NeoMedia Technologies, Inc (NEOM)

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DD Mobile Search Triple Play (from moconews.com email)

Interview With Fast CEO (http:www.fastsearch.com) : Mobile Search Triple-Play

by Peggy Anne Salz

A flurry of activity and a raft of announcements, involving market giants including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, since the start of the year point the way to the industry's next mega-trend: mobile search. Mobile search is indisputably a potent way to generate value. Consumers find what they want; marketers gain traffic by providing relevant offers and advertising; and mobile operators and service providers capture increased revenue as a result of the increase in mobile content purchases by consumers.

However, the much more lucrative business opportunity may be in combining search, personalization, and recommendation (modeled on Amazon - this technology suggests content on the basis of the individual user's past preferences or on the basis of what a user's peers consumed, or both). The end-game is to boost content sales by providing users personalized and relevant results - as well as the tools to discover other cool content they might not have otherwise known existed.

I refer to this as a kind of "mobile content triple-play" and (after interviewing some 40 C-level execs at search, discovery and personalization companies - as well as mobile operators - for my own report on the topic) I see evidence that the mobile content industry is ripe for it. In fact, many these companies have told me they fear mobile search - particularly the big-name brands like Google. Content owners want users to come directly to their sites and not be directed by search engine results to explore their competitors' portals. In a D2C play, they tell me, it's all about improving the accessibility and discoverability of their content.

In view of the increasing importance of personalization and recommendation in the search mix, I caught up with John Markus Lervik, CEO of FAST. His take on search: Close, but no cigar. He confirmed that more operators and content owners are embracing a triple-play approach, relying on personalization and recommendation (through social networks) to monetize their content.

In a nutshell, mobile search has moved on. It's not about delivering what users ask for - it's about delivering relevant content before they ask for it, Lervik said. "Search is really [about] pushing content to you that's personalised, contextualised, and localised to your needs at the moment."
On Vodafone/Google [Google also has a partnership with FAST]: "We hope to remain partners with Vodafone, but we also understand that they are planning to work with Google....In the longer term, we are confident that operators will see little benefit from partnering with Google beyond the immediate PR effect, and that over time they [Google] will threaten the business."

Mobile content capabilities: Like the days of the Web, when all companies had to publish, mobile content companies need to master search. "They need these competencies, and they definitely also need competence on how they build the good search-based user experiences, both explicit search experiences and implicit."

Search on the device: I think from the start, you should offer that as an option....It may make sense in a number of cases to have maybe lightweight client applications as well that help you to be even more effective with your mobile searching."

High on the radar: Content companies are "starting to use the search engine as the way to handle the content. Not just for searching the content, but also for handling the content, so you actually build a portal on top of the search engine and then have the search engine personalise and contextualize the content on the fly as the user navigates the mobile portal."

You can download the audio of the interview here (6.9 MB, 30 mins).

http://www.fastsearch.com/l3a.aspx?m=516&amid=3677
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