MSearchGroove

You know a market has crossed the chasm when you can sub-categorize it ad infinitum into a virtual Long Tail of niches and segments. Mobile search has reached this point. We have local mobile search forums, vertical search players and multimodal search events (I’m thinking of Nuance conferences that showcase voice-enabled mobile search). Regular readers will note that MSG has uncovered - and will continue to showcase - new companies and new models that set the bar.

Against this backdrop, SMS mobile search is hardly the new kid on the block. (In fact MSG has tracked 4INFO from the start and Peggy has hooked up yet again with Zaw Thet, CEO, for a final wrap-up podcast to count down the year’s top developments.) BusinessWeek tells us SMS search is gaining serious traction in the U.K. and China. It has also attracted considerable VC interest in the U.S.

In the U.K., AQA (Any Questions Answered), set up by ex-Symbian chief Colly Myers with GBP2million of his own money, charges GBP1 to answer any questions via text and is hitting earnings of $5.7million, up from $846,000 in 2005, with $413,000 in pretax profits in 2006, from answering 16,000 questions per day.

Similar service Textperts was set up last year by two UBS bankers and again charges GBP1 per question and claims to be growing at 20 percent a year, thanks in the main to a growing number of consumers using these text services to make directory enquiry type requests for the location of business types and even phone numbers.

In the U.S., 4INFO has received $15 million in funding from Gannett and Peacock Equity, a financing venture set up jointly by GE Commercial Finance’s Media, Communications & Entertainment business and NBC Universal.

SMS search has also been championed by Google in China, where local services have been running for a number of months.

AQA, at four years old the oldest player in this market, answers 75 percent of questions within five minutes and 95 percent within half an hour - and expects to be answering 50,000 questions per day by 2008.

As a business model, SMS ’search’ is ideal: overheads are low, with AQA using a network of 1,000 freelance researchers, who get 30 percent for each correct answer they provide. The remaining 70 percent is split between AQA and mobile networks. AQA doesn’t have to deal with billing, as the service appears on its bill from the operators or gets deducted from their pre-paid balance.

From a user point of view, SMS seems to offer consumers an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand and easy-to-cost way of finding information using their mobile. I miss a discussion of how SMS search can be a trigger for targeted mobile advertising but I’m sure 4INFO will give us more on that.

Peggy adds: Good catch Paul. Personally, I miss a mention of ChaCha, a breakthrough social search engine that went live November 2006 and may be mobile sooner than we think. In a nutshell, this people-powered search engine has developed a “search-with-a-guide” process that lets stumped searchers connect with a live person - in real-time and via an instant message chat - for a list of highly relevant links and results. Brad Bostic, ChaCha president and co-founder, told me during a recent briefing that the company counts some 30,000 guides and is recruiting more at the rate of 10,000 per month. Revenue is generated by targeted text sponsored by Google and Yahoo ad networks. That’s online. But moving forward Brad told me ChaCha aims to be a one-stop location for people-powered search across a variety of platforms and devices, including mobile. (In fact, ChaCha has harnessed speech recognition technology and plans to become a full platform for search on any device at any time.) Proof that human judgment and knowledge has a place front and center in mobile search schemes

• Posted in
• Web 2.0, Location-based services, Mobile Social Networking, Personalization, Mobile Search, Mobile Content

0 comments

share

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

permalink