I’m on my way out the door to Amsterdam to speak at Navigation Location Services 2008 - and wanted to share this scoop before I leave. Thanks again to Yann Mondon who made sure I had the release first and before it goes out on the wires tomorrow a.m.

In a nutshell, abphone, a mobile multimedia search engine for entertainment, has formally launched mobile game search (an offer Pierre Scokaert, abphone CEO, hinted at on several occasions in interviews with MSG). Likewise Nadir Garouche, a long-time MSG pal and great source of breaking news (!), also wrote about this development on his blog yesterday. He was spot-on!

I’m excited because this is yet another confirmation of the pivotal role of vertical mobile search engines - gives me another company to profile in AltSearchEngines. To this end abphone has also announced a partnership with mobile game publisher Gameloft that will make the 200 premium games within the Gameloft catalogue accessible (indexed and therefore findable) by abphone’s search engine.

But Pierre assures us there is much more in the pipeline. As he put it in a statement: “In the coming months, we will index the catalogues of all major mobile game publishers, and we will provide APIs to allow them to reference their contents on abphone. Our ambition is to become the largest game index available on mobile phones, while we continue extending our leadership on image and video search.”

But it’s not just about a better mobile search experience. (Although I must stress that abphone does enable this through its search technology and its conscious choice to figure human judgment - how users ranks and rate results - into the final results set. The quality of results means the company counts “an average of 15 sessions per active user per month.”) It’s about a new business model emerging that will surely find more content companies partnering with vertical search providers as they move distribution off-portal. After all, how else will they be found?!

But don’t take my word for it. Consider this statement by Eve Arakelian, B2C Director, Global, of Gameloft: “abphone represents a new trend in the mobile business, where gamers will more and more access games off portals.”

I’ll have more direct from the source when I catch up with Pierre next week. It will be interesting to explore his plans for sharing and ranking functionalities in the scheme of things. More importantly, I’ll get the inside track on monetization. Abphone is ad-funded and Pierre has indicated that the new game search feature opens the door to “an alternative model of sponsorship.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, 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.