I am no longer an analyst. I am now Founder, President and CMO of a new start-up currently in stealth mode until we launch in the next few months.

The start-up is called Visibility Mobile and the focus is on Mobile SEO services. It is a partnership between myself and Irish technology powerhouse the TSSG (Waterford, Ireland) (www.tssg.org)

Therefore, its time for me to let my first ever blog - I ever ever created (this one) msearchblog go! Thank-you for reading and here is the press release that represents the start of my new venture. You can still find me on GoMo News (www.gomonews.com)



Mobile brands have a new champion

The mobile web is blossoming but its fruit has been sour to taste. Why? Poor usability and devices have made brands cautious of moving to mobile. Technical advancements such as the iPhone and Nokia’s N95 are changing this – but there is still a lot to do. 

Introducing Visibility Mobile

Visibility Mobile is a company which will fundamentally improve the usability of the mobile web. It will give brands better, more consistent visibility on the mobile web, transforming the end user experience. A groundbreaking new product will be launched under the GoMobileSEO.com banner at CTIA 2008 in September.

About Visibility Mobile

Visibility Mobile is a new Irish company that combines the competencies of the TSSG research group (www.tssg.org) in Waterford, Ireland with the mobile web expertise built up by Bena Roberts over the last fifteen years.

Bena Roberts President and CMO of the new venture is excited by the prospect of working closely with the TSSG.  “Applying the expertise of the team in Waterford to the problems posed by mobile search and mobile search engine optimisation has produced amazing results” she states. “I can see this having a huge impact on the way that brands and their fans connect on the mobile”.

Paul Savage of the TSSG and CEO of Visibility Mobile said, “Pairing up Bena’s years of experience as an analyst and her work on Mobile SEO with the experience and knowledge depth at the TSSG has been very exciting. It will be great to unveil the results in San Francisco in September”

-Ends-

For further information, please contact Paul Savage at Visibility Mobile on +353 51 302923

Everyone talks about The Long Tail, but what is it, where did it come from and how does it apply to digital marketing? The phrase was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired in an article published in that magazine in October 2004. It made a huge impression immediately and Mr Anderson subsequently expanded his theory into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

The theory refutes the long-held wisdom of the 80/20 rule whose premise is that 80% of sales would be made on the 20% of the inventory. The arrival of the Internet as a mass medium has proven this wrong. Amazon says 50% of its total sales come from a wide range of items that only sell once a month, while eBay’s staggering success came from auctioning obscure items.

The classic graph below illustrates the Long Tail. The Long Tail theory is that the Long Tail equals the Head in size; that collectively many products account for as many sales as the few bestsellers.

Away from the Internet, even bricks and mortar video retailer Blockbuster claims that half the films rented each month do not come from the top 100. Apparently customers buy films they know or that are in the top 100, but prefer to preview less well known movies at home before making a purchasing decision.

However, the Long Tail isn’t universal. Mobile is the big exception. Here the business model could more accurately be described by what BKI Media terms the Short Head – that is, that the first massive peak in take-up will contribute almost all the revenue and the Long Tail will barely exist.

Western Europe is full of pastiche and nostalgia, with lots of new music in fact being a remix of old tracks or sounds from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. Certainly this repackaging appeals to some of those who remember the tracks the first time round (and who might continue to buy the original records online as a Long Tail purchase), but equally it attracts a new, mostly younger audience.

These people are likely to view a riff or track as super cool for a short time, often because it had been used for a TV advertising campaign. Recent examples include Status Quo’s hit Matchstick Men from 1968, which is now more famous as the backing track to the Gordon’s Gin advert. Likewise The Chi-Lites’ 1971 hit Have You Seen Her, used by Hutchison to promote music downloads on its 3 network, has got a huge new lease of life.

In mobile, immediacy – ‘nowness’ – is almost everything, so it’s crucial that things can be found quickly and easily through vertical options such as “most used”, “most read”, ‘top ten” or “most popular”. Mobile service providers themselves play to the Short Head model by constantly refreshing on-deck content to keep people engaged and making fresh purchases.

In the maelstrom of argument that the principles of the Long Tail, including the Short Head, has generated, perhaps the most important aspect of all has been almost lost – the unprecedented opportunity to cross-sell.

The user interface, personalisation, recommendation and navigation have at least as big an effect on sales as the content itself, although as we have just illustrated, these present differently on mobile than they online, but they apply to both. And although they comprise different strands of digital marketing, people are distinguishing less and less between their use of the online and mobile world, it’s all part of the same digital life.

