Andrea Bauer

Searchme is starting to focus much of its time in the mobile space. Last week, it said it will launch an iPhone app and today it announced that it has launched a visual search engine for mobile devices that can be accessed by surfing to the company’s mobile page.

Searchme’s visual search engine delivers results as a browsable list of “pages,” which are actually images of websites that can be viewed before visiting them. To help users during the search process, Searchme’s search engine suggests categories that have some relevance to the query you’re inputting into the service if you want to drill-down into related topics, and provides shortcuts to the best results to try to cut down on search time.

Searchme’s mobile search engine is quite fast and generally does fine on returning the best search results. But if you’re looking to do extensive searching (who would on a mobile device?) and you judge the quality of a search engine by the number of indexed pages, you’ll be disappointed by Searchme — it only returned 103,000 results for “TechCrunch” compared to 6.9 million returned by Google.

On simple queries like “TechCrunch,” the mobile search performed well and the categories displayed above the results were highly useful. But on more complex queries like “how to have a dog meet a puppy,” it didn’t perform well at all and returned a visual list of useless pages. But Searchme’s main goal isn’t to supplant Google, it’s to offer an experience that’s different and simple to use for those who needs something relatively straightforward as quickly as possible.

Mobile Searchme is a fine solution if you’re looking for a new way to experience search on your mobile device. But if you’re already using Google or Yahoo search on your mobile device, I doubt Searchme’s tool will make you want to switch.

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Google on Thursday announced that it has used its Gears Geolocation API to make searching for businesses and locales in your area easier on Windows Mobile devices.

According to the company, Search with My Location approximates your location based on Cell ID technology already employed by Google Maps and returns businesses in that area. If you’re looking to find the best Italian restaurants in your area, you can input “Italian restaurants” into the Search field, and it will return a list of Italian restaurants around your location. But it goes beyond businesses and restaurants. Google said that if you want to know the forecast where you are, simply type in “weather” and it will return the weather for your area.

So far, Search with My Location is only available on Windows Mobile phones for users running Internet Explorer Mobile (a full list of compatible phones can be found here) in the US and UK, but Google said that wider support will be available as it continues to enter into agreements with vendors.

To use the new service now, surf to Google.com, click the My Locations link, and get started.

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Although buying products from your desktop at home has become just as customary as buying products at the store, few have found reason to buy products on their cell phones. In an attempt to buck that trend and make it easier for consumers to buy products from their cell phone, Billing Revolution announced today that it will offer a ’single-click’ billing and payment service that will streamline mobile purchases.

Once consumers are ready to buy something from the Web from a vendor that employs Billing Revolution’s service for payment, they are taken to Billing Revolution’s purchase page where they input credit card information from their phone. Once complete, Billing Revolution automatically sends an SMS receipt to their phone, which contains a link. After clicking that link, authentication is complete and with all future purchases, consumers will need only to click ‘buy’ for a transaction to be completed.

Billing Revolution is taking a risk with this platform that may or may not pay off. Right now, mobile purchases are just a small segment of online commerce and few consumers are willing to buy a product with their cell phones. But if Billing Revolution’s beliefs are right that all it takes is a simple process and the ability to buy products with a single click, it’s in a prime position to capitalize on what it believes is a booming market.

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Now that Apple has enjoyed some success with its App Store, smartphone manufacturers are starting to realize that having such a service is a worthwhile endeavor. An App Store with the right ingredients for success not only makes people want to buy the smartphone more than others, but it offers a new revenue-sharing opportunity that could become extremely lucrative.

Perhaps that’s why Microsoft’s new store for Windows Mobile 7, called Skymarket, leaked today. And it’s also why Google announced late last week that it was planning on launching the Android Market to compete with Apple’s store. Each and every company going after the mobile Web is trying to do what Apple has done with its own App Store.

If nothing else, the App Store has shown that there really is a recipe for success in this space. What is that recipe? At this point, success in the Mobile App Store market requires:

1. A popular device.

2. A single marketplace where users can find any application they want in one location.

3. A developer platform that’s both easy to use and powerful enough to create fantastic apps.

4. A dose of enterprise applications.

5. The ability to deploy the same applications on multiple devices.

6. The ability for users to download applications wirelessly to their device from a Wi-Fi or 3G connection.

Apple has most of these ingredients and is performing extremely well in the app market, but its competitors — RIM and Microsoft — seem lost. Both companies have applications that can be downloaded from countless places on the Web, the applications simply aren’t as usable as iPhone apps, and there’s no simple way to add applications to the phone without connecting it to your computer. (Update: To clarify and echo what some commenters have noted, BlackBerry owners can download apps over-the-air and do so on a daily basis.)

While Apple wins out in most of those categories, Microsoft and RIM can still stand up in a few where Apple isn’t quite so strong. For example, Apple’s applications appeal mainly to the consumer, but RIM offers the enterprise solutions that have been left out of Apple’s store so far. But in the end, it’s Apple that reigns supreme in the app store market and will continue to force the others to modify their offerings and catch up.

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