Future of Mobile Search

admin    Google     Future, Mobile, Search

This article has a number of videos to explain the concept that can be seen on Telecom Circle. The link to this article is http://www.telecomcircle.com/2009/08/future-of-mobile-search/

Have you ever searched for tutorials on 3G from your mobile phone? Most likely, your answer would be no but if I had asked the same question for search on PC, chances are that many of the telecom professionals could have searched for it. Here lies the difference between search on PC and search on mobile. The search algorithms that worked for PC are unlikely to work for the mobile. On the mobile, most of the search queries are around navigation, direction and local search.

Search has been an integral part of internet. In fact, search is the very first functionality that any new user of internet uses. However, this is not true for mobile internet. The mobile search is yet not anywhere near the adoption levels of online PC based search.

How is Mobile Search different?

The fundamental difference between the mobile search and PC search is the access device. The screen size of the mobile phone is a constraint and hence the internet search results need to be modified. Even the input keyboard is different and the search string could be shorter which means the search result has to be intuitive.

The second difference is in the usage pattern of mobile. Unlike PC, the mobile phone is a ubiquitous device and people normally search for “at the moment” kind of thing. This means they search for nearest restaurant, retail points, service centers or mobile content. Their need is immediate and the patience or tolerance is low. They are looking for relevant results that are actionable like they need a taxi that can reach them fast and they should be able to book the taxi using their mobile phone. This means that the result needs to be location aware and should also give the phone number of the taxi company.

Thirdly, the consumer expectations changes with the time of day for the search results e.g. an afternoon search for restaurants means that the results should be about restaurants amenable to business meetings whereas, in the evening the same search should retrieve fun places like pubs or lively music restaurants.

Lastly, the difference is in the frequency of search and the number of attempts for each search. On PC, a surfer changes his search string multiple times before he gets the right results while on a mobile, nobody is likely to change the search string more than a couple of times. Also, people search at least 4-5 different things on PC everyday but a typical mobile internet user searches something only once in 4-5 days.

Why is mobile search languishing behind the PC search?

The number of search queries on mobile was not even 2% of that on PC in 2007 (m:metrics reported 27 million mobile searches per day in 2007) and the main reasons for this dismal performance were

High cost of internet impacting the usage Low penetration of mobile internet, e.g. in Europe, the mobile internet penetration is barely into double digits Experience of mobile internet due to small screen size Unavailability of search engines relevant to the mobile phones

Future of Mobile Search

The mobile search should be able to utilize all the resources (location, camera, voice, etc.) that the device has to offer to retrieve socially relevant results that can give confidence to the user in almost every situation even if he is alone or in a completely unfamiliar environment. I am listing below five different types of mobile search which hold a lot of promise in future. I have also included a few videos for each search type to demonstrate how it works.

Local Search: The biggest benefit a mobile phone is that it is location or context aware. Both GPS as well as non-GPS devices can provide location co-ordinates based on different technologies. The search needs to take the location co-ordinates into consideration while churning out the results. Thus search for a television should give me the retail points in the vicinity. I would expect the search to take into account my past queries as mobile device is a personal device and is unlikely to be used by multiple people. Local search or Yellow pages seems to hold the maximum potential for mobile search as well as for mobile advertising. Voice Search: Imagine, you are driving car and need to find out about location of a particular movie hall. Will you be comfortable in inputting the search string on a web page? I would rather pull up my car on a side and quickly call somebody to find out about the hall. Voice search is very useful in such circumstances. Also, not all mobile phone owners are literate or comfortable with internet but everybody is comfortable talking. Google, Yahoo and Bing, all have voice assisted search but Chacha takes the voice search to another level as its search engine utilizes crowdsourced workforce to answer the queries. Another application, Vlingo lets you control your mobile phone with the power of voice. With Vlingo, you can simply speak to your phone to send a text message or search the mobile web. Visual Search: Apart from location, the other key feature of a mobile phone is a camera. Camera is like an eye and should be used to as a key input for search. Imagine you could search the Internet just by taking a picture of something, such snapping a picture of a music CD to look up reviews and listen to the tracks, instantly getting information on a product featured in a magazine, or looking up recommend places to visit by taking a picture of a famous landmark.

