This assumption has been confirmed by studies in the USA that show that in January 2011 mobile devices accounted for only 5.3% of all clicks on Google. In contrast, just 12 months later in December 2011 mobile devices accounted for 12% of all clicks on Google. This increase of 132% is substantial to say the least.

Comparing the share of clicks on device by region. Source: Marin Software

The good news is that ad spend on mobiles has kept pace with this increase and has gone up from 3.4% to 8.7% during the same period. This is an increase of 156%.

It is being predicted that mobile devices will account for 25% of all paid-search clicks on Google by December 2012, and at the same time ad spend on mobiles will account for 23% of Google’s paid-search spend.

Comparing the share of ad spend on device by region. Source: Marin Software

This sudden rise in mobile paid search as well as mobile ad-spend can be attributed to the unprecedented increase in adoption of smartphones and other devices such as tablets.

It is being estimated based on current figures that the number of smartphones in use globally will touch 1 billion between December 2012 and June 2013.

When increasing the ad-spend on mobile devices, advertisers will have to keep in mind the fact that while the cost per click on mobile devices and on tablet devices is less than on desktop computers, the conversion rates are considerably lower on mobiles than on desktops and tablets.

Though tablets are not yet as common as desktops and Internet-connected mobile devices they are growing in popularity and are providing the best overall return on ad spend. Advertisers should keep this fact in mind while planning their ad budgets in future.

These apps can be of great use to residents of the city as well as to tourists. Since the mobile apps are available to users at all times, it is a great way for people to make enquiries about the city and get up to date information even when they are on the go.

The ‘311 feature’ which is a built in app is very commonly used, according to Andy Sparks, UI and project and sales manager for eproximiti, a software development firm specializing in the health care industry and municipalities.

According to him since cameras and GPS facility are generally available in all smart phones, this app can be used to find out not only about events taking place in the city but also current details of graffiti information about potholes and bad roads, or fallen trees in some area and the like.

Earlier, information about such incidents could only be reported through phone calls and computers, but these apps on smart phones have simplified this process to a great extent. According to Andy Sparks, these apps can also be used to spread information about news initiatives being taken up in the region and increase citizen participation through increased awareness.

Some of the cities which have already introduced such local apps are Baltimore, New Orleans, Ottawa and Charlotte.

A well known mobile app called ‘Proximitips’ functions as a hyper-local social magazine, that not only provides news reviews and promotions but also has facilities for purchases and bookings.

This app can be used through street name city name or suburb. The app also allows users to interact with each other thus making the information more interesting and engaging.

Proximitips has been developed in London’s Tech City, and is available in throughout Europe covering 125 million places of interest.

It is estimated that London’s network of 250 underground stations and 18,000 bus stops is used by over 1 billion commuters every year.

Now, when a commuters and tourists wants to get from one point to another, they can plan their journey by visiting Google Maps and then clicking ‘Get Directions’ in the left-hand panel.

Selecting the train icon shows public transport directions. Users can enter a departure location and a destination as they would for driving and walking directions. These can be either in the form of street addresses or names of popular places, businesses or restaurants. Once that is done, clicking the ‘Get directions’ button will bring the desired results.

Google Maps with public transport directions for London

Users will receive instructions about several different options they can use for the trip. On Google Maps for Mobile, the suggestions will be based on the user’s current location by default.

While Underground and bus routes are integrated perfectly into the system, the recently extended London overground train network is not incorporated into Google Maps. As a result, some journeys that would take just 15 minutes on the train are shown as a 45-minute route via the Underground network.

Kentish Town to City Thameslink requires 30 additional minutes on Google Maps

Those using Android devices will get directions with Transit Navigation (Beta) in Google Maps. This new feature, which was launched earlier this month, will also show alerts when it’s time to alight or transfer from one bus or overground train to another.

Public transport directions are available for all Underground, bus, tram and Docklands Light Railway (DLR) lines. More services will be included as soon as information is available.

London has one of the best public transport systems in the world. Locals rely on the Transport For London official governmetn site when planning their journey. However, tourists often aren’t aware of this service. It will now be even easier for commuters, especially for tourists to use this public transport as detailed directions will be available to them at a click.

It was found that during the second quarter of the year, total retail search volume has gone up by 27% compared to the figures during the same period last year.

The major part of this growth has come from the increase in mobile searches, which grew by 216% compared to the same period last year.

The search volume for online retailers has gone up by 21% compared to the 14% increase in search volumes for multi-channel retailers, who use the internet as well as stores.

International mobile searches are also on the rise. U.K. retailers being searched by consumers based overseas. There was an increase of 34% in this sector of search. On the other hand the number of U.K. based consumers making overseas searches grew by 76% during the second quarter of 2011.

