It has been a crazy-busy, exciting week at MSG! The Mobile Advertising Research U.K. report, which combines desk research with extensive primary research and surveys to offer invaluable insight into the attitudes of people and companies across the emerging mobile advertising business ecosystem, is ready for release after receiving the final polish.

Regular readers will recall that MSG was commissioned to conduct Mobile Advertising Research UK, a project research endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K. and identify growth opportunities in the emerging mobile advertising marketplace.

The report — which combines valuable consumer insights gathered by ÆNEAS Strategy Consulting and Management (coordinated by my esteemed colleagues Tarik Fawzi and Atva van Zanten) and qualitative research based on more than 20 interviews with operators, enablers, agencies and brands contributed by MSG — marks the first in a series of region-specific reports that will include Germany (2009) and North America (2010).

During the inaugural event (Mobile Advertising Research U.K.) last week in London, Tarik and I presented an overview of key findings (documented by MSearchGroove here) and revealed the results of an online survey of over 1,000 British. consumers. Pricing is GBP 2,999 ($4,866) for the report, and a 500 GBP discount is available for MMA/IAB members, and people who attended the event. For more information, email James Cameron (james@camerjam.com) or call +44 7940 749874.

And speaking of reports, I am pleased to announce that I will provide a sneak-peak at the results of a performance analysis of voice-enabled mobile search services from search giants Google, Yahoo! & ChaCha during a special Mobile Search Masterclass in London on June 30.

By way of background, this course is part of The City University London’s Masterclass series, a collaboration between the giCentre and the Centre for Interactive Systems Research at the University. It will be run for the second year following from feedback last year and is endorsed by the Mobile Data Association (MDA). Registration is GBP295 and the organizers tell me there are still a few seats available, so email Mark Firman (mfirman@soi.city.ac.uk) to reserve your place.

Regular readers (and Twitter followers — @peggyanne & @msearchgroove) may recall that I teamed up with Peggy Albright, owner of Albright Communications and veteran writer in the wireless industry,  to research and write Pump Up The Volume: An Assessment of Voice-Enabled Web Search on the iPhone.

The complete findings will be released in July, but I can say that ChaCha, a fast-growing SMS mobile search service available in the U.S., “proved superior” to two other voice-enabled search options for the iPhone: the Google Mobile App with Voice and Vlingo for iPhone, a voice-enabled application that allows users to direct their spoken queries to Google or Yahoo! For the purposes of this study, Vlingo provided a spoken interface to the Yahoo! search engine.

To evaluate the overall performance of voice-enabled mobile services offered by ChaCha, Google and Vlingo for iPhone with Yahoo!, Peggy asked a series of 18 queries representative of six typical mobile search categories (Navigational, Directions, Information Local, Information General, Social, and Long-Tail). For each query, we evaluated nine performance characteristics including response time, results accuracy, voice recognition accuracy, number of results received, keytaps required, relevancy of the result, location awareness, use of advertising and presence of other value-added features. The study further took into account that a service could deliver its search results in the form of answers (as ChaCha offers) or as links to Web pages (which Google and Vlingo deliver); for each query tested, an accurate result could be achieved in either form.

In addition to going over some high-level results, I will also present an overview of the mobile search landscape, focusing particular attention on the 10+ categories of mobile search gaining significant traction, including multimodal (voice/visual), mobile vertical search (music/games) and social search, a people-powered search approach that effectively infuses human preferences and human judgments into computer algorithms to pinpoint relevant information and better answers.

This presentation is based on the work I did with Rudy De Waele, blogger at mTrends and dotopen founder, in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission).

Other masterclass speakers and sessions will examine a range of topics and developments, including: mobile search statistics and surveys, key trends and developments, location services and search user interfaces and usability, and the range of content and advertising monetization models involving mobile search. I’m honored to join an impressive roster of industry authorities from companies including AmbieSense Ltd., a provider of ambient search services; Microsoft Research (Cambridge); g8wave Ltd., a mobile marketing company; and Mobile Commerce Ltd., a provider of location-based services that also possesses what the founders call a “piece of enablement” that gives them deep insight into the search queries passed through the operator portals in the U.K., and the results set returned to the user. This central position, combined with the company’s prowess in search advertising, makes MC a top address for the inside track on the quality of the mobile search experience offered by Google and Yahoo!, as well as their ability to deliver relevant results to users’ queries.