This was shown perfectly by Scott Kelliher, director, mobile media services, Virgin Mobile USA, speaking at an Informa conference in New York at the beginning of March. Last year Virgin Mobile USA launched a rewards programme, Sugar Mama, through which its customers (none of whom are on contract), receive free calling minutes and texts in return for watching adverts. It has been hugely successful, signing up 50,000 customers in the first two weeks. As of 6^th March users had collectively earned 5 million minutes of air time.

Now Virgin Mobile USA has added another level of sophistication, moving Sugar Mama users between the desktop and their mobile and back again to complete a single, reward-earning task with only a 4% drop-out rate. As Mr Kelliher put it, “This is one of the coolest things…they don’t think about using [a means of communication] vertically, only about communicating digitally”.

Consequently, the key to exploiting the Long Tail and Short Head models in different media for cross-selling is timeliness and cross-platform coordination. A triple or quad play service provider needs to be able to offer a Have You Seen Her ringtone or ringback, wallpaper, video clip and track download on-deck as well as promoting a pay-per-view offering of the Chi-Lites performing the song and/or other artists who’ve covered the song (MC Hammer) and/or other Chil-Lites hits and/or if ‘you liked that, you’ll love this’ recommendation. And of course, the same type of offerings for those who prefer to go to the service provider’s online portal to get at the goodies.

It’s a way of mining the Long Tail. To do it effectively, service providers need a sufficiently flexible platform from which to launch a diverse array of products quickly, including in real-time if appropriate, such as to coincide with a concert; they need to lead innovation to exploit the limited window of opportunity for content-related offerings. But that’s not all.

In this very new world of cross-platform selling that exploits the Long Tail and Short Head simultaneously, they also need to be able to capture and analyse customer preferences and lifestyle to support one-to-one marketing and gain a deeper – as well as wider – understanding of their customers, what they like to do and how and when they like to do it. This knowledge will contribute enormously to all sorts of future campaigns that win by a Short Head, pulling the Long Tail with it.


First published December 2007 on the Pontis blog: http://www.pontisblog.com/2007/12/11/long-tail-short-head-unprecedented-cross-selling/#more-44
Written by Bena Roberts (Edited by Annie Turner).

History is not repeating itself. Mobile data is not yet  a cash cow like voice and SMS. The big Internet search brands' investment in developing technology, running search services and the costs of incentives that must be offered to get onto operators’ decks are not providing a good enough return on investment. They are obliged to push models based on pay per click or use to generate revenue, which they also have to share with operators. Yet these charges put consumers off using the services.

This is the reason for the brands' deafening silence at the moment in the mobile search market: they are all trying to work out a viable business model.

Yahoo! was bullish back in January 07 with its launch at CES, but there are figures available about the uptake and use of its monolithic search services. Since then 3.0 and other changes show frustration also from Yahoo! trying to get the model right.

Over the same period (07), Microsoft’s profits have increased by 13% and Google’s by over 40%, but none of this growth is coming from the mobile market. The growing online advertising market is still their bread and butter.

AOL, a late comer to the market, has ramped up its branded search entrance, offering some impressive solutions, but only within AOL Europe and MVNO Deutschland. AOL is still very much for early adopters, playing catch-up in mobile search.

 
So where does this leave white label companies?

White label search is in a potentially strong position.

Operators are finally realising that they are weakening their standing with consumers by offering Google and Yahoo!’s services, and are now looking to rectify this with own-brand, white label services.

White label search providers cannot offer search services free of charge because of venture capital investment that force them to pay attention to their bottom lines in the short term – VC funding is all about fattening a company up for sale in fewer than five years.

This means that mobile operators are being forced into another round of spending on mobile data, which they endeavour to recoup from their consumers, which in turn inhibits take-up.

The Catch 22 situation escalates as the white label providers push advertising onto operators as a sweetener for their investment, with the promise of faster new revenue streams from data services.

Operators find themselves with search and advertising services promising to be the two-headed saviour of their data services despite a glaring lack of a concrete evidence.

 
Where does this leave consumers?

Consumers are faced with a larger choice of search and data options, on and off-portal.

They are confused about the cost of using the services due to poor communication and inconsistent approaches by operators.

Consumers start to download clients that are free and promise a straightforward interface without being fully aware of the cost. This leads to an initial surge in the take-up of new services followed by a sharp reduction after the bills hit home.

Consumer are served adverts within search results and, in the case of click to call, need to add the cost of a phone call to that of the search.

Mobile operators try to encourage users to enjoy search in a multitude of different ways (see the September issue's analysis of T-Mobile's user interface for its portal which deploys five different search engines), but what is free, what is included in portal use and what costs money to access is typically not made clear.