London remains the core of online shopping in the U.K. registering 36% of all retail searches.

Wedding dresses, garden furniture and other DIY articles are high on the list of retail searches being carried out. Among electronic goods, the iPad 2 that was launched last March, and the iPhone 5 which is due to be released in September are reportedly the most searched items.

According to Peter Fitzgerald, retail director for Google, even though volumes dipped in April due tot eh warm weather as well as bank holidays, and then picked up again in May, the volumes of mobile search remained constant through out, due to the ‘always on’ nature of mobile users.

Apple acquired a feature called ‘Siri’ from voice recognition software provider, Nuance, last year. Siri is personal assistance software, with the added benefit of voice control.

Siri will function like a mobile search engine, and will take oral instructions from the user, through voice recognition technology.

When a voice command is issued to the iPhone 5, it will reportedly go through services such as Yelp, OpenTable and others to provide the required information or service to the user.

While voice recognition services and voice activated search have been around for some time, Siri will be the first mobile search service that can do more than just deliver search results. That in itself, could give search giant Google sleepless nights – this innovation by Apple could mean a considerable setback to their business.

It is, of course, a known fact that so far, voice-recognition-based services have faced several problems, such as distortion caused due to background noise and inability to handle even slight changes in voice modulation. However, it is bound to be only a matter of time before such obstacles are overcome. If Google intends to keep their place in the mobile search market, it would be essential for them to start working on this matter at the earliest.

This seems to be quite a logical use of the mobile Web, as users naturally need to find out many things about a place they are new to. At such a time the mobile is the handiest and most easily available gadget to help them.

For instance, when a user ends up in a location unexpectedly, the user could find an appropriate hotel to stay in by searching for nearby accommodation. Similarly, if the user needed to make a booking for a flight to or from a particular location, the mobile would be very useful.

It has been found that mobile devices are used during all stages of travel, right from the initial research to planning, experiencing and sharing of the experience.

Google has revealed that about 19% of all hotel queries are now conducted through mobiles.

Analysts at eMarketer predict that the number of U.S. consumers making use of mobile for travel planning will rise from 19.7 million in 2010 to 29.7 million in 2012.

This growing use of mobile for travel related requirements is a good opportunity for marketers to reach a larger audience. In order to improve their performance, marketers should show location related ads to travelers. Click-To-Call and easy to download ads also improve client compliance. Tablet devices are fast becoming very popular and campaigns should also be catered to these devices.

A report from the banking firm Macquaire Group, using data from Efficient Frontier, has found that at present, mobile paid search spend accounts for 5% of paid search spend in the U.S.

It has also been estimated that this could further increase to 10% by the end of 2011. In actual terms, mobile paid spend could then be worth $1.1 billion.

Quite expectedly, it has been found that Google is the major stakeholder in this market with about 97% of the market share, while Yahoo! and Bing jointly hold about 3.2% of the market share.

95% of searches on the iPhone come through Google. Of these, 50% are from the tool bar, 42% from Google’s home page and less than 10% from Google Apps. On Android devices, the number of searches through Google is likely to be even closer to 100%.

If Bing manages to tie up with Apple to become their default search engine, a large share of the mobile search volume could automatically go to Bing. Or, iPhones could lose favour with some users for providing a poorer search experience.

CPC for mobile search is currently higher than that for PC searches in some markets, while click through rates for mobile search are lower than for PC searches.

A Growing Monopoly

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that mobile search is growing very fast. It now accounts for about 15% of search across all categories.

This underscores the importance of mobile search. The fact that Google’s starting off in this growing market with such a strong position can only mean one thing – its position will get stronger, at the expense of all competition, and as a result, CPC rates will go up.

Advertisers stand to lose in such a situation, as the lack of a viable alternative will leave businesses with no choice but to advertise on Google AdWords if they wish to build a mobile search presence.

Users too will suffer in the long run, as the lack of competition will stunt development in mobile search, as the incumbent, Google, will have little reason to continue to innovate in that space.

When users click on ‘Deals’ they are shown a list of the special offers that are currently available in their locality.

Microsoft has started this feature in association with DealMap, which features deals from sites like Groupon, Living Social and Restaurant.com. The feature will offer about 200,000 deals across 14,000 cities.

Since the feature has only just been launched, the service is going through some teething troubles. For instance, a few of the deals being offered have already expired or the deal information may not yet have been optimised for mobile access. Given a little time, it is quite certain that these problems will be ironed out.

While the new service is compatible with both iPhone and Android based handsets, it is, quite surprisingly, not compatible with Microsoft’s own Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system. This incompatibility arises because the service is is built on HTML5, which is not compatible with Windows Phone 7. It is expected that Microsoft will soon add an update that will allow users to access this feature through the Windows Phone 7 and Internet Explorer 9.

