MSearchGroove

MSG will be back in full-force on January 7th. Past posts have outlined the improvements and projects that will surely make 2008 a banner year for all of us at MSG. My thanks to regular writers (James Cameron, Paul Skeldon, Peter Purton) as well as columnists/contributors Pamir Gelenbe and Emma Mohr-McClune.

A special thanks to Peggy Albright, a researcher who shares the MSG vision and commitment to quality and credible analysis. I greatly look forward to our collaboration and to creating an outstanding product.

Speaking of collaboration, none of this would be possible without a dedicated team of virtual assistants including Andrea Henninge, Bev Nicholson, Janette Martin, Diana Castro-Cook and Janine Redgrove, Head of Admin. In 2008 I have the pleasure of welcoming her husband, a professional video producer, who has kindly offered his expert services to document upcoming MSG round tables and events.

No New Year would be complete without predictions. I’m saving my top picks for reports, clients and speaking engagements in January (Location Based Services Forum, organized by Marcus Evans, and the 2nd Annual Mobile Search Congress, organized by Visiongain, to name a few…)

Instead, I’ve collected trends and takes on 2008 from esteemed colleagues and c-level execs in the mobile search and mobile advertising space. Please check back regularly.

Indeed, YOU, the readers, are the reason I founded this venture in 2007. In fact, I even turned down the position of European Mobile Content Analyst at a well-known global consultancy to blog my ideas/observations here. It was the right choice.

My heartfelt thanks for your continued support of MSG - and here’s to a great 2008 for us all!

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

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The release hit the wires at about 3 A.M. CET, so I can finally divulge some detail about the official tie-up (I hinted at yesterday) between Yahoo Japan for Mobile and Mobile Content Networks (MCN), which is now calling itself a mobile search management solutions provider. Marc Bookman, MCN CEO, and I deep-dive into the details lower down in this post.

MCN will provide its search platform to power Uta Search, a “digital content channel” around mobile music (ringtones and full-track downloads) on the Yahoo Portal. In fact, Uta Search service will be available directly from the homepage (a link right under the search box, to be precise). Japan for Mobile is available to nearly 80,000,000 mobile users across the NTT DoCoMo and KDDI/au wireless networks.

The press release details are sketchy, but Yahoo’s Japanese press release reveals other vertical channels - including games and comics - are in the pipeline. And MCN has told me a federated advertising solution is planned to monetize the lot.

Read between the lines and this announcement speaks volumes about the players and value props likely to play a pivotal role in the mobile search ecosystem. At first glance it might appear that Yahoo Japan for Mobile is snubbing its nose at the usual suspects, but it should not be read as a thumbs down to universal search engine providers (branded or white-label).

full story »

• Posted in
• Mobile Search, Mobile Music, Mobile Advertising, Content Discovery

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GOOGLE MOBILE: There have been reams written about Google’s 10 year mobile ad revenue goal and their mobile strategy - but here’s an article from AFX that connects the dots, allowing us in confidence to conclude Google’s goals are pipedreams (or as we say in the U.K. “a load of old bollocks”).

Kenneth Dulaney, VP of research firm Gartner Group, puts in a slightly more eloquent way, “I’d say it’s difficult to get half of Google’s revenue from mobile advertising. Google doesn’t understand yet how to build mobile applications, so there is potential for early failure because they don’t have the right application. What Google’s got to understand is that people don’t want to navigate on the phone.”

To add to the drama is a raft of stats about mobile search and advertising in one place, suggesting that growth in this sector may be much slower than many have predicted.

· More than one-half of mobile phone owners said that nothing would motivate them to use Web-based services on their mobiles

· Only 3 percent of mobile users use mobile search

· Only 10 percent of teens access the Web via their mobiles

· In the U.S., 16 percent of cell phone owners regularly access the Internet from their mobiles, increasing to 28 percent in 2012 (Jupiter Research)

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• Web 2.0, Mobile Social Networking, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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In preparation for our series of research reports in 2008, Peggy Albright and I are scheduling briefings with mobile search companies, and not just the usual suspects. If you want to schedule a conference call to discuss your service/strategy, please contact me directly at peggy@msearchgroove.com.

In the meantime, allow me to share some information I have gleaned from a pre-briefing with a major company in the space. (I’ll have more tomorrow- I respect the wishes of the companies to keep this under wraps till then…)

The company will provide federated search to a branded Japanese mobile portal (and the brand, which counts over 100 million page views per day, is the biggest surprise of all).

The deal will see the search platform provider act as a vertical search service, combining, sorting and ranking mobile music content (that’s ringtones and full-track music downloads) from a number of content providers allied with the content portal.

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• Posted in
• Mobile Search, Mobile Music, Mobile Content, Mobile Advertising

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Digital media will see a rash of mergers and acquisitions in 2008 driven by a quest for targeted online search advertising revenue and a faltering wider economy. And look for Google and Microsoft to lead the buying spree although other technology vendors and network operators will also be searching for bargains.That’s the view of Aleksandra Bosnjak, lead analyst at StrategyEye Digital Media. He predicts that pressure will mount on mobile network operators as big brands from the computing world push deeper into mobile in search of new ways to generate more revenue.

