I knew that T-Mobile was using Medio Systems as I tested this new mobile content search service in August. A full review has already been written in The Mobile Search analyst and I have also discovered that T-Mobile offers not one but five mobile search providers on its Internet portal. I thought this was a gimmick - but it isn't - now even t-zones and Web 'n' walk are strangely inter-linked.

But today it was announced officially and a few new announcements have been made – notably that advertising will also be incorporated.

But the question I want to pose is does this make Medio the mobile search leader?

The inital answer must be NO. Because Google's fit with Vodafone makes it the leader, without little doubt. But Google is a branded mobile player and not a white label ASP.

Does this make Medio the white label mobile search leader?

It’s a tough one. But it is looking positive for Medio with this T-Mobile Europe addition. This is a five language integration as well which also makes Medio one of the only companies apart from FAST and Google to do this for one operator.

I am doing a mental brain dump and from what I can gather in white label we have:

Medio: Telus, Verizon Get It Now Search, Amp’d (now not live), T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile Europe
JumpTap: Alltel, Boost, Virgin Mobile USA, Rogers and an undisclosed EU player
InfoSpace: AT&T, Verizon and Virgin UK and another one is in the pipeline 
Fastsearch: MTS, Optus, Telstra, (new partnership with Rakuten)
MCN: DNA Finland, TeliaSonera, DTAC, AIS, True, NTT DoCoMo


So – with regards to language both Medio and MCN are in the lead but deployment wise Medio leads in the US and Europe but InfoSpace is also a competitor. Verizon is a big one with about 61 million users and both InfoSpace and Medio can claim this. JumpTap cannot be ignored either but Alltel in the US has more like 15 million subscribers but in total the last time I checked JumpTap was claiming over 100 million subscribers.

If Microsoft hadn’t swallowed Motion Bridge – Motion Bridge might have been the leader with the Orange European deployment and Sprint.

Google has the most subscribers from a branded player; but Yahoo! doesn’t have global deployment only smaller ones such as Vodafone for ads and 3 for search. Not forgetting about 70 million from Asian deployments. So in terms of global language integration in search Google then Yahoo then in the white label MCN is stealing a lead..

OK this is a blog brain dump and I might have missed someone so sorry –but white label search is getting hotter and hotter.

There will be a mobile search leader and in the white label market it is getting a lot more competitive.

Oh dear – I just realized I missed China and we can’t forget the likes of Cgogo (and the partnership with Nokia) and mInfo.

But anyway – I just got off the phone with Michael Libes Medio’s co-founder and he is adamant that Medio is the white label search leader. I quizzed him a bit on search integration and languages. I asked about the local language search integration issues and he mentioned Canada and that one of the first ever mobile search deployments from Medio was both in French and in English. This puts a new twist on issues of value and scale for mobile operators..

Anyway – I think this warrants an article in The Mobile Search Analyst so in the next issue I will look at Mobile Search leaders in terms of
1. Subscriber numbers
2. Value
3. Scale.