 
Conclusion
The cost of mobile search continues to dampen consumer demand. The fact that its costs are not easy to understand means that mobile search uptake, revenue and results are faring poorly. Google is a big brand on the Internet, but Vodafone and T-Mobile are big brands on the mobile web that also need to earn euros from hosting and managing services.
 
Mobile search will not become the hugely popular consumer service it should be until prices come down. This is not about the price of the device or the cost of the voice contract, so much as the charges for using mobile search and portal services. Transparency is needed, but attempts so far are not close to being good enough. There are many “unlimited” data bundles, but in fact they are all restricted. Data rates are capped at speeds that are risible in the fixed world, while fair use policies are fair to the operator, not the consumer, although they vary considerably.

I saw on Tech Crunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/chacha-ditches-guided-search-model-i-love-to-hate-this-startup/ that ChaCha was ditching its guided search. This is something we predicted would happen and here is part of an article written by BKI Media published in December 2007.

ChaCha was co-founded by Scott A. Jones and Brad A. Bostic in 2006. Mr Jones is the inventor of the voicemail system used by nearly a half billion people worldwide, who was able to “retire” at 31 and go on and invent things like Gracenote which allows you to see what’s on a CD in iTunes etc. Mr Bostic has led a number of unspecified start-ups. 

Unfortunately, ChaCha is more of a bum note. The plan is that consumers’ queries are answered, free of charge, either by a user texting their query to 242242 (ChaCha) from within the US or online at www.chacha.com. If you choose the mobile approach, your query is always addressed by a “guide”, that is, a human researcher who provides the answer plus the web page/source of the information. This is also known as social searching.

The website gives you the option of searching yourself or asking a guide to help. Users aren’t obliged to register for a free account, but they have to if they want help from a guide and if they do so, their search mobile and online search history is saved, in theory speeding up future answers. (I tried asking how much it would cost to send the SMS and also if the service is available anywhere in the world, but kept being told I couldn’t register because I got the Turing-type numbers wrong, which I hadn’t. I had four failed attempts in all.)

Ultimately the plan is that users can call ChaCha and ask a question, a guide will listen to that question, find and type the answer, then send it through a text-to-speech program. ChaCha’s system will call the user back and relay the answer in a recorded computer voice, which of course often might be very helpful for someone on a mobile, for instance, if they are driving. 

Also, this is a much, much better bet for answers than the other way round (speech-to-text, which is fraught with problems, as anyone who has ever tried to use SpinVox will know), but it doesn’t get over the hurdle of the guides, which are central to the entire proposition. 

Guides work from their own PCs at home. SMS guides are paid USD 0.20 per transaction while online guides are paid USD5 per search hour. They can be paid via a debit card through First Internet Bank of Indiana, or by direct deposit to be paid once a month if their earn USD 100 or more. That’s certainly going to take some doing on the SMS front.

Who guides the guides? 

Much depends on how well trained the guides are (which for the tiny amounts they are being paid seems to be asking a lot) at using the tools that ChaCha claims to have that enables them to provide better, faster responses than the ordinary searcher. To up the ante, guides are also ‘categorised’ and allocated to certain queries, apparently, according to what their areas of personal expertise are and they have access to each other for help.

However, there are rumours that 90% of all queries are spoofs by pranksters and apocryphal-sounding tales of clueless guides abound (Guide in response to a query: What’s Digg?, for instance). It is thought ChaCha has around 12,000 guides on their books, although there are no set minimum hours.

Arguably the service isn’t aimed at the tech savvy and early adopters, but people who can’t easily navigate the web on their own or who want information on the hoof and can’t cope with mobile search themselves. Still, the calamitous decline in usage over the course of last year suggests that it hasn’t got the offer right for anyone. It surely isn’t any faster or easier texting ChaCha a question such as “What time does XX close on a Wednesday?” than phoning XX to find out?

Flawed business case

The user experience is fraught with difficulties, but so is the business model, which relies on advertising for its revenue, providing the service to users free of charge. Again, it’s hard to see how the Comscore figures are going to tempt big brands to part with wads of cash, especially as ChaCha is becoming something of a laughing stock amongst the cognoscenti.

Another big challenge, both in terms of attracting mobile users and advertisers, is that it’s off-deck – carriers haven’t exactly been queuing up to put it on their portals. The company is hoping to raise its profile at the forthcoming Sundance Film Festival which opens on 17th January in Park City, Utah in the US. At the event, ChaCha will send out droves of scouts to compile real-time information on the films and event, then send it to ChaCha guides who can answer questions from festival attendees walking around the venue. Last May, ChaCha announced a partnership with blinkx to facilitate video search, which might have a role to play at Sundance. In the longer term, we cannot see that Sundance will save it though.