There are two types of visual search that particularly excite me are Point & Find and Augmented Reality. Nokia’s Point & Find requires you to simply aim the camera of your Nokia phone at any object in meat-space and the Point & Find application will access relevant data off the Internet. Point & Find uses real-time image processing to recognize real-world objects in a Nokia database of virtually tagged items using the phone’s camera, Internet connection, and GPS data. The software also recognizes bar codes and supports category-specific text-entry search.

Augmented reality takes Point and Find a step further and adds information and meaning to a real object or place. This means if you are a tourist in a completely unknown place, you can get all the information you want to search by just holding the camera phone in front of the building or place. Another example of finding the nearest tube (metro) is in the video          Social Search: Since the mobile phone is personal and has a phonebook, a social graph of the user can be produced using the information from phonebook and the online social behavior. A search engine may give results that are relevant in general but if it can access your social graph and boost the ranking of search results that your friends have deemed to be important. It would preferentially show results that were more fun and more relevant to you in your social context. This kind of search would excite the digital natives. Vertical search: The most frequent vertical search on mobile is entertainment. abphone is a mobile search engine that focuses on multimedia content that you might want for your phone e.g. images, video and games.  They have created a really simple mobile search interface to a range of different content databases. Similar vertical search could emerge for shopping of consumer durables (television, music system, etc.) that would not only compare the features but also give a comparison on the best deals in the locality or city.

Read other similar articles on http://www.telecomcircle.com

India’s Innovative Mobile Twitter: Sms Gupshup

admin    Twitter     Gupshup, India’s, Innovative, Mobile, Twitter

Twitter now has competition from one of the biggest technologically innovative countries in the world—India. Competition takes the form of Sms GupShup.

Twitter now has competition from one of the biggest technologically innovative countries in the world—India. Competition takes the form of Sms GupShup.

Although Twitter is quite popular in the U.S., this version seems to have similarities as well as differences. It is free to sign up with sMs GupShup, but its primary difference from Twitter is that it targets mobile users, sending messages directly to your mobile. Many people prefer Sms GupShup because mobile use is the primary method of communication rather than the pc these days.

This site seems to cater to groups as a target audience. Each user can have multiple groups which helps differentiate between family, friends, and colleagues. You can create a group free of charge, or you can join an already existing group. Unlike Twitter, GupShup seems to be the go-between for messages. To send a message to your group, you send a Sms to GupShup and they forward it to members of that group. You can receive messages from members from anywhere in the world.

GupShup has amassed several million more members than Twitter. The user interface is easier to navigate and the look and feel have more of a community appearance. Users have the ability to send picture messages through the gallery. This feature is popular for mobile users since it enables users to communicate more personally by adding a picture. Users can share funny messages or groups with friends by forwarding them to their mobile phones. A person does not have to be a member of the site to receive messages from them. The GupShup member just sends the message or group to their friends’ e-mail or Facebook accounts if they do not wish to receive messages via their mobile.

Sms GupShup empowers its members by cutting out team moderation. Instead of moderators controlling the nature of the messages, community members have the option of flagging a message that they find offensive. A team member then views the flagged message and takes appropriate action.

Users can reply to group posts via their mobile phones and Sms GupShup sends the reply to the owner of that group. Sms GupShup is only available to Indian phone numbers. However, users can still access GupShup from their pc. Although the user is not charged for the messages sent with GupShup, they are charged for the data transfer. 
Overall, this is a very innovative site for those living in India. If you have business contacts in India and could not send messages to your contact, then it would benefit internet users outside India. Perhaps Twitter will take some of its features and implement them but until then, Sms GupShup is vastly superior for those living in India.

For more information on social networking, visit http://www.micro-blog.mobi and http://www.microbloggingservices.com.

