Mobile Entertainment

A FEW weeks back, a senior operator exec turned entrepreneur explained to me why he got out of the carrier business. He read the runes and saw the loss making content portals being replaced by a simple search box with links to just a few ‘hero’ brands elsewhere on the home page.

This vision of the future has gained credence incredibly fast. Seven years ago the idea of an operator content portal, managed by an expensively assembled team and offering a sizeable archive of products, was shaped (in Europe at least) by the creation of Genie and Vizzavi. It reached its apogee in the form of Vodafone Live!, Emocion and others. It’s arguable that the new search-led era began with T-Mobile’s Web ‘n’ Walk concept and picked up speed with 3’s X-Series and Vodafone’s re-launched content play just a few weeks ago.

The irresistible drift towards mobile search has begun. It promises rich pickings for the winners, with analysts variously predicting the sector will be worth $1.5 billion by 2011 (Informa Telecoms & Media), $2.4 billion by 2011 (eMarketer) or even $11 billion by 2008 (Piper Jaffray). Wild variation there, but you get the general point.

So the operators have a question to ask themselves: whom do I appoint to manage my search operation? It’s a very important question, since the answer will effectively define their approach to content. Options include using a internet search brand, a mobile specialist whose search box they can badge with their own brand, or a free-for-all ‘federated’ offering.

So far, no uniform answer has emerged. Broadly, the US operators have gone ‘white-label’, which complements their generally protective attitude to the mobile web. In Japan, DoCoMo offers consumers up to 13 search engines to choose from. In Europe, the big brands are making headway even though white-label specialists like Medio and Jumptap claim to be close to major deployments (see box).

The European situation represents a dizzying about-turn for many operators. Take 3 UK. Prior to launching X-Series, with its Google search box and flat-rate data package, the network didn’t permit web browsing at all beyond a small number of hand-picked sites. Then there’s Vodafone, rumoured to be unhappy with its Google partnership, but content enough to put the search giant at the heart of its re-vamped portal in June.

Not surprisingly Jumptap believes white-label is the best way forward. Eric McCabe, Jumptap’s VP of marketing, says: “It seems to me Google is doing a lot to compete with carriers. It’s talked about buying WiMAX spectrum, even launching its own phone. And while Yahoo! does some white-label deals, it still looks like a Yahoo service to me. So operators are cautious about brands – and we don’t blame them.”

McCabe concedes that web brands do attract consumers but he insists that users will gravitate to ‘superior’ white label search engines once they’ve tried them.

Of course, what adds spice to the debate is the promise of huge search-based ad revenues. All the main players in the sector have launched ad services aimed broadly at mobile content companies, but also capturing revenue from the big youth brands that have money to throw at new channels.

Jumptap formed a partnership with ad agency WPP and says it is now 100 per cent booked across its inventory. Meanwhile, Medio launched Medio MobileNow, which determines ad relevance through search behaviour, click-through history, user demographics, geography and trend analysis.

At present, most interest in this new ad channel comes from mobile-oriented companies. But it’s changing. Omar Tawakol, Medio’s chief advertising officer, says: “Seventy per cent of searches are for content downloadables. However, we’re seeing search move beyond this and into services like bookings, communities and so on. That’s why we’re constantly working to ensure our indexing makes the off-portal world discoverable.”

The drift beyond content downloads is well under way in Europe, with companies like Yell driving forcefully into mobile. Yell (the online identity of the Yellow Pages directory) has developed a mobile directory comprising over two million UK businesses, which is available as a downloadable app or from a browsable WAP page. There are no plans to monetise with ads for the first two years, but mobile is an obvious value-add for listed companies – even if the parameters for charging them have yet to be defined.

Carey Bunks, head of product and technology development at Yell, says: “In the book, it’s content – the size and form of the ad – that determines how much you pay. But that doesn’t translate to mobile, which is more about prominence and position. So we have to take a new approach.”

Interestingly, Bunks is not entirely convinced of the hype around GPS. Although Yell is all about local search, it’s not always necessary to map the location of the user. He explains: “Most searches are not about where you are now, but where you’ll be in an hour or a day. So GPS is not a panacea – and it’s not that reliable either.”

Yell is powered by the Danish company MobilePeople, which has identified directory providers as potentially powerful players in mobile.

Claudia Poepperl, MobilePeople’s chief marketing officer, says: “Others are focusing on operators; we’re not. We look at stats that say the directory business is growing at eight per cent a year and that online search is growing at 80 per cent – and we see that directory companies need to adapt. We can help them.” Indeed, MobilePeople is now trialling mobile ‘landing pages’ in Denmark, which it will ‘upsell’ to listed directory companies.

Of course, all of this activity is happening independent of the operator portal. And there’s a strong argument that says – in a flat data world – there’s no need to cosy up to the carriers. So although Yahoo! has worked hard to find its Go solution a home on-portal, it’s been equally active in marketing it D2C and embedding it in handsets.

Chloe Graf, head of communications at Yahoo!’s Connected Life division, says: “The mobile internet is ready to take off: the only thing that’s missing is consumer awareness. That’s why we pursue every route to get in front of them – whether via WAP, devices or operators.” Like Yahoo! Google has also spotted the potential of the handset sector, closing deals with Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and LG.

For all of the activity around mobile search right now, it’s easy to overlook the possibility that some new paradigm of discovery will prevail; the search box is not the only fruit.

Companies like Gracenote and Shazam would argue that their music discovery systems (record and send a piece of music to get info back) are more intuitive than any text-based UI. Meanwhile companies like Abaxia, Mobicomp, Celltick, uiOne and others are experimenting with content discovery via a ticker on the idle screen.

For reasons of simplicity, many in the business are now looking at voice-activated search. There are plenty of users out there who are happy with this ‘technology’ – and millions in developing countries who cannot read yet use mobile phones. Certainly, interest is building, with Microsoft acquiring voice specialist Tellme and Google launching Google Voice Local Search for US business listings.

Then there are those such as 82Ask (now Texperts) and AQA that use human operators to answer text-based questions. It is a low-tech solution, but has been successful, with AQA answering over 14,000 text questions a day from the UK and Ireland. Maybe the operators should call and ask: “white-label or branded?”