Last year, the case studies and analytics provided by Colin Bates, Mobile Commerce CTO, data also reported on MSearchGroove, provided invaluable insight into the most popular categories of mobile search queries and what users really want from their mobile search experience. The eye-opening observation: “Users are grazing, not researching. They are looking for time-fillers rather than facts, and they are using search boxes for site-finding rather than data-finding.”

It will be exciting to explore how mobile search has moved on and discuss where it is going. If you plan to attend and would like to meet up or catch up, please contact me directly (peggy@msearchgroove.com) or arrange an appointment with Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com). I hope to see you soon and will circle back with analysis after the event.

Yahoo finally and officially joins the group of search companies getting on the voice search bandwagon, and announces that it has launched voice-enabled oneSearch for the Yahoo! Mobile iPhone app.

While Yahoo comes to the party more or less six months later than rivals such as Google, there is some indication that the wait was worth it if we consider that this service extends beyond allowing people to conduct keyword searches (for flight numbers, locations, Web site names, local restaurants - the works). People using the app can also use voice to customize the ‘My Interests’ tab. The procedure (according to the press release): “Simply click on ‘add anything’, speak the topic you’re interested in, then select the relevant content and add it to your page.” The Yahoo! oneSearch with voice application is currently available on more than 80 different devices and across platforms including Blackberry, Nokia, Windows Mobile, and now the iPhone - with support in eight languages.

Various bloggers have tried out the voice app, which harnesses speech recognition technology from Vlingo, and reported mixed results. But it’s difficult to judge the user experience based on random road tests. (This is why MSG has pooled its resources to produce mobile search research that, like my own mobile advertising white papers, offers readers a balanced assessment based on first-hand experience and solid methodology.)

The Yahoo app, however, comes in too late to be included in Pump Up The Volume, MSG’s own assessment of Web search on the iPhone. But that won’t keep us from conducting our own road test of the Yahoo app soon. Regular readers and Twitter followers (@peggyanne) may recall I announced the project a while back (a teaser before we had further refined our methodology to account for fundamental differences between natural language and keyword search, an important improvement that makes the results all the more compelling).

The white paper, researched and written in collaboration with Peggy Albright, MSG Associate and founder of Albright Communications, will be released next week. By way of background, our work assesses the overall performance of the voice-enabled search services offered by ChaCha, Google, and Vlingo in a typical range of use cases and scenarios. (Vlingo for iPhone converts queries into text and submits them to one of two search engines, Google and Yahoo. We chose Yahoo.)

A special highlight: A foreword by Bill Meisel, Editor of the specialist publication and voice technology knowledge destination Speech Strategy News. I’m honored to have him on board for the voice search white paper, and look forward to showcasing his analysis/columns on MSG soon.

I won’t divulge all the white paper results and stats here. However, I can say that ChaCha’s  results proved superior to both the Google Mobile App’s voice feature and Vlingo for iPhone.

ChaCha uses human agents to transcribe and interpret/answer search queries (spoken as questions). However, we found the performance of voice recognition alone does not determine nor predict the accuracy of a search result. Indeed, one search provider exhibited high voice recognition accuracy but still had difficulty delivering the intended search results regardless of query format.

Some background on the methodology of this defining work, which will be available for free download.  We created 18 queries representative of mobile search usage and trends. The queries covered search categories considered common in the mobile environment, such as navigation (to a specific Web site), directions, local information, general information on timely topics, and specialized or unusual long-tail topics (sometimes referred to as “dinner table” questions). We also included specific queries that represent the most popular mobile search terms in 2008, based on mobile search data publicly reported by AOL and Yahoo. Recognizing that the search engines used in the Google Mobile App and Vlingo for iPhone services are built from the ground up to handle keyword search - matching documents/information on the basis that they contain one or more terms (keywords) - we conducted a second set of tests using keyword queries.

Peggy and I are proud of the research and look forward to collaborating together on future mobile search assessment reports and work contracted by our various clients. I will keep you posted of our progress on MSG.

A key takeaway I want to leave you with: This white paper provides evidence that mobile social search - which harnesses human judgment, thus restoring balance in a model that tends to promote search engine optimized websites over destinations the user may find genuinely relevant and useful - has significant advantages over algorithmic computer-centric search approaches. As I have pointed out in this earlier analysis, in the case of the mobile phone, an intensely personal device we have with us at all times, a more people-centered approach represents a perfect fit with our search behavior and our expectations for a more personalized service. Indeed, the rise of mobile social networks further underlines our increasing requirement for search services that effectively inject human preferences into the equation. This, itsmy.com CEO Vince Staybl, recently told me was the primary motivation for the tie-up between his mobile social networking service with socially-assisted search engine Taptu, and I fully expect many more such partnerships to follow.