And speaking of search, new search advertising platforms will pave the way for operators in the digital space to translate user behavior into revenue. MSG has been preaching the pivotal importance of relevancy (and the business imperative to control the customer analytics) from the start with precisely this scenario in mind. Good to see a confirmation from StrategyEye that platforms which analyze user search patterns to produce tailored advertising directed at that individual will begin to pay off.

As Aleksandra puts it: “It’s all going to be about advertising revenue in 2008 and the year will really be defined by the battle between Microsoft and Google for dominance in the digital space.”

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• Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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By Emma Mohr-McClune

Emma Mohr-McClune is a Principal Analyst at Current Analysis, responsible for coverage of European mobile consumer services. She is an esteemed colleague and frequent contributor to this site, so check back regularly for her take on market trends that matter.

Europe is set to see new bundled content service models appear in 2008-and a new, low-profile MusicStation promotion from Vodafone UK offers an early taster. Not only is this the strongest competitive response to the iPhone we’ve seen to date, but it neatly offsets ‘Nokia Comes With Music’ competition some six months before its expected release.

This Christmas promotion sees Vodafone UK duplicating O2 UK’s iPhone all-in-one bundled service concept, with high-volume voice, text, and mobile Internet components, pegged at a comparable monthly subscription charge for mid-volume users. (See table below.)

However, all three devices featured within this promotion are fully subsidized, and the headline selling point offers ‘free, unlimited music downloads’-a unique proposition in the UK. Vodafone UK has folded the GBP1.99 per week MusicStation subscription charge into a monthly bundle for voice and texts, which also includes a monthly 120 MB quota of mobile Internet data.

This essentially takes the decision of cancelling the MusicStation subscription out of the end user’s hands, thus offsetting the fear associated with losing access to all previously downloaded tracks. To be sure, this promotion is not as aggressively priced as it could be. Vodafone UK’s GBP45 per month bundle offers fewer inclusive minutes and substantially fewer inclusive texts than the corresponding O2 mid-volume iPhone tariff, but end users may swallow this, given the cost benefits of the ‘free phone’ and ‘free music tracks’ in this deal.

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• Posted in
• Mobile Music, Mobile Content

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Thanks to Jason Spero, VP Marketing, for sharing the most recent AdMob Mobile Metrics Report with MSG. Like the name says, the report deep-dives into data collected with every ad request, impression and click to provide the mobile industry, specifically publishers and advertisers, an important feedback loop.

Considering AdMob serves some 1.6 billion ads per month, it’s information that merits more than a cursory look.

Among the highlights:

Western Europe and North America continue to be the motors of growth. Overall, AdMob Network impressions were up 4.5 percent over the previous month. (In real numbers that’s 1,722,213,245 for November vs 1,648,546,800 for October).

The top devices in AdMob’s top four markets (that MSG reported here) remained the same. In the U.S. it’s the Motorola KRZR; in India the Nokia 6030; in South Africa the Motorola v360; and in the U.K. the SonyEricssonK800i.

And the word on iPhone: The iPhone “dramatically overindexes on usage share compared with unit share.”

MSG will circle back with the next report - and a few surprises in the New Year. (Omar Hamoui, AdMob CEO, pre-briefed me last week on a game-changing service, but I have agreed not to post more at this time.) In the meantime, Omar kindly provided me with his pick of the trends that will mark 2008.

full story »

• Posted in
• Mobile Advertising

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By Dr. Rick Hangartner

Dr. Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist, MyStrands, has nearly 30 years experience developing computing hardware and software in the aerospace, data communications, heavy-trucking, and supercomputing industries. Prior to joining MyStrands, he worked for seven years at Cray, Inc. developing high performance computing hardware and software.

No, the headline on this entry is not a careless grammatical error. Nor is the question really “What is the recommender market?” That would imply that “recommenders” are mature, well-defined technologies that deliver specific features and value to the online world. Emerging recommendation technologies are currently setting the standards for discovery and personalization in today’s social networking-dominated Web 2.0 environment-and the future of online social networking is all about discovery and personalization. While search engines help you find things you know you are looking for, discovery helps you find the rest.

If we accept that every business must make its case in 10 to 20 seconds on its Web site, then we are all but forced to admit that recommenders, more than anything else, represent the conceptual answer to the question, “How can I get that visitor/user/customer to realize that I offer something of value to him or her?”

Although venture capitalists and Web 2.0 users may find that claim to be just the tiresome excuse they need for hitting the “Back” button, the point is that a good argument can be made that unlike search engines, the recommender idea is a formal concept that has as many different concrete examples as there are separate market applications.

