MSearchGroove

In-Brief: Details from last week’s Q&A with SurfKitchen and Medio covering their partnership to deliver search via the idle screen; SurfKitchen’s “next-gen” ODP strategy, plans to boost mobile search & advertising, and upcoming North American mobile operator win; Medio’s view of the competitive landscape & plans to launch self-service mobile advertising.

Regular readers will recall that I reported on the tie-up between white-label mobile search & advertising provider Medio and leading on-device portal (ODP) provider SurfKitchen last week when it made the rounds at Mobile World Congress. I wrote my analysis based on the press release (coverage here), and requested briefings with both companies. Michael “Luni” Libes, Medio Chief Architect and co-founder, responded immediately and Dave Evans, SurfKitchen CTO and widget guru, followed soon after. Thanks to my able assistants, Andrea Henninge and Bev Nicholson, I now have transcripts of both interviews that I can feature here as well as incorporate into other reports/projects in the pipeline.

To be clear, the partnership between Medio and SurfKitchen is neither exclusive nor unique in the industry (in fact, other ODPs tell me they are planning similar partnerships as we speak). However, it is a development that validates the pivotal position of the idle screen in delivering search and, more importantly, advertising. And we all have our eye on that prize…

Search & advertising + ODP is a winning combination that we’ll see more of this year. This is because mobile operators recognize they must move past using ODPs to deliver what Dave calls the list of “hit” services (such as mobile TV, music, content catalogues, and navigation) which offer limited customization but drive significant revenues. The real value is in harnessing ODPs to support a broader range of services and business models around search, advertising and personalization. (For more check out this thought-provoking opinion piece - and Dave has promised to circle back with a guest column for MSG soon.)

Vendor spin aside, Dave makes an important point. ODPs are morphing into a new kind of service creation tool, enabling services - such as search and advertising - to be created by third parties and delivered to the handset.

More on SurfKitchen further down in this post; but first, what’s in this for Medio?

Just as I thought, Luni sees the ODP as another channel to the customer. More specifically, the ODP is “another method to get people to the content and ultimately generate significant advertising revenues.”

This excerpt from our impromptu Q&A says it all:

Q: Is the ODP core to how Medio will present and/or monetize mobile search services?

A: We have been focused on this [kind of] technology for ages. On Verizon [Wireless], our search deployment is an app that does search. It’s been downloaded on the order of 10 million times - not an insignificant application on Verizon.

A trial that is still going on is with Sprint. It’s live and it’s on more handsets now….It’s really like a storefront ODP. It’s the entire vending machine in Sprint; in client form. [In the case of] T-Mobile we took it that one step further. …If you see it in those few steps, you see that [the focus on ODPs] is actually a logical progression.

Q: So where does that leave SurfKitchen? You do your own app and the other approach is to partner with other ODP players?

A: Right. We have a new partner in SurfKitchen. They specialize in getting code on handsets [porting]. We specialize in search. So wherever they’re deploying their ODP; we’re happy to be the search partner for them.

Q: There are other ODP players out there. Are you speaking with them as well?

A: We have talked to others already. We do these partnerships when there’s at least an RFI on the table; so in this case there was something that triggered [the partnership] but I can’t speak of what that is.

I expect you’ll see other [partnership announcements] from us in the next year or so.

Q: Do you have ambitions to be on the active idle screen - to have search be part of the device UI?

A: In most cases it’s actually harder to get something [an app] on an idle screen than to get an app pre-loaded because it requires you to have the code embedded on the phone. It can take years to get to that stage.

We are pursuing that. I can’t comment on which ones we’re talking to. We are talking to idle screen vendors and OEMs, and operators in North America.

Q: Active idle screen is gaining serious traction in Asia.

A: We’re not actively pursuing Asia at this time.

Q: Speaking of Asia; how’s it working out with mInfo? You announced a partnership and things went quiet.

A: It’s going fine and, typically in this industry, things take longer than expected.

Q: Let’s talk about T-Mobile and Yahoo. Just to be clear, is that an impact on Medio.

A: One of our biggest customers swapped out their Web search partner [Google for Yahoo], so that made a couple of waves, but we’re still the on-deck search company.

Q: What about advertising? Has anything changed in the way that you approach publishers or the other way around? You made your CBS announcement not long ago, but I’ve been hearing that you are no longer focused on getting more publishers.

A: No, that’s incorrect. We’re still adding more publishers. We added ABC - so we are live on ABC news - and we’ll be adding more publishers.

Q: What about smaller publishers?

A: I can’t give you any details until later this year. There’s lots of things early this year; there’s lots of things going on. We can say self-service is coming, and we’re happy to talk to any publisher who wants a search box on their site now.

Q: Finally, federated search. Companies have different definitions and approaches. What’s Medio’s view?

A: We’ve been doing this [federated search] since the start. We did federated search on TELUS and we do federated search on T-Mobile USA.

We will be doing something that’s closer to what you probably have in mind in terms of design in federated search. You’ll see that come in a few months.

Q: So how does this compare to JumpTap’s view of federated search?

A: Yes, I saw that interview on your site. ‘We can do it if they ask us to do it’ was the kind of answer you got [from JumpTap]. Whereas… we do it unless they [operators] tell us not to do it.