Natural Search Seen As A “Growth Area” As Local Search And Mobile Search Gain Traction In UK Markets

admin    Google     Area, Gain, GROWTH, Local, Markets, Mobile, Natural, Search, Seen, Traction

British online marketing consultants recently released their “Online Lead Generation 2008″, detailing business attitudes regarding the effectiveness of natural search, paid advertising (pay-per-click) and e-mail marketing in generating consumer leads. A whopping 94% of the businesses polled indicated that generating online consumer leads through online marketing and Internet advertising was seen as a “growth area”.

The size of this number indicates just how bullish the business community has become about the rise of e-commerce and the efficiencies and effectiveness of online marketing to consumers who are evermore comfortable making purchases and purchase decisions online. Despite, or perhaps because of stalling economic growth across much of North America and Europe, there has been a significant shift to near unanimity in seeing online marketing as an advertising/marketing strategy that is here to stay. Last year, only 84% of respondents indicated that they viewed online marketing as a growth area.

Natural search, the process by which search engine optimization specialists configure web pages, page content and the Internet’s web domain to ensure that a web page is ranked and displayed prominently in the search results on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines was seen as the top means of generating online customer leads, followed closely by sponsored advertising (the pay-per-click advertisements that appear as “sponsored results” on Google) and e-mail marketing. Interestingly, although natural search was seen as outperforming pay-per-click, businesses still spent more of their resources on pay-per-click Internet advertising,

How to proceed with online marketing is becoming perhaps the business-critical for small businesses as consumers switch to their laptops and mobile phones for information about local products and services and the effectiveness of advertising in traditional print, TV and radio diminishes. Recent polling results released by Nielsen/NetSurvey in conjunction with WebVisible show that 86% of internet users search for local products and services online – up from the 70% of internet users who were looking for local products and services over the Internet in 2007.

And looking is turning to buying – not only online, but offline as well. The Nielsen/NetSurvey/WebVisible results show that 90% of the consumer transactions that were initiated through online local searches were completed offline. Evermore technologically proficient consumers and search engine programs that are increasing the ability of consumers to find local products online quickly and easily – be it a local movie listing, restaurant or apparel shop – either from home or from a new generation of mobile phones with GPS technology that pinpoints the consumers geographic location in real time is changing the way people shop.

Consumer research released this month by JupiterResearch supports the view that more and more consumers are turning to the Internet as a preferred method for finding the goods and services they wish to purchase. Polling results from JupiterResearch indicate that there is a 1:6 ratio between purchases made online and offline purchases that are initiated by consumers researching the product or service purchased online.

Given these trends, it is no wonder that businesses large and small are turning their attention to online marketing as an area with potentially huge growth. That companies are still spending more on their pay-per-click advertising rather than focusing their efforts and resources on natural search and search engine optimization is likely an indication of a lag in response to changing consumer behaviour.

The most popular categories of products and services that consumers are currently searching for online tend to be larger ticket items, according to survey results released by Opinion Research Corporation. Over eighty percent of persons searching for goods online reported searching for travel, recreation and leisure goods as well as electronic goods, while fifty-five per cent reported researching clothing and automotive products, while only 24 per cent reported searching for food products. However, with the rising predominance of local search and burgeoning mobile search by consumers tapping into the trend towards smart phones with Internet search capability, online marketing seems destined to become a top marketing tool, if not the top marketing tool, for companies large and small as the responses of businesses to the E-consultancy/Media-Clash online lead generation survey indicate.

Online Marketing, Local Search and Mobile Search to Drive Six-Fold Increase in Internet Traffic

admin    Google     drive, Increase, internet, Local, Marketing, Mobile, Online, Search, SixFold, Traffic

Recent survey numbers highlight how Internet traffic is growing exponentially and is poised for a 600% increase by 2012. The huge increase in Internet traffic comes at a time when the convergence of mobile search technologies and local search capabilities will drive the growth of online marketing, local search and mobile search to similar heights – while driving foot traffic to businesses large and small that have a “digital footprint” in today’s surging digital economy.

