In-Brief: In response to the comment Medio Systems’ co-founder Michael “Luni” Libes recently posted on MSG I tested Verizon’s Get It Now service. My analysis reveals what Verizon delivers - and doesn’t.Mobile search is about allowing users to find what they already know they want. It’s important to get search right, but even power-search does little to encourage impulse buying behavior. That’s where recommendations come in. Unlike search results, recommendations suggest similar content to users based on their search queries. It is also possible to base recommendations on other factors such as browsing patterns, purchasing habits or intelligent segmentation - but the mobile industry, for the most part, isn’t there yet.
What the industry can do is match content recommendations with keywords. At least, that’s what I assumed when I began my study of mobile search/recommendation on the T-Mobile USA and Verizon portals. However, I am forced to conclude that the industry has a long way to go before it properly implements content recommendations. To be fair, the industry has to get search right first, (which it is currently struggling to do), but I believe the industry should tackle these issues in parallel as the technologies are intertwined and mutually beneficial.
In response to my earlier post Luni correctly pointed out that the searches were performed from within Verizon’s Vcast Music application. He stated that “for a better experience on a Verizon phone, subscribers (today) must download the “Get It Now Search” application, which will search not only the VCast Music catalog, but also the ringtones, ringback tones, wallpaper, games, and applications catalogs, all from a single search box.”
Curious to see if there would be a vast difference in the quality of the results I downloaded the Get It Now app to my handset and conducted mobile searches for a variety of content, the results of which I have documented in this post.
In-Brief: MSG’s Navigation Day @ CeBIT pre-event coverage kicks off (albeit a day late due to server issues) with an overview of Nuance, a provider of speech-enabled technologies and solutions for mobile search, navigation and in-car communications. Fatima Vital, a Nuance senior marketing director, provides a snapshot of mobile search use in the U.S. (where Sprint and Verizon offer Nuance voice-enabled search services), shares her checklist for an optimized voice UI and brings us up to date on Tegic (a former AOL company best known for its flagship T9 text input product, which Nuance acquired in 2007). 
In-Brief: Survey results reveal a majority of respondents believe branded search (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) will dominate & location is the must-have feature of mobile service moving forward.
