Abphone mobile search reaches half a billion searches
The multimedia mobile search engine abphone has said it has delivered it 500 millionth search.
abphone key milestones
November 2005: Creation of abphone by Pierre Scokaert, Jean-Philippe Coumes,
two ex-France Telecom R&D engineers and Hervé Hoff, former Managing Director of
Alinto and of a subsidiary of EADS.
March 2005: Launch of the photo search.
June 2006: First tests on advertising banners
February 2007: Launch of the video search in France
April 2007: Launch of the video search in the UK.
June 2007: Trial on the Vodafone Live portal (very good use and returns
Positive users)
September 2007: First referencing on mobile kiosks (Gallery in France, Plazza
In Belgium)
September 2007: First affiliation tests in France and Singapore.
October 2007: abphone appears on the WAP and i-mode portals and WAP of
Bouygues Telecom.
2008: abphone reaches half billion searches.
What we think?
Abphone are a sort of mobile search engine for mobile – I think we need to take this stat with a pinch of salt as its obviously linked to the operator deployment and not hits to abphone as a stand alone player. I think that abphone also encourages adult images/video – which might also drive the success of the mobile business. (Let me know if I am wrong, but I did a few searches and abphone came up a few times).
Comment response from abphone on this:
It is important that I send you these comments straight away because it does not seem that you got the right information about the company’s search engine, and the post you made is very confusing for the abphone.
- Even if operator deployment is important for abphone, the stat is not linked to that. 95% of the traffic is off portal, which means that they are hits to abphone as a standalone player.
- abphone in no way encourages adult content. There is no ambiguity in abphone’s attitude: no provocative advertising banners, no sub-messages, no allusuo to “special content”, etc. If they did, they would certainly not be referenced on operators’ portals such as Bouygues in France!!!
Pierre Scokaert, the CEO and the 2 other co-founders (ex R&D engineer at Orange), are strong believers in freedom of choice and protection of minors, these two things being fully compatible. And it’s true that abphone being a search engine, you can ‘t help people looking for what they want, whatever it is.
And it does not mean that Google, Yahoo, etc. encourage “porn content”, which is wrong.
At the contrary, abphone have built into abphone filtering and parental control features, which give users full control over which content they access with abphone.
Bena says: thanks for the above, I stand corrected!
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One Response to “Abphone mobile search reaches half a billion searches”
Bena, thanks for the post.
Let me respond to the points you make.
1. Even if operator deployment is important for abphone, the stat we announced is not linked to that. 95% of our traffic is off portal, so the stat is in fact linked to hits that we get as a standalone player.
2. abphone in no way encourages adult content. If we did, do you think we would be on the portal of operators, such as Bouygues Telecom in France ?
Comment made on April 9th, 2008 at 3:17 amWe are strong believers in freedom of choice and protection of minors. abphone provides filtering and parental control features which make these two things fully compatible.
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