Staggering numbers from worldwide networking leader Cisco Systems predict a six-fold increase in global traffic on the Internet, highlighting the increasingly important role online marketing and internet advertising will play for businesses large and small as consumers increasingly move online to do both shopping and “Windows shopping”. Cisco released its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast for 2007-2012 on June 16th, which predicts that we will see a 600% increase in Internet traffic by 2012. Cisco’s VNI projections predicts that Internet traffic will double roughly every two years as a result of “a combined annual growth rate of 46 p[er cent form 2007 to 2012.

The key component in this surge of Internet traffic will be video streaming. Cisco predicts that by 2012, “video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried over the U.S. portion of the Internet in 2000. Increasingly, marketing agencies and advertisers are moving off traditional media and moving online to exploit the consumer movement to the Internet. Significantly, much of this consumer movement online will result from the increasing tendency of consumers to access the Internet from handheld mobile devices – a trend that will only increase as RIM, Nokia and other cellular phone and mobile device manufacturers move to keep pace with Apple that just recently released its next-generation 3G iPhone.

Cisco is predicting that mobile data will roughly double each year from 2008 to 2012, highlighting the importance that mobile search will play in an emerging digital economy. Jupiter Research, a leader in online research analysis, has projected that annual revenue from mobile search revenues are expected to hit $US4.8 billion dollars annually by 2013.

As technologies converge, the driver behind these anticipated huge jumps in online advertising and mobile search numbers is – not surprisingly for those who have been tracking the emerging technologies of Web 2.0 – local search. Jupiter predicts that in the emerging digital economy, local search will be the most popular service amongst all advertisers and will attract 40% of all mobile search ad spending between 2008 and 2013.

The convergence of technologies that is fostering the growth in mobile search, and particularly local search, was illustrated by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. Sitting down for a much-publicized interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo earlier this spring, the head of the search engine giant touted how improvements in mobile search capabilities on advanced mobile handhelds (such as the BlackBerry or Apple’s iPhone) combined with advances in Google Maps and Google’s local search capabilities are making real time, and precise geopraphic local search a reality.

”(W)henever I fly somewhere,” Schmidt told CNBC, “I open up … my iPhone or my BlackBerry, and, boom, there’s everything in my world as I’ve landed in a country I’ve never been in. It’s a remarkable achievement.” Schmidt notes that Google has been tracking the huge increase in use of Google Maps local search technology. “(T)here’s been a huge increase in maps, Google Maps, hugely successful,” Dr. Schmidt reports. “(W)hen I want to go to the equivalent of a Starbucks, I just type “Starbucks,” it says it’s over there. For me, that’s just a huge–a huge improvement. And that service is available almost everywhere in the world.”

What is common practice for Google’s high-flying and technologically enriched CEO is increasingly becoming commonplace for the digital consumer on the street. The predicted growth in internet traffic, together with the radical shift of advertising dollars to online marketing and the growing tendency of Internet-savvy consumers to take up mobile search, clearly forecast where commerce and e-commerce is headed. While there may still be local niche markets that depend on foot traffic to drive their business, increasingly it is a company’s digital footprint that drives customer traffic to its online site or storefront. And the vehicle driving that electronic traffic is mobile search. As online traffic balloons between now and 2012, the importance on local search, mobile search and online marketing will also balloon.

How Do You Connect Twitter To A Normal Mobile?

admin    Twitter     Connect, Mobile, Normal, Twitter

Also, once its connected to the mobile does it cost to text tweets to twitter and does it have to connect to the internet?

Platform Requirements for Windows Mobile Development

admin    Google's Nexus One     Development, Mobile, Platform, Requirements, Windows

As companies embark on mobile application development in order to satisfy business needs (whether it be Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile development, or whatever), a number of requirements to a mobile platform emerge. Most critical of them are as follows:

1. Desktop application integration. This includes accurate data synchronization with encryption and possibility to manage data offline. If you need timely access to important data stored on your desktop, including e-mails, event alerts, and customer data, than proper integration is a must.