Irrespective of the minor shortcomings of this feature, Microsoft is undoubtedly one up on their rival Google as Google has not yet got a similar feature. It has been rumoured, though, that Google plans to launch a similar service called “Google Offers” very soon, which might explain why Bing rushed to get Deals out in the market before it was fully developed to support Microsoft’s own devices.

Microsoft also plans to start a similar service in association with eBay.

According to comScore’s report, 2010 US Digital Year in Review, new and highly advanced mobile handsets were introduced along with new mobile content options and applications. The use of smart phones and the 3G spectrum increased significantly and the use of browsers and applications through mobile handsets went up by 7.6 percentage points between December 2009 and 2010 as a result of this.

The availability of new data plans with 3G and 4G services have also furthered the growth of the mobile industry. 29% of mobile subscribers now have unlimited data plans compared to 21.7% last year. This, coupled with the introduction of handsets such as the iPhone 4, Windows Phone 7 and RIM Blackberry Torch has caused the usage of smart phones to reach an all-time high of 27% of all mobile handsets.

While RIM remains number 1 with a 31.6% share of the smartphone operating system market, Google’s Android OS has become the second largest, with 28.7% of the market largely due to large-scale adoption of Google Android powered devices.

Samsung was the most popular handset manufacturer last year in the U.S.A. accounting for 24.8% market share of devices sold. LG was second followed by Motorola, RIM and Apple.

Mobile devices continued to be used for a wide variety of activities in addition to making phone calls. Text messaging was the most popular activity, with 68% of American mobile subscribers texting in Decmber 2010.

While the dominance of SMS might seem old-fashioned, one must keep in mind that the mobile phone is a communications device first and foremost. Moreover, a number of new technologies saw increased adoption too. 39.5% of subscribers used their mobiles to get news and information, 36.4% used their mobile browsers, 34.4% used mobile apps and 21.4% accessed mobile search services.

Reports from Performics Inc. indicate that by the end of 2011, Mobile Google paid search will generate 16% of all Google paid search clicks. This figure was only about 3.5% in January 2010.

The surge in the growth of mobile paid search has already begun in the last few months of 2010. However, conversion rates from mobile search advertisements are lower than those from paid search on desktops.

James Beveridge, a senior analyst at Performics says, “Conversion rates are still lower for mobile search than desktop, suggesting that advertisers should focus on improving mobile site experience.”

Imran Khan of JP Morgan believes that monetising mobile search is the most important opportunity for Google this year. He finds that while mobile search queries have grown over 5 times in the last couple of years, and still continues to grow, only 3% of Google’s search advertising revenue comes from mobile and Google should now focus on strengthening this sector.

Robert Hamilton, Google’s own product manager for mobile search also says that mobile search usage has gone up by 130% in the third quarter of 2010 and the amount of search traffic on Android tripled during the first half of 2010. He also estimates that the number of mobile phones in use worldwide will reach 5 billion soon, and by 2014, there will be more mobile Internet users than wired Internet users.

Getting Mobile PPC Right

All facts point to the obvious conclusion – Google needs to concentrate on mobile PPC now. However, just like video, mobile has proved to be a difficult channel for Google to monetise.

Over the years Google has tested various mobile ad placements. Currently, ads are shown above and below the search results, depending on the nature of the query. Only time and extensive testing will tell what ad format and placement will work best for Google Mobile Search.

Paid search traffic on Google Mobile is about 4% of the total PPC traffic, and that is almost double the market share that Bing enjoys. Also, it was found that mobile search in general has increased 247% compared to the previous year, while desktop search has actually gone down by 15%.

Click through rates for mobile search average around 1.32% whereas for desktop search the average is closer to 1.1%. This fact alone should be an eye opener to small and medium-sized business owners who find it increasingly difficult to drive traffic through regular PPC search ads due to rising costs per click.

Moreover, mobile search is popular for localised search queries. Local stores, service providers and small business owners focusing on a local area can take advantage of mobile search to improve their business much more so than large, nationalised businesses can.

Finally, the investment that SMEs may have to make in mobile advertising in the form of click-to-call and expandable map ads is more likely to pay rich dividends, making the overall value proposition for mobile much more compelloing.

Competitors BlackBerry RIM and Apple iOS are running neck-to-neck for the second slot.

Between January and August 2010 the Android OS has grown steadily from a modest 14% market share to 32%.

RIM on the other hand has been wavering between 34% in January to 37% in March and 26% at present. Similarly, the Apple iOS has gone down from a high of 32% in January to about 25% at present.