Disclaimer: ChaCha is an MSG supporter and white paper sponsor. The opinions expressed in the white paper are those of Peggy Albright and Peggy Anne Salz, and do not reflect the opinions of organizations referenced in the paper.

The realization that mobile advertising is ripe for a re-think (and the stark possibility that traditional advertising inventory may be dead on the mobile platform, as Alan Moore, author luminary and founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, suggests) forces operators, brands, enablers and agencies to focus on what many are calling engagement marketing.

At the other end of the spectrum, this shift in mindset also turns up the pressure on mobile search providers to develop services that are (likewise) more useful, engaging and personal. Indeed, improving the mobile search user experience is at the center of a sustainable and successful mobile search and advertising strategy. Users are encouraged to explore the wealth of content and applications at their fingertips, and their urge to discover leads to more queries and more opportunities to deliver paid search advertising. It’s not quite the fixed Internet all over again, but there are similarities.

The outcome is a virtuous cycle where useful search results and targeted advertising convince users that mobile search is a useful way to find content and applications that matter to them. What’s more, the advance of app stores (similar to the excitement the industry experienced when content portals were the rage) underlines the critical importance of a better interplay between search and advertising moving forward.

I am therefore encouraged by improvements (from companies such as Yahoo), and excited by the increasing popularity of new mobile search paradigms, ranging from multimodal search (which has received a much-needed boost thanks to the iPhone); to approaches that integrate human input/judgment to deliver search results we’re much more likely to appreciate. (I am currently compiling a comprehensive directory of mobile search providers, so please contact me to be included. If your story is interesting, I will also profile your company on MSG.)

A category of mobile search high on my radar is visual search. (Companies include: Idée, IQ Engines, Kooaba, Mobile Acuity, Searchme, SnapNow and SnapTell.) I am pleased to report I am close to confirming a date for a podcast with Philipp Schloter, Nokia’s general manager of Point & Find. Nokia (which MSG covered here) just last week took the wraps off a new beta of its visual search service. The technology is cool but the real excitement is about the fit with mobile marketing campaigns. As Julian Pate, Client Partner at interactive marketing agency AKQA, put it in a statement: “The Nokia Point & Find service marries the digital world with the physical world in a way that actually has meaning for brands and consumers. Not only does it allow consumers to engage with brands in an innovative way but provides brands ‘point and purchase’ opportunities with an on-the-go audience.”

This same value proposition is echoed by SnapNow, a U.S.-based visual search company I profiled in my regular column for EContent magazine.

In it I examine the proliferation of pilots and projects that harness mobile to hyperlink images and items, enabling consumers to access information, make purchases or just browse the Web for similar cool content, by simply snapping a picture using their cameraphones. I also interview Tony Keaveny, Head of Sales for SnapNow UK, who updates me on what the company is doing to “snap-enable” content ranging from print to video.

As Tony puts it: “Your phone becomes your mouse and the world around us becomes the Web. It’s about transforming print, packaging, video, outdoor, or just about any other advertising into a portal enabling communication and - more importantly - commerce.”

Tony walks the talk, which is why he has also kindly offered to “snap-enable” the MSG logo, which means you can get more information about MSG by taking a picture of the logo with your cameraphone and sending it to pic@snapnow.co.uk. I’ll think of a contest to make it worth your while. In the meantime, this is  great (!) because MSG is in demand as a media partner and now you can connect to MSG via the  logo on brochures and posters  at industry conferences such as the Open Mobile Summit, June 10-11 in London, a top-notch industry conference organized by OpenMobileMedia, where I chair the session on mobile advertising.  I invite you to read the column here - and to explore the other great content at EContent.

On a personal note, I am proud to be a contributing editor and look forward to collaborating with Michelle Manafy, EContent Editor-in-chief on a special social media issue sure to set the bar. More about that when I put out a call for pitches here and on Twitter (@peggyanne). Michelle is also the programming chair of Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summits (ESS), annual events that encourage deep discussion and practical analysis of the search space. The next one is May 12-13 in NYC. This week Michelle wraps up Buying and Selling EContent Conference, an event that brings together leading executives knowledgeable in the techniques for buying and selling content. She gives her views on the marketplace and the role of user-generated content in this pre-conference audio interview.

But visual search is just one of the 15 categories I have identified in the process of compiling a comprehensive overview and SWOT analysis of the major mobile search players, together with Rudy De Waele, Mobile Web 2.0 luminary and founder of dotopen, an open innovation consulting firm advising start-ups and established companies helping them define business models, forge alliances and pursue funding opportunities.