(To read the conclusion - please email me).

According to Peter Jacso (2004, Wikipedia) federated search consists of:

1.   Transforming a query and broadcasting it to a group of disparate databases with the appropriate syntax;

2.   Merging the results collected from the databases;

3.   Presenting them in a succinct and unified format with minimal duplications;

4.   Providing a means, performed either automatically or by the portal user, to sort the merged result.

This is different to traditional search, which uses spiders to crawl data and get results. Often the same result can appear several times during a web search, whereas using federated search, the results are categorised and searchable without having to click through every result.

MCN has been a early mover and innovator in federated search. Its patented technology, Query Broker and Taxonomy, delivers results via one interface from any content source. Federated search is MCN has been core offering since the company’s launch in 2004.

The company’s mobilesearch.net offer is THE example of federated search and shows how relevant results can be delivered in two to three clicks.

Just recently Medio Systems, a mobile search company that has used the traditional search engine search method of crawling to access and retrieve information announced that it was adding federated search to its model.

MCN’s Federated search definition 
 
With MCN’s search a “single query can be brokered in real-time to access content distributed across multiple search engines and content repositories. Results are returned to the user as actionable content (music, games, images), as links to additional information (business addresses) or in whatever format is most appropriate.”

 MCN has adapted the core elements of federated search, increased scalability to respond to the larger mobile community ecosystem and added the appropriate tools, business interfaces and monetisation methods to create the ultimate solution for mobile search.

Medio’s Definition of Federated Mobile Search
Search results that include both on-deck content and mobile web results into an index from top search engines for the most complete search experience possible. 
 

So MCN the company has created a plug and play federated search system that orders and structures content from operators and content providers in a way that is easy to find, access and deploy (and has done so within six weeks). The company offers a pure content discovery solution for operators and vendors.

Medio Systems, on the other hand, is continuing to use crawling and indexing from traditional search, but is also bringing off-portal content to the party and federating the results of that off-deck content to improve the original on-deck search. Medio will broker results from search engines and merge them within the results of a specific query.

Critical comparison

MCN: Medio’s entrance into the federated space is vindication of what we knew in 2004 – crawling is not enough.

Medio Systems: This is not a question of whether or not crawling or federated is best. Crawling WAP sites is working and Medio is serving customers’ needs by offering brokered results from branded search engines.

MCN: As the leader in federated mobile search, MCN is already able to integrate, manage and view reports from multiple content channels or segments chosen by the mobile operator or content provider. This means that revenue generation is almost instant.

Medio Systems: Mobile search is not only about speed of results, but also relevance, advertising, behavioural analysis and organic results. The mobile search.net is rigid in that users always get similar results. With Medio the most relevant results come first and are not rendered in a particular way, rather they are returned and displayed with appropriate answers in mind.

MCN: User interface is paramount in mobile search. This means that MCN is also able to provide operators with advanced services – from recommendation engines to cross-promote push and sell services – that will make the solution richer and get users what they want faster.

Medio Systems: Recommendation is one channel, but Medio’s ActiveRank algorithm uses keyword relevance to ensure that search results are found first – not similar results or near matches.

MCN: Dynamic search is what MCN is about. Since its launch it has been focused on brokering results in real-time. This means that query results are returned and sorted into a single ranked display. MCN has taken this concept built the Query Broker technology around it and the result is the Mobilesearch.net Search Management platform.

Medio Systems: With eight deployments in seven countries Medio is already a leader in integration. The goal now is to deliver off-deck results to enhance the user experience. Our use of federation with Google and Yahoo! results is no different from MCN’s ability to generate federated results from different mobile advertisers.
 
MCN: MCN is the Rolls Royce of the federated mobile search space and Medio’s is jumping on the bandwagon with a Ford imitation.

Medio Systems: Medio is no imitation. There is no question that federated search is a strong option for mobile and Medio supports the best technologies.

Conclusion

The argument for crawling vs federating is one about made for mobile vs replicating the Internet. The two schools of thought vary on this and the fact that Medio Systems has introduced federated search to its portfolio leads us to believe that a new alternative for the mobile Internet is available – combining what is good from the Internet with made-for-mobile.

This is way that MCN has made federated search its own. It has added to the traditional Internet search, enhancing it to create a deeper system that is more appropriate to the mobile services it promotes. The notion of brokering the results should enhance the medium – as long as the net is cast sufficiently widely and the brokering mechanism is always biased towards producing apt answers the first time.

