Newsletter #140 The Future of Mobile Search 

Feature Article 

The rise and rise of smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices has led to some aggressive forecasts of future mobile advertising revenue. For example the Kelsey Group, a market research firm in the US expects that the mobile advertising market will accelerate from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. According to Kelsey, the current domination of SMS advertising will give way to search advertising which is predicted to be 73% of the total mobile advertising market by 2013.

But will mobile advertising  play out the way that many commentators think it will? The iPhone App model has been a raging success for Apple and other mobile operators have rushed to replicate Apple's success in 2009. For example Nokia has released Ovi Store; Google, Android Market and Research in Motion (Blackberry's manufacturer), App World. Only four months after Apple announced that one billion apps had been downloaded earlier in the year, it was announcing the two billion mark in late September. That's over 11 million applications downloaded a day, on average, over that period.

All new smartphones are location-aware, or will be soon, which is leading to an explosion of applications that can use your geographical coordinates.

ZAGAT To Go is an application available on a number of smartphones which takes advantage of your location to recommend restaurants, nightclubs and hotels in your area. You can then read reviews and add the location to favourites. Star Walk is a highly regarded iPhone App which is a planetarium simulator which uses your location to show and allow you to identify objects in the night sky.

I don't think traditional search (if you can call Google traditional) is going to be as important as many commentators think. Most people will have a range of applications on their smartphone that they will use to find the information they want, and it will only be when they reach the application's limit, that they'll Google.

The portability of mobile devices plus high speed connectivity and an intuitive interface means the ability to find basic news and information on the go very rapidly –  in depth research and analysis will probably be carried out on larger devices. However there is no doubt that time-dependent information such as stock quotes, news headlines, movie times and plane arrivals are a natural fit with app-laden smartphones.

Just because Google has dominated Web advertising, capitalising on a new advertising model based around search, doesn't necessarily mean they will win the mobile battle. If you can see the worth of providing time-dependent information to your customers, then keep a look out for the mobile aggregators who can stitch all this information together in a seamless App or group of Apps that users can't do without. They may be a smartphone manufacturer such as Apple or Research in Motion, a current content aggregator such as Google or Yahoo or someone out of left field.

It could well be the latter.

Hot Tips

Newbies

Tabbed browsing has been available in most browsers for several years but we still see many users who are unaware of how easy and efficient it is to use tabs. See this page for some visual tips on tabbed browsing in IE7
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Internet-Explorer-7-Tabbed-Browsing-Help-and-Tips/39157
If you're using Firefox:
http://opensourcearticles.com/introduction_to_firefox_2

Power Users

If you are a power user and want to have more options with your tabs you can add a great Firefox Add-On: Tree Style Tabs
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

For Internet Explorer (IE7 and 8) IE7Pro is an add-on that adds a lot of extra features to IE including better tab management.
http://www.ie7pro.com/

Interesting Sites

Kickstarter is a market where creatives and/or entrepreneurs can put their ideas or projects forward, together with what they require to fund them. People can pledge money towards these ideas but the creator keeps 100% ownership. An interesting concept. http://www.kickstarter.com/

InsiteFul Quotes

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." Will Durant

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page of www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

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Best wishes

Alex Garden