Andrea Bauer

U.K.-based Taptu, which is developing a mobile search engine, has raised about $10 million (6.45 million pounds) in a second round of funding. Participating in the round were existing investors 3i and Sofinnova. In total, the company has now raised 11.45 million pounds. In addition, the company appointed Andreas Bernstrom to the position of COO. Bernstrom, who has been working part-time with the company for almost six months, said the funding will go towards increasing its userbase and figuring out how best to monetize the search engine. The company, which was founded in 2007, launched its first mobile search service in February, and now claims about 1 million searches on a daily basis on its Wap site worldwide. Bernstrom will be charged with growing the number of searches, and forming partnerships with carriers and other mobile sites.

Taptu Mobile Search with Steve Ives from Dutchcowboys on Vimeo.

The company, which has 40 employees, will face stiff competition from companies like Google and Yahoo, but also from fairly established startups like Jumptap and Medio Systems. How will Taptu differentiate itself? Bernstrom: “That was the first question I asked as well. The guys have spent a great deal of time looking at what people use their mobile phones for, and how they engage with mobile phones, and what search will be used for if it’s over the mobile phone. It’s markedly different than the desktop….For instance, 60 percent of the content people search for is entertainment related. The mobile phone is really social.” He said that means knowing that a search result will fit on the smaller screen, but also that the results should easily be shared via SMS or on a social network.

Prior to Taptu, Bernstrom was the COO at TradeDoubler, an Internet marketing company that had more than 550 employees. He was responsible for expanding TradeDoubler.

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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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Further cementing Google Maps Mobile as one of the most useful free mobile applications ever, Google has added Voice search to its repertoire. It’s an experimental feature at this point, so it’s only on select handsets; if you’re using a Blackberry Pearl 8110, 8120, or 8130 - go update!

The new feature seems pretty easy to use: hold the left soft key, say your search, release the left soft key, and off it goes. It utilizes the same speech recognition engine used by 1-800-GOOG-411. Still, typing still works fine, allowing you to fall back on your thumbs be it that your environment just doesn’t mesh well with voice recognition.

While I’d be a bit surprised to see this feature make it into the generalized J2ME version of the application, we’ll probably see it to roll out to other big-name platforms as Google works out the kinks.

Pearl users can grab the update at http://www.google.com/gmm

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Back in April at CTIA, Microsoft was showing off a few new features on the way for their search application, Live Search for Windows Mobile. They announced this morning that these features would be available to users starting today.

The new features:

* Map your friends: Grabs addresses from your contact list, puts them on the map, and provides directions.
* View Virtual Earth collections: Lets you check out maps of locations/events shared by members of the community.
* Web search: Launch web search directly from the client to find web pages, product price comparisons and reviews, news, images, etc.
* Weather: Check the current weather, or a 4 day forecast.

Yahoo! Go 3, which provides some of the same functionality as Live Search (though no virtual earth or friend mapping support, as far as I know), recently launched on the Windows Mobile platform.

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At the Yahoo! press conference at CTIA Yahoo! presented their plans to integrate its “oneSearch 2.0″ features into mobile phones. The three key elements that Yahoo! is emphasizing are an open development platform, easier ways to search, including voice queries, and idle screen search integration.

Open Development

Like everyone else in the civilized wireless word, Yahoo! is keen on the whole “open” thing. Developers will be able to use the Yahoo! API to tap into search algorithms designed to return more relevant results. For example, if you were to search for Italian restaurants in a certain area, you’d get a list of nearby joints but you might also get data from online reservation websites that are hooked up to those restaurants so you could quickly make reservations.

There will also be a monetization system in place for developers so that their hard work doesn’t go unrewarded.

Easier Ways to Search

The big feature here will be voice-enabled queries powered by a company called vlingo. Yahoo! is now a major investor in the company and has exclusive rights to its voice technology. There’s a preview for BlackBerry users available here. It looks pretty straightforward; you hold down the call key and tell it what you’re looking for. Sounds easy enough. Apparently vlingo is able to intelligently work with natural speech so that, for instance, saying “N-C-double-A” will result in NCAA items.