Mobile barcodes are on the verge of becoming a global phenomenon, but what exactly are they, what do they do, and for whom? We became familiar with the original, linear barcodes (or 1D), from our supermarket shopping in the 1980’s (although the technology was patented in the 1950’s). They comprise a series of vertical black lines and white spaces of variable width, representing numbers, which are read (or decoded) by a barcode reader to extract the information they bear.

However, as barcodes were used in an ever greater variety of environments beyond straightforward stock control, they became longer and longer as people tried to pack more information onto them. A new generation of barcodes was devised in the 1990’s, usually referred to as 2D or matrix codes. They are formed by patterns of black and white squares arranged on a (usually) square grid and can encode thousands of alphanumeric and other characters in virtually any language. Immediately the size and capacity problem was solved, opening the way for applications that had never been considered. 

Another radical and exciting advancement in barcode reader technology allowed the camera in a mobile phone to act as a reader. Mobile phones can now be enabled to read a variety of 2D mobile barcodes. These include QR codes, Data Matrix, Cool-Data-Matrix, Aztec, Upcode, Trillcode, Quickmark, shotcode, mCode and Beetagg.

The vast majority of symbologies are in the public domain, which means they can be used by anyone without restriction and without payment of a fee or royalty. This public approach gives rise to internationally recognised standards, global interoperability, and creates an economy of scale.  This is a great boon for advertisers and consumers (both of whom are the mobile operators’ customers) because only one software client is required to read any code.  For the operators, this translates to greater choice and more competitively priced equipment.

Unfortunately, some barcode developers have chosen the proprietary route, which means they keep control of their own codes, the information that is permitted to be encoded and charge a fee or royalty for their use. These issues and the lack of interoperability usually means that proprietary barcodes tend to be used in controlled, closed environments, rather than in open, public systems around the world.

The most common use of mobile barcodes is to request information or a service or content from a Web site. It might be details of a promotion, or a discount voucher via SMS or MMS, or to activate a download such as a ringtone, music track or game, or click to call an IVR or human agent, or buy a travel or concert ticket. The advertiser pays the set-up costs as well as its operator partner on a per-click, download, view, redeemed coupon, ticket sale or call, depending on the campaign.

The key is that mobile barcodes are a pull technology, a permission-based way for a consumer to engage with an advertiser or medium. This is a very important attribute since there is a great deal of consumer angst and regulatory concern about intrusive mobile marketing: mobile barcodes are a world away from pushing unsolicited spam via SMS or MMS. Big brands are understandably wary of engaging in any advertising activity that compromises their reputation by alienating their customers and have stayed away from these kinds of push campaigns.

The pull of mobile barcodes overcome these issues and offer a direct, accountable way of connecting with consumers. However, if mobile barcodes are to succeed as an advertising medium, a high level of back-office integration is necessary, which reinforces the importance of open standards for processes and interfaces. Operators will need to demonstrate to the world’s biggest brands that the barcode scanning transactions are accurate, reliable and defendable because they are going to charge that brand for every click.

The precedent is there: Google has built a multi-billion dollar, online business on this per click or interaction model with its Google AdWord/AdSense, which provides advertisers with reliable, accountable records of their users’ transaction history and an accurate invoice, plus timely and granular revenue share payments to other parts of the ecosystem. In mobile, unlike online, there is the additional challenge that these mechanisms have to work across carriers, across countries and across currencies.

So the stage is set. With 2D barcode scanning, advertisers have a reliable, permission-based mobile channel open to them. Consumers love them as an easy way of using mobile technology to engage with services and media they are interested in, as has been demonstrated in spades in Japan, where mobile barcodes are part of everyday life. This is because Japan is unusual in having a very dominant operator, NTT DoCoMo, which decided to endorse QR codes and ensured that all new handsets had QR code client software embedded in them. The rest is history, but this approach is not applicable to markets in most other countries, which typically have four or five operators competing against each other.

The challenge now is to ensure that any brand advertiser can run the same ad campaign in Singapore, London and Seattle instead of having to produce and run different campaigns in each country and for every operator. The inability to do this has been another big inhibitor to mobile advertising. Mobile barcodes have the potential to overcome these issues and become the mainstream, global phenomenon that they could and should be. However to attain this goal, the various parties that make up the ecosystem and the various warring factions within the mobile barcode industry need to come together and work on common standards* that will be to everyone’s advantage.

This paper was written independently but sponsored by NeoMedia Technologies