In-Brief: In-depth report on the VisionGain mobile search conference with special focus on Bango, Nokia, AccuraCast & MCN. 

I’m back in my office - from London - with some thought-provoking observations and arguments raised during the conference. A surprising and positive development: the consensus that mobile search must be and can be much more contextual. In fact, Chris Goswami, Director Product Management, Openwave, who chaired the session, suggested that “advertising could be the content” if the industry can deliver the right mix of contextual search and tie it to targeted advertising. It’s the industry nirvana - but how do we get there from here?

Or maybe the question should be: What is holding us back? It could be something as simple as a lack of worthwhile content, participants suggested. Get that right and then the problem will solve itself. Put another way, more content will mean more searches, and more searches will mean more inventory because the ecosystem players will be convinced there is money to be made.

Relevancy is another issue. But no one was blaming the branded mobile search providers. Their Internet search services aren’t made for mobile and they can’t count on mobile operators for customer data, so what they see (key words and some incomplete location data) is what we get. But what excuse do white label providers have? As Martin Harris, SVP Sales, Bango, put it: “They should be doing a better job of delivering relevancy because, between these two organizations [search companies and mobile operators], they know more about the individual consumer than a branded search engine.” I’m quite curious to see what response white label company execs will offer here in their defense…Comments welcome!

But it might be that we have a poor mobile search experience because the space lacks innovation. This was the view of Farhad Divecha, Director, AccuraCast, an SEM and website development company. To date, Google is synonymous with search in the Internet and, until we have something better, Google will likely dominate mobile. This is partially confirmed by recent stats from M:Metrics that report Google consistently leads the pack of popular search terms. Add to that brand power and mindshare, and Google has an enviable position indeed.

However, that competitive edge exists only as long as the industry - and users - will settle for second-best. That is bound to change - forever - when users rebel against reams of results with outdated or static material that is neither accurate nor relevant, or become concerned that mobile search could degenerate into a showcase for advertising and other distractive content.

As Patrick Barile, who heads up business development in Europe for white label provider MCN, said: Context will change everything because “Google will have a lot of catching up to do to deliver context.” Indeed, when the end-game is context, white label has a handful of aces.

Nokia is also banking on the increasing importance of context to tip the scales in its favor. Jussi-Pekka Partanen, Nokia’s head of mobile search, outlined his company’s strategy to deliver a mobile search experience that unites our physical, virtual and social worlds. In his view, search should allow us access to all the content that is relevant to us no matter where it lives. Why search? Because it is “the only UI paradigm that scales with the exponential growth of content” across devices and platforms. Currently, we suffer a “chaos of content scattered across all of these domains, and search can scale up to serve us the relevant [stuff].”

Google, on the other hand, is “a prisoner in a way of its page rank algorithm.” It has bet its bottom line that we will want content and information based on how it linked together in the Internet. While this may still play a role in our experiences, Nokia believes we - not algorithms - will rise to be in control. “Everything should be based on our personal preferences, not page rank….We [therefore] need a solution that organizes the content - accessible through the search box - in a way that is it is relevant to the individual.”

In this scenario, page rank is unimportant as are web page indexes. What matters is our own personal index, which mirrors the content and information we interact with in the physical world and in our social groups. “We’re talking about mapping the physical world and the social graph - and putting ourselves in the center.” Once we have the results, we also need the device capabilities to interact with them.

As JP put it: “If we find a local store, then we need to be able to navigate there; if we find information, then we need to be able to share it with friends; if we find music, then we need to be able to stream, download and store it; and if we find something we want to buy, then we need to be able to purchase it.” And the list goes on…

But the real game-changer could be what happens when Nokia “unleashes the power” of the billions of mobile devices in our hands today. Google may have a server farm of over one million servers, but 3 billion mobile users “have an advantage over any server-based solution.” It’s the language and logic we heard when IT behemoths gave way to decentralized client-server solutions and personal computers. And it’s likely to spark a similar revolution in technology and lifestyle.

JP’s vision: To create a data structure that will link the personal indexes we create on our personal mobile devices. It doesn’t have to a full-blown P2P network connecting all devices, although JP is convinced that will happen. We can start by linking our personal index and information with the indexes of our friends. The data structure wouldn’t only enhance and grow the index we carry with us in our personal devices; it would give the device the parameters it needs to keep downloading the cool stuff it thinks would interest each of us - perhaps using a Wi-Fi network - and push it to the device memory.

JP has kindly agreed to continue this fascinating conversation on MSG, and you can count on me to post on Nokia’s plans and progress toward “unleashing the power of the devices to create something unique that fulfills our unique requirements for relevance.”

As I have said and written many times: Even power search is powerless if it fails to deliver the right results to the right people. And what better way to achieve this than through the capability to create, or rather co-create an index of what matters with the people who matter most.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Local Search, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Web 2.0. 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.