There’s also a predictive text feature, should you choose to go the old fashioned route and type things in by hand, along with contextual recommendations — like if you were to search for Apple, it’d try to pare down your results by recommending iPhone search results, Apple stock results, or Apple computer results. Stuff like that.

Yahoo! executive vice president of Connected Life, Marco Boerries mentioned that proximity-based search results are in the pipeline as well. It’ll be a manually-configured feature that’ll allow you to use GPS, cell tower triangulation, or nearby ISP routing to hone in on your location.

Idle Screen Search

Idle screen searching basically entails a Yahoo! Search box being placed on the Windows Mobile Home Screen, for instance. The idea is to be able to launch a search without first opening a web browser.

It’s a pretty simple idea in theory but Yahoo! has had to do a lot of work to get device manufacturers and mobile operating system developers to include its search bar in the idle areas of their products or at least develop versions that end-users can install that are compatible with the myriad of mobile devices currently on the market.

It’s expected to roll out soon — Q2 of this year.

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Today, Yahoo filed a presentation detailing its three-year financial plan that management gave to its board of directors in December, before Microsoft’s unsolicited bid. These rosy projections should be read in the context of that ongoing battle and Yahoo’s attempt to get a better price out of Microsoft. But this presentation also sheds some light on where exactly Yahoo sees its strengths.

Yahoo is projecting revenues after traffic acquisition costs (TAC)—i.e., what it shares with other Websites that run Yahoo ads—to grow from $5.1 billion in 2007 to $8.8 billion in 2010.

How does it plan to grow revenues by 73 percent over that period? Here are some slides from the presentation (which you can find here at the SEC’s EDGAR Website, or just search for Yahoo).

Yahoo argued to its board that it could exceed Wall Street expectations and accelerate revenue-growth to 25 percent in 2009 and 2010 and increase its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion this year to $3.7 billion in 2010:

Notice that for these projections to come true, Yahoo needs to increase its operating cash flow margins to 42 percent from 33 percent. That seems overly optimistic, especially now that the economic outlook is so uncertain.

To justify its projections, Yahoo is counting on better clickthrough rates on its search, display and video ads.

This next slide captures how that strategy has played out over the past couple years, with initiatives and deals categorized as either helping to build Yahoo’s audience or monetize that audience. (Notice the emphasis on Yahoo Buzz, Open Search, and Mobile—these are the things Yahoo is highlighting as growth drivers to its board. With mobile, in particular it feels like it does not get enough credit, and in another slide it notes that it has more than 600 million mobile subscribers have used its OneSearch product):

It sees its big opportunity in display advertising, where the top 10 players still control less than a quarter of the market and there is a lot of room for ad rates to go up:

At the same time, it believes that it can continue to close the gap on its revenue-per-search, which it estimated to be 60 to 70 percent lower than Google’s at the end of 2007 (so it still has along way to go, see comScore data here on comparable clickthrough rates):

Yahoo’s overall strategy boils down to two things: attract an even bigger audience, and sell that audience to advertisers:

Finally, Yahoo is not timid about investing in the future. It wants to nearly double capital expenditures to $1 billion by 2010, with 70 percent of that going to “innovation and production infrastructure” (not that they have much of a choice there. Google’s CapEx in the fourth quarter—$678 million—was more than Yahoo’s for the entire year):

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The mobile phone versions of the Opera browser will now come with Google as the default search engine.

The new deal applies to Opera Mini and Opera Mobile; the desktop version of Opera already offers Google as the default search engine. Opera’s mobile versions currently have an install base of 35million users.

The financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but it would be fair to guess that Google just paid its way into Opera’s mobile user base at the expense of Yahoo, the previous paying provider.

The deal is effective March 1 and applies everywhere except within the borders of the former Soviet Union.

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At Google, it’s all about speed. That’s doubly true for mobile applications. Google made some improvements to its mobile search, making it load faster on most mobile browsers. It does this by caching the page.

