Medio Systems has reached a number of milestones. Since launch in 2004 it’s teamed up with T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Telus Mobility. It has delivered over 1.5 billion answers to subscriber searches. Moreover, Medio is seeing uptake of 1.4 million subscribers for mobile search each month.

WOW Medio. After 18 months of being engulfed by the PR of other mobile search companies namely JumpTap – Medio is fighting back. I agree. Medio is the king of search in the North American market but global leader it isn’t. Any of these figures can be trumped by NTT DoCoMo search or mobile search numbers for Chinese mobile search engines.

But (this will sound funny coming from a competitive analyst) it is not about who is winning. It is about which company can penetrate the market globally. There are a number of players active in the US market and there have been 16 new mobile search launches this year only. But companies are finding niches that they are locking in to.

JumpTap has advertising, Medio has voice search and recommendation and also digital content search with Nokia. Smaller companies are carving niches in music such as Targetize and MCN is dynamically indexing content to create niche mobile search platforms for companies from NTTDoCoMo to 3GSM.mobi. Infospace is grappling back for lost market share and Fast is helping it out but hasn’t made the most of its global presence.

Out of all the companies Fastsearch is the one that is globally successful (Italy, Russia, US, Turkey) but is still finding customers dropping it (Vodafone and Amp’d).

In a very tough market there are few choice players. JumpTap is currently on trial in with a mobile operator in Ireland much to the discomfort of very small Irish search company Trust5 but it’s a competitive sink or swim environment. Medio is about to brandish itself as the mobile search provider for a leading European mobile operator but just the other day I spied at 3GSM meeting between JumpTap and another tier one operator.

Basically everyone is in bed with everyone else. The competitive environment in on fire… its very exciting.

Back to the Q&A

Is Medio mobile search leader? Not globally but in the US yes.

Does it have the potential to become global leader? Yes. If it plays it cards right and continues the marketing machine churning.

Read Medio vs JumpTap and Fastsearch vs Infospace in the Mobile Search Analyst.
Next month Novarra vs InfoGin; M-Spatial vs Mobile Commerce.....