MSearchGroove

In-Brief: Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, talks about socially-assisted mobile search, the hype around local search, and the outlook for mobile advertising.

The earlier post (below) covers the news, but this podcast deep-dives into what the announcement means and the potential impact on mobile search and monetization schemes moving forward. It’s early days, but Taptu is “ahead of plan” in usage, and could be on to something bigger than pure PageRank.

Listen to the podcast here [12:55]

Some highlights:

Delivery models: Steve says being embedded in a handset is “incredibly restrictive.” That’s “more the old model of mobile.” Taptu is sharply focused on the wide variety of advanced browsers out there, so expect to see it on an iPhone soon. Perhaps Android is also on the agenda…

The crawling & indexing of social information: This is the one to watch. “Most of the social information we [users] would like to search on … lives in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. It would be great if search engines could crawl and index that stuff so you could find it quickly….[This is] really key to making mobile search a mass-market activity.”

Mobile advertising: “We want to see specific targeting of mobile ads around search terms. At the moment there isn’t a sell-side marketplace for this, so if you have a lot of inventory - a lot of advertising inventory that is linked to search terms - there’s no open marketplace in the mobile ecosystem where you can sell that inventory. And that’s the first step because we’ve got to make these ads specific to the intention of the searcher because, that way, they’re a lot more relevant and they’re a lot more useful.”

Local search: “When we look at the mobile search logs, we don’t see a lot of evidence for people searching for local services or Starbuck’s or pizza. It doesn’t show up very high in the list of search terms….The evidence is that they’re not so much interested in local, and this fits in with the pattern of people’s lives. Most people don’t spend the majority of their time traveling away from their normal locales, and most people are either at home or in the office or in three or four other places that they know quite well.”

2008 trends: More countries will pass the tipping point to where 20 percent use a 3G phone, paving the way to higher mobile data usage. We’ll also see more iPhones - or more iPhone-like devices. Again, a factor that will boost use of the mobile Web. Finally, 2008 will be the year that “social networking on mobile goes mainstream.”

• Posted in
• Mobile Social Networking, Web 2.0, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising, Local Search, Podcasts

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