Our broadest search happens to be in Canada [with TELUS]. In T-Mobile USA, we don’t have the mobile Web turned on - our mobile Web index - because they asked us not to. And at Verizon; it’s currently only downloadable content because that’s all that they have required.

Q: So what do you do in the case of TELUS? What are you federating and how?

A: We federate all results except the Web results. So it’s Yellowpages in Canada and the U.S., as well as results from Amazon. We also bring in weather and flight status from third parties. And when I mean third parties, we actively go out and quote them in real-time and bring back their results.

That to me is the definition of federated. Federated search is actually like what search is, which is everything that’s searchable within that one company’s domain and within their index. Whereas with federated you actually go in and integrate search results from other parties. By that definition; we’ve been doing this forever.

++++++

Likewise, I used the catch-up call with Dave not only to be clear on SurfKitchen’s side of the tie-up with Medio, but also to get an update on SurfKitchen’s progress toward becoming a “next-gen” ODP (and integrating search and advertising every step of the way) since MSG published an exclusive podcast a few months back.

Back then, Dave spelled out SurfKit Phonetop - a suite of applications to deliver zero-click discovery, and a range of analysis tools and framework to enable services to be deployed across a broad range of devices as widgets. The product has since launched and will be shipping in 2Q08. Dave tells me SurfKitchen has a customer “who is the process of implementing that technology, and will be going live in the middle of the year.”

Here is an excerpt of our Q&A:

Q: You talk about being a next-generation ODP. What do you mean by that?
A: Over the last six months we’ve seen a lot of change in the industry; in particular there is a renewed focus on discovery and the user experience. We’re also seeing that the operators are starting to focus on offering a broader range of services to their subscribers and opening up the walled garden to third-party content providers and third-party services.

An ODP, rather than being a fairly closed service focusing on one or two services for the operator, is becoming a platform for the wide range of services that the operator, as well as third parties, can deploy into that ODP.

Q: What is SurfKitchen’s role in this? Luni [from Medio] remarked your value prop revolves very much around your ability to do all the heavy-lifting, the porting.

A: Absolutely. We are the enabler to enable those widgets to be built and run on a wider range of devices and platforms including Symbian, Microsoft, Java, Brew, and Android. We’ll be extending it [to Android].

Trying to create a consistency across devices makes a much more viable market for people who want to develop widgets and deploy them at much lower cost. We all know that the experience on the device is a much better experience than the experience [of] a WAP browser, but it’s expensive to put an application onto a device. So, at the moment, we really see just the high revenue earning services on the phone. With the widget framework you make that effort once, put the widget framework onto the device and then you can launch lots of services on the back of that at a much lower cost and a much shorter time to market.

Q: You have other announcements and I’d like you to connect the dots. SurfKit Home, for example, brings the on-device portal onto the idle screen.

A: Yes, SurfKit Home delivers zero-click access to other services that the subscriber wants to have on their home screen. So, again, this is all about how do we increase the discoverability of services and, along with the widget framework, how do we then make the relevant services easy to find on the phone for the end-user.

The final new piece is our mediation server, which is aimed at providing click stream tracking on the ODP. It can track key presses, page views and how those push back to the server and are then delivered into the operator’s data warehouse. We can close the loop in terms of being able to easily launch a new service, measure how users are using [the service] and then refine that service.

Q: And across all those products, you’re integrating search and advertising?

A: Yes. We’re seeing that search and advertising really is coming together as a single message - single service - that needs to be provided into all the widgets [and] all of the services offered by the operator. Our announcement with JumpTap last year and our announcement with Medio this year are about working with the best of breed search engines and being able to surface that up into the ODP.

Working with those companies means that we can leverage discoverability by having entry search or advertising on the home screen as well as within the widgets.

For example, you might have a restaurant widget that the user can search within and, because the user knows they are in the restaurant widget, you can add additional context so the search terms get the response back from the search engine consumed within the same widget. This keeps the user all the time in this great experience, in this context, and allows for the pushing through of paid-for adverts from restaurants or from entertainment establishments that want to have those eyeballs.

Q: That means more opportunities to show advertising and more context that will likely make those ads more effective and, ultimately, generate more revenue. Is ad-serving or selection part of what you will be doing?

A: We will provide the targeting data, but we will be working with people like Medio, JumpTap and also some of the more dedicated advertising solutions. We’ll provide them with the targeting to receive the campaigns back then surface them into the ODP.

Q: What about AdMob? Last time we spoke you were integrating it into the client.

A: AdMob is very much focusing on the key word advertising, which we are still integrating into the client where the operator requests us.

We see a lot of potential also for the more promotional campaign based banner advertising. We are not yet announcing it, but we are working with one of the league players in that space to provide commercial ads into the client.

That should [produce] a good mix of promotional advertising as well as key word text advertising, and then mapping that into the recommendation engines from Medio provides a broad range of paid-for content, key word advertising and more promotional CPM-based advertising.

Monday: A podcast/briefing with Artilium and a closer look at the company’s MWC announcements and path-breaking approach to presence.

• Posted in
• Personalization, Recommendation, Web 2.0, On-Device Portals, Mobile Search, Local Search, Mobile Advertising, Content Discovery

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