The recommender industry really is the business of pulling three components together into a system that helps a user-driven business convince their potential customers that they should stay for a while. These three elements include,

1) An effective model that relates the needs visitors have to what the business offers,

2) Quality data to build a model instance that relates specific needs to specific offerings, and

3) Unobtrusive means for easily and quickly determining an individual user’s needs.

Note that these three components are not quite as simple as “good (statistical) algorithms,” “a lot of data,” or “simple user interfaces.” In the coming years, defining an effective model will increasingly involve a scientific approach to understanding user needs and the market strategy of the business. Gathering quality data will require more sophisticated understanding of which data are actually relevant to the model. Devising means for characterizing an individual user’s needs will depend on a refined understanding of how people implicitly and explicitly signal needs that they themselves may not even fully understand.

In short, the recommender industry is the evolving business of building and deploying systems that reify some of the psychology of human economic transactions. What this means for the marketplace seems relatively clear: Search engines as we know them will never disappear. In the near term, search engines will increasingly incorporate simple recommender technologies to handle approximate queries (e.g., “You asked for this, and based on similar queries/behavior by others, you might be looking for this.”). But in the long term, the recommender industry will be larger, and recommender technologies will be more pervasive than the search industry and search technology as we know it.

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• Recommendation, Mobile Social Networking, Web 2.0, Personalization, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Content Discovery

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Successful content-selling strategies are no longer based on user-pull. Pull is built on the premise that users know what they want and are prepared to go look for it. That’s quite an assumption when it comes to fast-paced content such as entertainment and multimedia which changes faster than users can keep up. More importantly, the pull model ignores the rise of empowered customers who increasingly expect - even demand - content and services on their own terms.

Orange UK doesn’t just grasp the seismic shift to more personalized and proactive content delivery; it has hardwired this paradigm into its first-ever mobile content recommendation service. Put simply, the service - which harnesses a server-based solution from Xiam Technologies, an Irish provider of content discovery solutions - provides users real-time recommendations across the Orange World Portal. The aim is to expose users to content that is relevant to their own specific interests and purchase intent.

I caught up with Jim Small, Portal Relevance Manager at Orange UK, to review the results to date, the relationship with Xiam and the link with targeted mobile advertising. My special thanks to Jim for an invigorating exchange and the opportunity to hear his vision for services that transcend content silos to ultimately deliver individual users what they like - even before they ask for it.

Listen to the podcast here [11:16]

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• Posted in
• Recommendation, Mobile Social Networking, Mobile Search, Mobile Music, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Podcasts

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Many regular readers have contacted me over the last week to inquire about changes at MSG, so let me take some time at the end of a monumental week to fill you in. Since the “official” official launch took place on October 12, I have spent much of my time organizing a top-notch team of writers as well as reaching out to c-level executives and thought-leaders for columns, articles and opinion pieces. I’m pleased to report that each individual I have approached is eager to contribute; a testament to the vision of this site and my own personal mission to establish MSG as a catalyst for broad topic discussion and advancement on the subject of mobile search and all things at the intersection of content and context.

Look for a lively mix of contributions from major players including Google, Yahoo, Nokia and a mix of white-label providers, as well as insights from exciting companies sure to make an indelible mark on 2008. On Monday it is my pleasure and honor to post an overview of the recommender industry written by Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist at MyStrands, a provider of recommender systems that recently raised $24 million in another round of funding - bringing the total to $55 million. (MSG has tracked the company from the start. Listen to the exclusive podcast here.)

Speaking of podcasts, I have invested in a small studio to expertly edit and produce an ongoing series of audio interviews with industry movers and shakers. At the request of regular readers, I have extended this service to companies on a sponsorship basis. JumpTap is just one of many companies to communicate its strategy, view and roadmap via the MSG Sponsored Podcast Series. JumpTap is pleased with the results (Part 2 features Dan Olschwang, JumpTap CEO) and I’m happily in my element again since I actually started out working for National Public Radio in the U.S.

If you are interested in developing a podcast series with MSG, then please contact Jennifer Abelson. Jennifer, who is CEO of the Abelson Group, a U.S.-based PR firm, has been instrumental in delivering MSG’s message to companies in this space and I look forward to working with her as MSG expands its reach into industry events and topic discussions.

In this vein, MSG will hold an invitation-only roundtable during Mobile World Congress in February to debate mobile search and mobile advertising with senior executives from a mix of vendors and mobile operators. I’ll circle back with more details closer to the event.

I am indeed fortunate to have connected with a wonderful and dedicated team of professionals that share my commitment to quality and my passion for new ideas. Happy coincidence has reunited me with Peggy Albright, a veteran analyst whom I have had the pleasure of working with on Informa mobile portal usability reports and white papers. Peggy will collaborate with MSG to produce a series of monthly mobile search performance reports throughout 2008. This research service will routinely and thoroughly investigate the capabilities and performance characteristics of mobile search solutions available to users in the U.S., Europe and other markets.

No doubt 2008 will be a milestone year for MSG. I look forward to co-creating this site with you all and warmly invite your comments and feedback!

• Posted in
• Web 2.0, Recommendation, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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