You’re reading it here first! Vertical mobile search engine and entertainment company abphone will release a mobile music search service in December, closely followed by a mobile games search service. This post details the roadmap and the company’s plans to deliver targeted ads against its entertainment inventory.

Regular readers will notice my discussion of new mobile search models and players runs through my research and writing like a leit motif. It’s more than a warm-and-fuzzy belief that empowered users will demand choice in their search results and their origins; it’s a hard-nosed business sense that tells me the insatiable appetite for inventory will soon move operators and content providers to offer more results from more sources. When it comes to making money on sponsored ads (or simply being in a position to deliver users a breadth of content to choose from in the first place), more can only be better. First rule of Wikinomics: You are only as XXX (fill in the blank) as your network of business relationships.

This realization is driving the current discussion around federated search, and it also allows nimble newcomers to mark their turf with subject-specific vertical search engines. (Veveo, for example, is sharply focused on mobile video search, while HooQs and mywaves present an interesting mix of video-centric content mixed with search services.) My interest in this new dynamic – and its impact on the ecosystem – has led me to seek out and profile these exciting new players. (If you consider yourself to be one, then please contact me directly – I’m eager to do a briefing.)

Naturally, I started with the veteran of vertical – abphone [pronounced A B phone], a French company with global reach whose track record goes back to 2003. I contacted Pierre Scokaert, abphone CEO, to get the inside track. I contacted Pierre Scokaert to get the inside track on the company. I got much more than I expected, namely an exclusive on the company’s mobile music search engine (slated for launch this month) and a view into a business model that could represent a tectonic shift in how the industry offers mobile search (as well as a line-up of companies in a position to do so).

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First, the facts. abphone is a free mobile site that offers mobile search services based on its own IP and algorithms (type in wap.abphone.com or check out the demo video the company was kind enough to produce for MSG). The company shifted its focus to image search in 2005 and launched mobile video search only this year in France (extending it to the U.K. in April). Now it is gearing up to launch video search worldwide. The aim, Pierre tells me, is to become a “general multimedia search service.”

Altogether, the company counts “several million pages viewed every day” (a figure Pierre defines as “more than two and under 10″) and over 100,000 unique visitors per day. But it’s not just about numbers, as he points out. The fact that many of the visitors are die-hard fans of the service provides the service with invaluable analytics that it slices and dices to improve content ranking, for example. That certainly smacks of a win-win situation and I have more on the role of human judgment later down in this post. [Chalk up another triumph for the Wisdom of Crowds!]

Listen to the podcast here [13:42]

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Music search: Here are the pre-launch details for the service. abphone has indexed the music content contained in the catalogs of all the major labels. The service will present users with all the usual eye candy: album art and video where it is available. “We will also allow users to listen to 30 seconds of the track samples. At the end of the process, if they are ready to buy the track, we will send them off to a music vending site.” Of course, “when a user buys the full track, there will be some revenue generated and so this is another possible business model abphone will investigate.”

Commerce & advertising: AdMob is a major partner, but abphone also works with AdInfuse in the U.S., ThirdScreen Media in the U.S., and BuzzCity in Asia. abphone presents a mix of text and banner ads and “very often it works well to combine a banner and a text link next to it.” Relevancy is a focus, and abphone can deliver the goods when it comes to customer data (it monitors click-patterns, preferences and purchases across its site). However, ad networks can’t yet make use of all this data to target mobile advertising messages. So the road to relevancy will naturally be a rocky one…

Third-party content providers & APIs: “We also have value that we can provide to the content providers and this is something that we would like to do in the future; provide content providers with APIs through which they can come and reference their content on AbPhones so that we can show their content when it is relevant to users’ searches.”

Ranking & analysis: Pierre balked when I suggested his approach could be called social-assisted search (a term coined by Taptu and explained in this post). The difference: Taptu literally taps into social sites to identify popular content and slot it among their results. In plain text, this means it factors in the popularity scores on social networking sites, such as MySpace, to rank music tracks. abphone’s technology “analyzes the behavior of users when we present them different content and, based on the analysis of the click streams from the users, we can determine which content they like most. This allows us to rank the content and then it allows us to show the most interesting content in the first page of results.” Two very different approaches.

And don’t forget, Taptu seeks to be a more universal search service, a strategy that will likely see it collide head-on with the usual suspects (Google & Co.), while abphone’s sharp focus on its chosen verticals makes it a prime partner for any and all universal search engine providers. As Pierre put it: “We are very complementary to what they do and hopefully we can partner with them because definitely what users find on abphones they don’t find on Google or Yahoo, and what they do find on Google and Yahoo they don’t find on abphones. So I think there’s a definite opportunity for a partnership there, and this is the way we’ll go.”

And a final thought on vertical search, inspired by a discussion I had today with Phyllis Reuther, CTO at MCN, a federated search platform provider we’ll be hearing more about this month and next as it reveals a slew of operator wins…

In the course of reviewing the nuts and bolts of the technology and the ability of MCN’s offer to tweak mobile search results set on the fly, we honed in on verticals. Sure, a federated solution can connect with verticals and broker the search query to the sites to boost the number (and perhaps even quality) of search results. But it’s also possible to turn the model on its head and broker the query to select groups of sites in such a way that it creates a de facto vertical search engine. You want to deliver a broad choice of mobile games, broker the query to the top games destinations, sort, shuffle, and even brand it as your own vertical. A vertical for poker? No problem – send the query only to Poker sites. And so on…Possibilities as endless as the content at our fingertips.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Mobile Music, Mobile Search, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.