Seek and You Shall Find — Mobile Search
With an abundance of mobile content at their finger tips, users certainly can’t claim they offer a lack of choice. But they can complain about the tedious navigation process and confusing hierarchical menus they must endure to find and buy content they like. If operators and content providers want to sell more mobile content, then they are
going to have to harness technologies and techniques to help users discover the content they want—perhaps even before they ask for it.
By Peggy Anne Salz
Content, content, content.
It’s the offer that promises to grow mobile data revenues exponentially—and the challenge that may bankrupt many operators’ business models. The overwhelming amount of pre-packaged mobile content such as ringtones and alerts as well as the growth in usergenerated content including images, clips and mobile blogs means there’s plenty to capture users’ interests—and their wallets—but completing a successful sales pitch will require operators to become much better retailers. Smart retailers make shopping a no-brainer by placing hot-selling items where consumers can see them. Mobile operators and content providers, on the other hand, force users to navigate through multiple menus and sift through catalogues to find content they like. Mobile devices—with their screen-size limitations and restricted input capabilities—only exacerbate the problem.
Recent usability research highlights the scale of the problem. Studies from companies including Qpass, a US-based content management platform provider and Sweden’s Mobile Matrix, a market research firm, argue that mobile portals must bring content to users within six clicks. Unfortunately, the same studies conclude that an astonishing 65 per cent of content is positioned too far from the homepage, making it invisible to users. Indeed, a recent benchmarking study conducted by Informa Telecoms & Media, a telecoms research firm in the UK, reveals the vast majority of mobile content may as well not even be on offer. It found that users typically have to click
through 10-40 screens, and spend more than two minutes, to download some of the most popular ringtones or games. Understanding that users simply cannot buy what they cannot find, many mobile operators and content providers are scrambling to boost their mobile search capabilities by partnering with Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, white-label search engine providers including FAST Search & Transfer, InfoSpace, Medio Systems and JumpTap—or both. A flurry of activity in this space over the last six months points the way to the industry’s next mega-trend: mobile search.
Shortcut to content
Mobile search is indisputably a potent way to generate value. Consumers find what they want, and marketers gain traffic by providing relevant offers and advertising and mobile operators and service providers capture more revenue from increased mobile content purchases. While it’s early days, mobile subscribers will no doubt generate
significant mobile search traffic, creating tremendous revenues through proven online search marketing models. Indeed, global search revenues are projected to generate US$5.5 billion in 2005 and US$11 billion by 2008, according to Piper Jaffray & Co., a US-based research firm, and there is increasing evidence that this could translate to the mobile space.
NPD Group, a market research company based in Port Washington, New York, recently found that the percentage of US mobile subscribers who use mobile search
has doubled to 12 per cent since last year. More good news for mobile data usage and search comes from Ipsos Insight, which has found that the mobile phone is well on
its way to becoming the dominant Internet platform. It reports 28 per cent of mobile phone owners worldwide had browsed the Internet on a wireless handset, up slightly
from 25 per cent at the end of 2004. France and the UK exhibit the strongest growth, but Japan also shows rapid growth. Today, four in 10 adults browse the Internet on their wireless handset in Japan, double the rate in 2003.
While search does assist in delivering a better end-user experience, the much more lucrative business opportunity may be in combining search, personalisation and recommendation to provide users personalised and relevant results—as well as the tools to discover other content they might not have otherwise known existed. While search is clearly critical to monetising content, operators and content providers should not short change themselves—or their users—by merely retrofitting Web search solutions for the mobile Internet, the report says. “Search paired with personalisation and recommendation is a much more powerful combination.”
The right stuff
Put simply, the business model is no longer about user-pull. Pull is built on the premise that users know what they want and are prepared to go look for it. That’s quite an assumption when it comes to fast-paced mobile such as entertainment and multimedia which changes faster than users can keep up. The pull model also ignores the rise of empowered customers who increasingly expect—even demand—content and services consistently tailored to their individual needs and in tune with their lifestyles and life stages.
The new paradigm is personalised content-push based on a deep understanding of the individual’s purchases, passions and past clickbehavior. It’s even more compelling if
the technology can learn users’ likes and dislikes over time to dynamically and consistently deliver the right content mix.
