In-Brief: A quick overview of the new names and approaches in mobile search that merit a closer look. Companies include Cafegadgets.in, ChaCha, dotMobi, Veveo, & Zodigo.

Is mobile search a source of competitive advantage? Or is it merely a must-have navigation feature well on its way to becoming a commodity? (The scenario: Every service will need a search box – and any technology will do…) Well, the jury is out on this one for now. (I might add it was a topic of lively debate at Search Goes Mobile - over dinner and after-dinner grappa.) One conclusion I did reach: There is new interest in offering — even cultivating — a breadth of mobile search engines. For operators, mobile search is a new weapon in their competitive arsenal, and being the gateway to new search services is top item on their agenda. (More in follow-up coverage from SGM.)

In the meantime, a review of this week’s developments reveals a growing interest in mobile search. There are new names and new approaches, and you can count on coverage here and at AltSearchEngines. (I have sent out requests and will circle back as the companies file in.)

Indeed, I greatly look forward to a webinar/briefing next week with Veveo, a vertical mobile search engine provider. The company’s vTap application – available for Windows Mobile, Nokia N-series, and handsets from Samsung, Sanyo, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG – effectively lets users search video from the Web and then transcodes it into a format that will work with the player on the handset. MSG covered the company from the start and it’s encouraging to see the mainstream media catching on as well. If you want to read up on Veveo and its vTap offer in the meantime, then check out this column in BusinessWeek.

ZODIGO: Zodiac Interactive is in the news after grabbing headlines at DEMO 08, where the company also introduced Zodigo, a mobile content search and discovery engine for TVs and browsers. Earlier this week the company made the decision to spin off Zodigo into a new company, entirely focused on mobile content search, led by Matt Johnston, formerly Zodiac’s SVP of strategy and Zodigo’s CEO.

As Matt put it in a statement: “In order for Zodigo to be truly successful as the prominent source for mobile content discovery, it needs to be a complete entity and focus solely on the mobile content sector, which is huge and continuing to grow rapidly. With this move, we believe that Zodigo will have all the opportunities to become the #1 place where people can easily find and download exciting new content for their mobile devices.”

I have a briefing with Matt next week. By way of background, the service – much like a Movies-On-Demand service from cable operators – makes it easy for consumers to navigate (either via remote control or mobile phone keypad), discover and download mobile content from the TV and Web to their mobile phones. To round out the offer, Zodigo also lets users find games, ringtones, podcasts and content recommended by like-minded people through the use of an “intelligent system that quickly and automatically learns about users’ preferences, as well as their exact mobile phone type, and recommends only content that works for that phone.”

.MOBI: dotMobi, a Dublin-based mobile domain provider, is planning to sell find.mobi, its consumer-facing mobile search engine tool. Looks like the search engine has outgrown the lab and is ready for the marketplace. All sites captured and ranked by find.mobi are made-for-mobile and designed from the ground up to work on mobile phones. Makes sense to feature mobile sites in mobile search results – and the find.mobi index includes sites from all major top-level domains, including .mobi. (dotMobi was established by a consortium of technology industry companies including Microsoft, Nokia, Vodafone, 3, the GSM Association, Hewlett-Packard, Orange, Samsung, and Sun Microsystems.)

I can’t say the announcement comes as a surprise. During a Mobile Monday in Düsseldorf I connected with Ronan Cremin, dotMobi’s Director of Development Initiatives, who revealed the search engine was catching on with mobile operators and other companies who understood how a made-for-mobile search engine could plug the holes in their universal search strategies/services.

This isn’t only spelled out in MSG coverage; it is confirmed in this post from Silicon Republic. James Pearce, Vice-President of technology at dotMobi, is quoted as saying that find.mobi – although not formally launched – is “already receiving significant traffic.” He also reports that the search engine has “been implemented as a private-labeled mobile search engine for one European operator, with additional customers in the pipeline.”

In related news, dotMobi is planning to auction off generic domain names for the mobile space, including domains like film.mobi, religion.mobi, drugs.mobi, and airlines.mobi.

CHACHA: An update on ChaCha, another cool mobile search offer MSG tracked from the start. The company, which has launched a mobile answers/mobile search service that combines algorithms and human judgment, has been named to the annual FierceWireless “Fierce 15″ list. ChaCha was also ranked as the “No. 1 Alternative Search Engine” in February by Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines.

CAFEGADGETS.IN: Searching and shopping is a logical and lucrative combination, and I expect this is just the start. Consider Slifter, a mobile shopping/search tool that enables millions of mobile users to find and share nearly 250 million products and promotions at over 150,000 locations in the U.S. using their mobile phones. This week, Cafegadgets.in, an India-based online retailer of gadgets and gizmos, took the wraps off CG Mobile Search, a product and price search service for mobile based on WAP Pull technology. Put simply, users who want to buy gadgets simply send an SMS to a shortcode to do comparison shopping.

The exact details of this new service are a bit vague, but I am encouraged by the email I just got today from Hitesh Dhingra, Cafegadgets Co-founder.

He writes:

Hi Peggy

Thanks for your mail.

I just spent 30 minutes on your site & trust me I will be spending another 3 hours today itself in reading through your archives. It’s really interesting to know the happenings worldwide and I must congratulate your team in providing an ideal platform for the global players to showcase their products.

Thanks Hitesh for your offer to do a Q&A/podcast – and thanks most of all for your positive feedback. Glad you like the site and please spread the word!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Mobile Search. 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.