Google also added an iGoogle link to its mobile homepage. It also now allows you to customize and rearrange the widgets on the mobile version of your iGoogle start page so what you see on your mobile iGoogle can be different than what you see on your desktop. (You have to set this up from a regular computer, but can basically drag and drop widgets around to your liking).

This should make iGoogle a much more viable mobile start page. And, arguably, you need a start page with shortcuts to your favorite content on your mobile browser more than you do on your desktop. It’s just faster that way.

Below is a longish Google video with a demo of the new functionality (skip to about 1:44 in, when the actual demo starts:

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Google is developing a new search service for cellphones that will be focused on mobile specific content such as ringtones and games, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The new search site is said to enable users not only to find a list of mobile content providers, but will also provide an easy purchase interface for selected sites, most likely through Google Checkout. Google has apparently been working “for months with content providers — including large entertainment companies and smaller mobile-media aggregators” in preparation for the services launch. The report goes on to say that Google may also include a social-networking component that would let Gmail users exchange content.

Google already provides a number of mobile focused products, from mobile friendly versions of Google search through to a Gmail app for mobile phones. It would appear to be a logical step for Google to offer a mobile focused site such as this. Where the offering becomes interesting is in the challenge it presents to cellphone operators who profit well from services such as ringtones. On one hand we have AT&T offering unlimited data plans on the iPhone, on the other we have cellphone providers such as Verizon which are blocking VOIP services and other web apps because it wants to milk maximum profits from every user. I’d find it hard to believe given history so far that mobile operators will allow Google to undermine one of their most lucrative revenue streams without a fight.

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While Google purposely pursues a much wider agenda that goes to the heart of mobile advertising, (in all the excitement many missed the news that Google has launched coupons linked to Google Maps - a move that dovetails well with location-based mobile advertising somewhere down the road), its efforts are scattered in comparison to those of rival Yahoo In fact, a closer examination of Yahoo’s recent raft of mobile services and search deals, shows Yahoo is not only more focussed than Google, but potentially much better positioned.

Unlike Google, Yahoo has soothed operator fears that branded search must result in brand dilution and a raw deal. Indeed, Yahoo has become expert at selling itself as the missing link in operator’s emerging fixed-mobile content access and search strategies. It is also an indispensable part of their search monetization schemes.

This was the message that came through loud and clear in a discussion I had with Mark Joseph, Head of Content at 3. The UK operator recently sealed a world-first global agreement to provide Yahoo services and search. The milestone move sees Yahoo taking the top-notch position as the default Internet search engine on 3 handsets and on Planet 3, the operator’s mobile portal. According to Joseph, the tie-up with Yahoo is core to 3’s strategy to “bring trusted Internet brands to our network in a way that enhances [users’] overall customer experience”. Search monetization is also high on 3’s agenda - especially since Yahoo will abide by 3’s business rules to also deliver a mix of on-portal content offers promoting 3’s own content partners and the wider Web in search results (which Yahoo will also transcode for delivery to mobile devices). Geraldine Wilson, Yahoo’s VP of Connected Life at Yahoo Europe, tells me the plan is to present “3 content followed by paid-for placements, sponsored links and then the Wider Web”.

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Google announced today that they’re extending their reach into the location-based marketing business, with the launch of a couponing product. Local businesses can offer coupons against their products and services via Google Maps and users simply print them and then then redeem them as usual.

But where’s the mobile element? Google Maps already offer the facility to send driving directions to your phone, so why not get the coupons sent there too? You could simply show the phone at the point of sale and that’s it.

Many of the problems associated with redemption of phone-based coupons aren’t applicable in this instance. If the target market is expected to be owner-run businesses, staff education about the redemption process ceases to become an issue - whereas for someone like Walmart to introduce mobile coupons, the physical redemption process becomes a huge hurdle to overcome. In any event, the option to make the coupon mobile could be given to the merchant on sign up, so they can decide if its something they can cope with.

In addition, malredemption of coupons isn’t an issue here, as all these coupons are all self-liquidating offers, so the more redeemed, the better. This must be the case, as by partnering with Google Maps in the first place, the merchant has made an unlimited number of coupons available, in theory.

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