Mobile search and discovery at CTIA

I was lucky enough to moderate a really great panel with two men who are up to their necks in mobile search and discovery. James Siminoff is the Chief Strategy Officer for mobile voice company Ditech, and Rahul Sonnad is the CEO of Geodelic a hyper-localised mobile search service that has caught our attention before.

Who are these guys?

Geodelic - operates a high-end, location based search application. It only runs on newer smartphone models, and provides hyper-localised responses. It will tell you what the most interesting things within a certain distance of you are - and those results can be filtered by category.

Ditech - work at the operator level, creating voice solutions that can be rolled out across entire countries. Ditech aims services at lower end devices that can’t handle complex applications. The idea is that if the operator can run a great, voice-based search service at it’s end, you don’t need a great phone. Even the piece-of-crap device I picked up from T-Mobile the other can use Ditech services.

The broad strokes:

Hyper-localised is the future: Both James and Rahul agreed that in a few years, local mobile search will be the thing most people pull their phone out of their pockets for. Being able to pull your phone out of your pocket and quickly access both pull and push information (contextually based on where you are) will be a huge area.

Operators need to take a stance: it was great to get Rahuls input on this one. As a developer of a rich, smartphone app, he would be delighted if carriers took a more active interest in search. James nailed the problem on the head - there may be a tonne of great search apps available for your phone, but it’s impossible to keep track of which you need to use in which situation. You might even have the perfect app installed, and just forgotten it was there. Operators have the ability to pull opt-in information from users phones, and use that to push the relevant apps to users at the right time. This would give operators more control over an area they increasingly seem to be losing their grip on, and it would be useful for developers who want more exposure for their apps.

Augmented reality is a red-herring: a lot of people are excited about augmented search and discovery. A lot of people are working at it. But Rahul raised the point that most of what we consider to be “augmented reality” is just a fancy front for Google Maps. For the time being, most AR services just point you in the direction of geo-tagged content - and in most cases that lets you know that the restaurant you are looking for is 1.6 miles away, through some guys head and the wall behind him. The “Terminator” vision of being able to scan and identify things just by looking at them is a long way away.

This is just in terms of search, by the way. We weren’t disparaging applications of Augmented Reality to things like mobile gaming.

Don’t worry about Google: what do you with Google always lurking in the background? It is adopting an aggressive mobile stance, and is happy to assimilate any service that works. Again James nailed this one, saying “if you work in search, or mobile, or any tech market - then Google is going to be coming into your market. They’re too big not too. So if you’ve got a job in one of these markets, and you can’t handle Google competing with you, then go do something else. Become a bar-tender. Because it is going to happen.”

However, both panelists agreed that Google isn’t as threatening as it seems in mobile. Its major revenue comes from AdWords - and that’s online. Google is throwing a lot at mobile, but nothing as stuck as yet. There is no proven money maker for Google on mobile, and it isn’t taking the entire market over.

Yet.

UGC = user generated crap: a model that was discussed for mobile search was the bite-sized recommendation. A single aspect of Twitter, focused more sharply on recommendation, could hook in with future hyper-local search services to provide you with a constant flow of opinions on the things in your immediate vicinity. Then you just have to face the problem of everything turning out as a three-star review. If a restaurant get 500 reviews, it will almost inevitably even out at an average rating - and if anyone can rate anything, then even obscure, off-the-beaten track places will get the same score as run-of-the-mill franchise establishments.