recommendation, Mobile Music, Mobile Content

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