Our work is in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission), an organization providing customer-driven support to the EU policy-making process.  The purpose of the workshop next week in Seville, Spain, is to identify mobile search trends and recommendations for policy makers. I cannot attend the event, but look forward to publishing a summary analysis of key points raised during the workshop on MSG.

Connect the dots, and mobile search innovation is shaping up to be a major focus in 2009.

The last word on the increasing importance of mobile search comes from Nokia (via AltSearchEngines.com). During his presentation Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia’s new Markets unit, told the audience mobile is the future of search. (Hmmm…Does this conviction mark a new chapter in Nokia’s own mobile search strategy? It’s a topic I’ll raise in my upcoming podcast…)

Tomorrow MSG features a mobile publishing how-to looking at Mippin, a company that caters to the Long Tail of content/sites, and road testing the service on MSG.

Next week (and beyond) will be chock-full with an exciting line-up of analysis, podcasts, and white papers (mobile voice search launches and MSG previews Vol. 2 of my series of mobile advertising how-to white papers).

For more of the news coverage (as opposed to the in-depth analysis that has become synonymous with MSG), I invite you to peruse the feeds from MSG partners Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Industry Review and Mobile Marketer. If you are interested in a media partnership with MSG, or believe MSG should feature a feed from your site, then please contact me directly. As a knowledge resource MSG is on a mission to showcase the industry’s best sources of news and information.

Some great stuff to add to your required reading list: The Netsize Guide 2009 and three new mobile search white papers (two live -one slated for release following Mobile World Congress), all focused at some level on the extraordinary impact of iPhone on our search behavior). A highlight: Some surprising stats on search volume, and a sneak peek at Google’s voice search performance.

Gearing up for a whirlwind week in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Coverage on MSG will be thin (not enough time for deep-dive posts) but I assure you my follow-up analysis and in-depth video interviews will be worth the wait. Andrea Henninge - bless her! - has managed to squeeze in dozens of top-level interviews/briefings over the next five days at an average rate of one per hour - and even left me some time in the evenings for a few parties and get-togethers.

Top of the list is the launch party (Tuesday) for the Netsize Guide 2009, the 360-page mobile industry almanac I wrote on behalf of Netsize. Stan Chesnais, Netsize CEO, tells me it is the best one ever, and has already commissioned me to write next year’s (although we both struggle to think how we can top this one!).

If you are at Mobile World Congress (MWC), then don’t forget to pick up a paper copy. After the show, you can also download it for free on MSG. I look forward to your comments and feedback. I will continue to pursue this exciting theme (the morphing of the physical and virtual worlds with the mobile device at the center of this new convergence) on MSG, so watch for podcasts and video interviews that take this discussion to the next level.

And speaking of path-breaking, this week mobile search providers Taptu and Abphone debut their white papers on MSG.

(You can download the Taptu white paper by clicking the banner further down on the right-hand side, and you can find abphone’s white paper here.)

I am honored that both companies asked me for input. In the case of Taptu, it’s a comment. Abphone, on the other hand, asked me for a complete foreword.

In fact, Pierre Scokaert, Abphone CEO, sent me a personal email to thank me for my work:

I did read your foreword, and found it very good. It adds a lot of weight to our paper, and having someone as highly regarded as you speak of Abphone is always an honor.

However, I am equally grateful for the opportunity to lend my voice to his - and would like to take the opportunity here to thank Pierre and Yann Mondon, who heads up Abphone’s public relations.

Abphone

I don’t want to give away too much - and before my podcast with Pierre on precisely this topic - so here’s a short, high-level summary of the white paper, titled Snacking the Web.

In a nutshell, a shift in mobile search behavior (search has become a leisure activity, pursued in idle time and short sessions, and made popular by cutting-edge devices such as the iPhone) impacts how services can/should rank search results and determine relevancy. Abphone’s approach emphasizes click stream analysis, effectively drawing from the wisdom of crowds to determine which results users find relevant to the search queries, and ultimately improve rankings for future users.

In my view, this path-breaking approach borrows heavily from the insights outlined in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson. Ants, Johnson writes, are not intelligent as single insects. But they develop a kind of collective intelligence - which he calls “emergent intelligence” - when they are interconnected in complex colonies.

