Mobileslate

Back in March, 2006, I wrote about Mobile Search and how the big players, Google and Yahoo were not connecting subscribers to content like ringtones and games. So if the big guys don’t get it, then what are the little guys doing about it?

MCN today announced that it acquired Caboodle Networks, bringing Semantic Web and recommendation to a mobile search management platform.

Caboodle has the know-how and the patents to deliver recommendations based on the user’s context and the intelligence to tackle age-old semantic search problems such as Jaguar (the car) and jaguar (the cat). It doesn’t have a silver-bullet solution, per se, but it does go a long way toward disambiguating similar search terms.

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With Caboodle under its belt MCN can create the associations between content and successfully cross-sell and up-sell the users to similar content. Caboodle doesn’t index content; it relies on taxonomies and contextual information to categorize it and play matchmaker between users and the content likely to matter most.
Source: MSearch Groove

As MCN has some installations in Finland, Japan, and Thailand, they are definitely off to a great start. The novel approach at addressing the problem of finding relevant content becomes increasing important and more and more people rely on using their mobile to search.

A few weeks ago, Google published that their mobile search jumped 35% in the May-June timeframe (Source: mocoNews). While the methodology in calculating this number is not attributed to one event, it serves, in my opinion, as a general gauge that mobile search is on a slow simmer vs. heating up. Google Mobile Map queries make up a large part of these inquires which helps to generate utilization of their enormous server farm and in return provide more and more usage data to derive and build incremental improvements. I’m still waiting to see how well it can handle the off-deck/on-deck scenario of mobile content and services instead of providing web results on your WAP browser or transcoding information from the web.

So as the end of 2007 is near, roughly 18 months has past since I last wrote about mobile search. So what has changed? Well, we’ve reached the Awareness Phase. The Awareness that Mobile Search is here. We’ve reached the Education Phase — telling people what mobile search should be defined as. Perhaps still refining it. And we are probably at the early stages of the Implementation Phase, where companies are attacking the problem, building solutions, and refining it based on the refinement of the definition of mobile search. And the parallel track of Implementation is that mobile operators, on and off-deck portals, mobile content and services, Web 2.0 players are all looking at implementing some kind of mobile search to their feature sets of their mobile distribution channel.

Let’s hope mobile search can accelerate to to the next phase, where the mobile search engine wars ultimately benefit the consumer and not chose to steal our change purse or get us into a compromising head lock.

Tags:   content · data services · Google · Mobile · search · YahooNo Comments