The Next Web

Mobile ‘walled garden’ services: haven’t you paid attention?

Written on April 2, 2008 – 10:33 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

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I’ve written quite a bit about mobile search on The Next Web Blog and recently called it the ‘Achilles heel of Google’ in a piece about Taptu. Since Google and other major search engines were built for the desktop, they likely lack the kind of thinking that is needed for this complete new way of searching. The new, smaller yet mobile-focused search engines do get that, and therefore get awarded and some good buzzing in blogosphere. The CEO of Taptu, Steve Ives, said: “Mobiles are supersocial devices, so if your service isn’t relevant to you in a social way it won’t get used that often”.

Yet when I read an interesting article by interactive marketing man David Berkowitz today, I noticed that there’s also another battle going on the field of mobile search. Berkowitz describes five predominant ways consumers can search through mobile devices: on-deck, off-deck, applications, voice, and SMS. I’d like to focus on the first one.

With on-deck search, Berkowitz is referring to mobile search and mobile Internet usage on the carriers’ branded portal. According to him, this is the most used form. These portals offer default search engines, powered by mobile advertising companies like Medio Systems and JumpTap. As you can tell by their websites, these companies are both focused on monetizing search and see content as a nasty side-effect. Berkowitz draws a strikingly good comparison:

The deck is exactly like AOL in the 1990s, where AOL focused on bringing brand-name content to the user in its walled garden.

Wow, that’s really great guys, follow the example of AOL. Remember how that ended? Users who had walked around in the walled garden of AOL suddenly discovered that there was a whole new world out there. Ok, not one where AOL was making lots of money, but why would they care? They’re the users! They want good content! Not some fake articles that are just written to sell stuff.

So of course, many users left, even when AOL offered open Internet connection. Everyone associated AOL with the walled gardens. So why are the mobile carriers doing the same thing? Again, we’re at the beginning of a new revolution and again companies start creating portals. Sure, the masses will fall for it the first year, but it’s only a matter of time before they ask for off-deck searching - like Google and Taptu - and other off-deck services. When it comes to technologies that are all about connecting people, a walled garden just don’t work. So, all you carriers executives out there, you’d better think of another strategy before your brand gets hurt.

David Berkowitz, google, mobile, mobile search, taptu

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Taptu: Mobile social search is Google’s Achilles heel

Written on February 22, 2008 – 1:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Mobile internet is hot - we all know that - and one of the rising stars in the mobile world is Taptu, a social mobile search engine. They won the Global Community Award at the MoMo Peer Awards on February 13 at the Mobile World Congress and Robert Scoble proved on PodTech that it comes up with better results than Google does. Officiously, it seems like Taptu has the potential to become a big player in mobile search. So it’s about time that we hear the story behind this UK-based start-up. After a nice and interesting email conversation with the Taptu team, CEO Steve Ives told us where he got the guts from to challenge Google and what the social aspect of Taptu is.

First of all, the Google Question. Every time a new search engine sprouts, this is the first question critics try to answer. Ives: “A Nokia guy I met at a party confided to me that he thought Google still hadn’t yet cracked mobile search properly, and some fresh thinking was needed in this market. We started to look at it, and the more we looked, the more ideas we came up with. It became a bit of an obsession after a while. We pestered the VCs constantly after that, eventually they gave in and invested in us.”

Google’s position seems untouchable when it comes to desktop search, but challenging the giant on the mobile phone might work. Ives explains why: “Services like Google were born on the desktop and then moved later to mobile. When moving the service to mobile, something gets lost in the translation. A desktop user will use search 5 times a day or more, but a mobile user that discovers Google Mobile or Yahoo OneSearch typically only searches once every 5 to 7 days. We believe that to get people to use mobile search 5 times a day or more - in other words, to make mobile search a mass market service rather than a niche service - then you have to give it a social context. Mobiles are supersocial devices, so if your service isn’t relevant to you in a social way it won’t get used that often.”

Next to a Google-challenger, Taptu is also a social search engine. Jimmy Wales plugged this term in January when he launched Wikia Search. During an interview I had with him, he said: “One of the weaknesses of current search engines is that their algorithms take a long time picking up new good sites. (..) It takes only one community member that finds a good new site and lets the community know.” What does Ives thinks of Wikia Search? “We’ve been watching Search Wikia quite closely. They have some similar ideas to us about how to improve the quality of search results through social interactions. But we are totally focused on mobile, which is a completely different medium to the desktop, so the dynamics of sharing are rather different also.” (more…)

google, mobile, mobile search, search, social search, steve ives, taptu

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