In the case of mobile search, a single searcher, like an ant, can happen upon an excellent result. But there is no way for the searcher to leave a trail to benefit searchers who follow. As a result, each searcher must endure the same process (click distance) to find content they want. Abphone learns from its users, creating a feedback loop that potentially improves rankings for future users to deliver an overall positive user experience and help people find content they want in fewer clicks.

Allow me to close with my favorite quote from the abphone white paper: Pierre’s rant on Web transcoding

Take a gourmet meal, prepared by capable chefs, using only the finest ingredients. Then put everything in a blender and mix it into a pulp, as long as you need to, until you can drink it through a straw… This is what website transcoding is like.

I like it so much I have just added it to my slide deck for my presentation for the Qualcomm Plaza Internet Forum. The event now counts some 70 top-level attendees, and I am honored that Qualcomm feels the jump in attendance is due to my participation in it. Everywhere there are signs that MSG has indeed reached the tipping point…

Taptu

I am also proud that Taptu has decided to debut its white paper, titled Touch Search: A New Vision For Mobile Search, on MSG. True to the name, the white paper examines the shift in mobile search since the advent of the iPhone.

However, Taptu does more than acknowledge this trend; it has responded with a roadmap to encourage the innovation that content providers and brands agencies will require to deliver an optimized search and advertising experience for touch devices. I’ll have more on this next week, after I have had the pleasure of meeting today (Monday) with Andreas Bernstrom, Taptu COO, and had a closer look at the Taptu’s prototype search services for the Touch Web.

A highlight of the white paper is this trio of industry predictions. (Methodology is explained in the white paper.)

1)      Total global mobile search volume will grow rapidly from 63 million searches per day at the end of 2008 to 620 million in 2012 - almost 10 fold growth in just four years.

2)      The volume of searches from touch phones will grow even faster, to overtake the volume of searches from normal phones by the end of this year.

3)      By 2012, over 75 percent of all mobile searches will come from touch phones alone, representing less than 10 percent of the installed base of phones and just 20 percent of annual shipments.

A root question to consider: Will we have one Web (the Internet)? Or two (the Internet, and made-for-mobile sites)? Or three! (the Internet, the mobile websites, and the Touch Web)…

No one has the answers, but Taptu is preparing now for the challenges ahead.

My thanks again to Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, and Bob Last, Taptu Head of Business Development, for providing me the opportunity to contribute to the white paper.

Voice search

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to give you a sneak peak of the next white paper in the pipeline: a joint project with Peggy Albright,  founder of Albright : Research : Media, assessing the performance of voice search services on the iPhone.

The white paper - which roadtests ChaCha, Google, and Vlingo — will launch in the week following MWC and be available for download on MSG. I have already twittered about some of the findings (they were too amazing to keep under wraps)…

Let’s just say that Google underwhelmed us - on all counts.

Disclaimer: ChaCha sponsored the white paper. The opinions in the white paper reflect those of Peggy Albright and Peggy Anne Salz, and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations referenced in the research.

The requests are pouring in - and that’s just word of mouth! Regular readers will know that MSG is proud to partner with bnetTV, a leader in online broadcasting in the emerging technology and growing lifestyle sectors. We’ve formally teamed up to cover news and developments at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2008 in San Francisco.

I am on board to do close-ups and deep-dive interviews with a host of mobile search and advertising companies that peg the needle, and I am delighted at the opportunity to connect with such high caliber companies and execs.Just doing the scheduling today - and it is getting a bit tight, so I encourage you to pitch your companies soonest - I see that I have blocks of interviews (each approx. 15 minutes) that run for hours. Infogin, Medio Systems, Motricity, MCN, JumpTap, V-Enable, BuzzCity, Nuance, Spinvox, DeviceAnywhere, Millennial Media, JYGY, The Hyperfactory, Acision, NewBay, Movial, Amdocs, Novarra, Transpera, — and the list goes on.

So much for the daytime. In the evenings, bnetTV traditionally catches up with cool companies at Showstoppers and Pepcom. This year we’ll both be at the Smaato Mobile Advertising Awards 2008, a special event recognizing the best and brightest in the space. (bnetTV is a media sponsor.) BTW: If you want to get the most out of mixers, blenders and networking opps, then I recommend you check out this complete list of parties, organized by Eric Chan over at Mobile Slate.

If you plan to attend CTIA and want to schedule an “on-the-ground” interview, then contact me (peggy@msearchgroove.com) or bnetTV (CTIAF08@bnettv.com ). Space is limited, but we’ll try to squeeze you in. In between filming and some fun, I am also scheduling briefings, meet-ups and coverage for MSG. I encourage you to contact my PA Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com) to set up an appointment.