Life-time learning is at the core of personalisation technology developed by Leiki, a Finnish developer of intelligent Web and mobile services whose customers include content providers FT.com and Sina.com. The company’s patented technology combines real-time learning, profiling and personalisation to help users explore all the mobile content at their finger tips and discover content they like that they might never have known existed. “It’s not about searching for content; it’s about dynamically delivering content according to the user’s past usage and preferences,” observes Petrus Pennanen, Leiki CEO and founder. “Users are confused by the abundance of content and the confusing hierarchical menus in which they are arranged,” Pennanen explains. “It’s like trying to shop in a store that makes you dig for the items you want. Customers want guidance in a store—and it’s even better if the salesperson knows your taste in food or fashion over time. This is what our technology brings to mobile.”
Leiki’s solution also finds users whose preferences are most similar, playing matchmaker between users who share interests and may want to hook up to talk about them. In other applications, Leiki can figure out the user’s mood—based on their actions or context—and suggest content and services that match. A user who makes a note about a workout session, for example, may appreciate a personalised content-push of energetic tracks or welcome information about health and fitness. Leiki’s technology can pinpoint this window of opportunity and respond in real-time.
In an effort to deliver the right users the right content an increasing number of content companies—as well as search engine providers—are developing and deploying so-called recommendation engines. This technology—modelled on the approach of online bookseller Amazon—effectively suggests content on the basis of the individual user’s past preferences or on the basis of what a user’s peers consumed, or both.
Highly recommended
However, deploying discovery solutions in the mobile environment is not straightforward, and solutions cannot be ported from the Internet. Mobile recommendation engines also have to identify which users have which devices and translate the content recommendation into what is appropriate for each user and each device. This means reaching a balance between the content that users might like and the content they can actually access. In short, it makes no sense to recommend an MP3 track if the operator does not know for certain that the user has an MP3-capable phone to play it on. A company that has content recommendation high on its radar and the capabilities mix to deliver is mPortal, a US-based enabler of mobile content and applications. Its SPRINGBOARD suite of products, which includes configurable client software and a network content management solution, enable operators and content providers to deliver personalised services and encourage content discovery based on relevant recommendations.
“The ability to intelligently serve up different menus to different users eliminates the frustration users experience in trying to find content they like and avoids the disappointment when the content doesn’t run on devices,” explains DP Vankatesh, mPortal CEO and founder. The company bases its content recommendations on the “back-end of content delivery,” an area Venkatesh says is filled with valuable clues to users’ content preferences and passions. “We provide recommendations based
on the fact that we can interface with the billing systems and all the records for every transaction,” Venkatesh says. “This gives us deep insight into what content users have purchased and allows us to suggest more of the same.”
The ability to provide a personalised service and the potential to deliver content suggestions users will likely welcome is at the heart of Disney Mobile, the branded wireless services offered by the Walt Disney Internet Group, a major media brand and mPortal customer. According to George Grobar, Disney Mobile senior vice president and general manager, the solution enables the company to deliver users “a highly personalised experience with the degree of simplicity we need.”
While recommendations based on customer information such as page views and downloads will no doubt be an important part of content-selling strategies going forward, it may well be the recommendations from the tight-knit communities users know and trust that matter most. Indeed, a recent survey from Jupiter Research shows 64 percent of users will try a service or content recommended by a friend, and 69 per cent will pass what they like along to between two and six friends.
One company cashing in on the desire of users to seek and share content is Alatto, a mobile search and service discovery company headquartered in Dublin. Its hosted solution, Tribes, makes accessing, recommending and sharing mobile content a no-brainer, says Neil Flanagan, Alatto CEO. The company counts almost a dozen operator and content provider deployments. In a way, what we’ve done is turned the mobile device into something akin to a TV remote control,” he explains. “We offer a one-button press to get the next piece of relevant content.” The Alatto toolbar also offers one-click recommendation, allowing users to rate the content they like and pass it on to their friends.
Other technologies and techniques from companies including Singapore’s Purple Ace and Australia’s AgentArts ake this a step further to content users with like-minded users based on the content they like and purchase. Against this backdrop, the real power of search and discovery may be about much more than encouraging users to interact with content; it may be about enabling them to create mobile communities around the content they seek and share together.
Whatever the mix, personalisation and recommendation will be musthave features of content services going forward. Indeed, search and discovery will be about more than finding content according to key words and concepts such as music or sports. Finding and sharing content with people who have mutual interests will be the next killer app.
