Kimia provides federated mobile search for Telefonica Spain

Federated search is opening doors for many smaller mobile search players to enter, attack and win in the market.

Late last year, Medio Systems announced that it was going to start offering federated mobile search to mobile operators as part of its solution for off-deck services. MCN has successfully made a name for itself in mobile with its own vertical mobilesearch.net services. But federated indexing of content makes search on mobile accessible to an army of new innovative players.

One of these players is Kimia. Kimia is a Spanish based mobile company that is focused on aggregating RSS content simply and effectively. But the other arm of the business is to use RSS content to create a tailored and targeted vertical search services for consumers.

How?

Kimia’s technology allows RSS Syndication quickly and fast. Users can plug in to content channels, operators can server the serve to consumers as their own branded white label offer. But more interestingly – vertical strands of nice content can be deployed on mass for large vertical market segments.

Examples?

The best example I have is the My Catalan News Search on Telefonica Moviles in Spain, provided by Kimia.

What does it do?
Basically, it is available in the emotion portal. It’s called My Catalan News and it provides daily syndicated news to consumers. There is a search box. Kimia does boast its own localised meta data search engine which it uses to plug into the RSS vertical content. This means that results are relevant and targeted as the vertical feed is the one that is being searched for news articles in the local language.

Why is this important?
Well there are a number of reasons. The mobile device is different to online and crawling for results on line is more effective than in mobile. Why? Well there is a lot more to crawl online and SEO is used to assist competitive ranking and positioning.
However, even though the number of WAP sites is growing – results tend to be weaker in mobile because they more influenced by the vendor that creates the WAP site or the mobile advertising spend of the company.

RSS is different. It can be syndicated for mobile from any source. It can then content adaptation is often necessary to make the results viewable. This means that in one feed or results page users can see rich media content next to SMS or made for mobile or online content. This gives users the choice of what they want to consume.

Indeed contextual search services also enable this – but it’s very different. The results can include a lot richer number of results. This is good if this is what is wanted. But when results are made in a MyCatalanNews search engine – only requested, Catalan, News is necessary. So “did you mean” or “Catalan cooking” results are not welcomed.
The future for mobile is not solely federated mobile search. It is also not a pure meta search engine and even search via RSS syndication are not good enough.

The winner in the mobile search space will be the company that combines what is good online with what is good on mobile – seamlessly.

If you want to know more on Kimia – let me know. I first met these guys in 2006 and since then they won EUR 2 million in funding and are really one to watch.

Related News:

1. Kimia receives EUR 2 million round A funding led by Debaeque Venture Capital
2. Understanding Federated Mobile Search
3. Federated Mobile Search Medio Verizon and Google
4. Eye opening chat on federated mobile search with Phyllis Reuther CTO of MCN Mobile Content Networks
5. Atos Origin InfoGin deploy Mobile Internet Services at Telefonica Spain