2. Multi-tasking. Due to a limited character of mobile device resources, multi-tasking is one of the key ways to increase productivity. (Though it’s okay with Windows Mobile development, this may be an issue for iPhone or Android developers.)

3. Minimization of traffic amount between a server and a mobile device, which contributes to time and cost savings.

4. User-friendly interface that allows accomplishing necessary tasks by fewer operations.

5. The last, but not the least of requirements is lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and support costs. Implementation of a mobile platform across the enterprise must be estimated beforehand and such factors, as support and upgrade costs, are of importance, as well.

Each platform provider offers its own mobile solutions to satisfy these requirements. Microsoft, for instance, is getting prepared for Windows Mobile 7 launch, which potentially would also improve Windows Mobile development experience. Google, on the other hand, armed with the forthcoming Google Nexus One, is trying to compete by incorporating Android with existing Google Apps, such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, and other. Apple puts emphasis on business features, providing integration with MS Exchange, as well as data encryption, GPS, etc.

However, according to Evans Data survey, Windows Mobile development is still dominant in comparison with RIM OS, Mac OS, and Android development. 50 percent of mobile developers are targeting either Windows Mobile 6.0 or Windows Mobile 5.0 platforms. The reasons why the number of businesses operating on Windows Mobile is overwhelming, include the following:

• Apart from Outlook integration, Windows Mobile offers such Microsoft Office Mobile applications, as Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, and Word Mobile. These applications have gained so much popularity that they are universally implemented across various industries.

• The TCO of the Windows Mobile platform is 15-24% lower than that of the RIM Blackberry platform over a three-year period. And there’s nothing to be surprised at, since the native support of Exchange ActiveSync removes the need to invest in additional software, integration, and other Windows Mobile development efforts.

• Windows Mobile, being a .NET-based platform, gives users a possibility to gain all advantages of Microsoft Office and other Microsoft-based applications.

Though being sometimes criticized for its clumsy user interface, Windows Mobile, compared to other mobile platforms, is, to the maximum extent, a business-oriented technology, which is, naturally, determined by the marketing strategy of Microsoft, concerning Windows Mobile development. The good thing about it all is competition that drives all of these platform providers to new enhancements and innovations, which, in their turn, help better satisfy the mentioned requirements to business application development.

Google will Publish Its Own-Brand Mobile Phones Next January

admin    Google's Nexus One     Google, January, Mobile, Next, OwnBrand, Phones, Publish

Keyword: Google, Android phones, windows phones, smart phones, PDA phones

International news from CNET: a well-informed sources well-informed sources, Google plans to launch two versions of its own-brand mobile phones in next January, one will cooperate with T – Mobile USA, the other does not limit operators.

HTC will make Google cell phones, there will be names on the phones such as HTC Passion, Dream or Nexus One etc.

Google is probable to sell first Google phone on January 5 directly through their web site.

Google expressed in its official blog on last Saturday, Google is testing a new mobile device in the employees. The media revealed that Google will sell a touch mobile phone without locking operators, which is convenient for users to choose their own favored servicer.

Another version will cooperate with T – Mobile USA under German Telecom, T-Mobile USA will provide with purchasing subsidies of Google mobile phones for American customers, however prices are still pending.

Sources said that, in the long run, Google will become mobile seller and  obtain commission from the operator.

Google mobile phones share resemblance with iPhone, but what different from iPhones are: Google phones can replace batteries, Google screen is bigger, and the users also can enlarge the memory card.

Currently, T-Mobile and Google haven’t issued any comments yet.

Will Power, analyst of Baird Rearch said: “we expect this phone Will bring all smart mobile phone manufacturers positive influence, such as Apple, RIM, Nokia Oyg, MOTOROLA, HTC, Palm, samsung, etc. in addition, Google’s existing partner–Android may be the biggest beneficiaries.

So far, Google has had cooperation with many phone manufacturers about Android. Last month, Google has announced more than 12 Android mobile phones listed.

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