However, when the total number of smartphone owners are compared, BlackBerry wins the first place with 31% of the market and is followed by Apple with 28%. Android devices have only 19% of the market share as yet but are bound to catch up if the current growth rate is upheld.

However, if Apple’s plans to make a deal with Verizon and T-Mobile materialise, the picture could change in favour of Apple.

While Microsoft has now gained the number 2 position in desktop search according to reports from Nielsen, their performance in mobile search has not improved significantly.

In the beginning of 2009, Microsoft had signed a five year deal with Verizon, to make Bing the default search engine on Verizon mobile phones, with a view to improving their mobile search rankings.

In spite of this deal however, Verizon continued to have the right to use Google as the default search engine on their phones which were powered by Google’s Android software. As a result of this, Verizon is using the Google search engine on 7 of their 8 Android phones, thus leaving Microsoft ‘out in the cold’ in a manner of speaking.

Reports from comScore show that Microsoft’s share in the mobile search market has grown from 1.2% to 1.7% between July 2009 and July 2010. However Google has grown from 9.3% to 14.4% in the same time period.

Microsoft however has said that the deal with Verizon has been made keeping a long term view in mind.

They say that 7 new Android phones are due to be released by Verizon this fall, and they will use Bing as the default search engine.

It is certainly crucial for Microsoft to improve their mobile search market share if they hope to be able to corner a part of the ever growing mobile advertising market.

Last week, at an event in San Francisco, Google announced a new voice function called Voice Actions, which will allow users to perform various functions such as sending emails and finding and playing music through the voice search application.

Google’s director of product management, Hugo Barra said that 25% of those using Android 2.0 are already using voice search. According to Google, their voice search feature is 70% accurate, which is far higher than their telecommunications service, Google Voice.

Voice Actions is a cloud-based service. It joins the likes of Google Goggles and Google Navigation on the cloud, making the convergence of mobile technology and cloud computing a thing of the very near future.

As a whole, voice search now refers to any voice-to-mobile interface that enables different actions like search, looking up locations, looking up phone numbers and placing a call, navigating to a locations and even browsing.

Apple already has a similar feature, acquired from Siri, for which they are believed to have paid $200 million. Microsoft has also hinted that the upcoming Windows Phone 7 will have voice-activated features.

78% of smartphone users accessed their browsers in April 2010 and 80% of them accessed applications. By contrast only 19% of feature phone users accessed their browsers, and 17% accessed applications. But feature phone users still constitute almost half of all users who access their mobile browsers and applications.

In April 2010 there was a growth of 28% in the number of users accessing their applications on the phone. The figure was up to 69.6 million users.

Social networking through apps saw a growth of 240% and was up to 14.5 million users. Access to News Apps grew by 124% to 9.3 million users and Sports Information apps grew by 113% to 7.7 million users.

Mobile banking usage has also more than doubled over the last year, to nearly 5 million users. Online retail sites via browsers also grew by 47% to 7.3 million users.

In April, the number of mobile users accessing their browser also grew by 31% to nearly 73 million users. Social networking through browsers grew by 90% to almost 30 million users.

Mark Donovan, comScore senior Vice President of mobile says, “With mobile media consumption on the rise, the discussion of how consumers are accessing content – whether it is via application, browser or both – continues to be an important factor for companies looking to invest further in their mobile brands. Although application access is clearly on the rise, with several categories more than doubling their audience via this method, content consumption via browser continues to be the most popular method for Americans to access mobile media.”

In other words, brands and marketers need to take care of both categories of users while planning their campaigns, as they have an opportunity to grow through both channels.

A growing number of users access the mobile Internet every day and a large number of these users also make purchases via their mobiles. At the same time, a growing number of smartphones and feature phones now ship with integrated GPS receivers.

Continued growth in usage of both the mobile Web and mobile geo-positioning systems will definitely result in an increasing use of the combination of these services in the form of mobile local search.

When smartphones were first introduced, the cost of the handset and other technological accompaniments such as the user interface, processors and GPS was extremely high. Thus, only a few people could afford to use these services.

Now, however, the cost of these products and services has dropped considerably, making it more affordable for consumers in general to use such services. These features have also become more user friendly, further encouraging buyers to make use of them.

Many location-based services and location-enabled apps are also being developed to exploit the boom in mobile social networking. Mobile apps that tie-in social networking with geo-location awareness are growing in popularity with phenomenal speed.

Juniper’s study predicts that browser-based services will continue to dominate local search, but applications from app stores will also hold a large share of the information services market.

The total revenues from all mobile location-based services is predicted to be in the range of $12.7 billion by 2014. Advertising will account for a large portion of this revenue, but it may not be the primary source of revenue.

Juniper Research has arrived at these findings based on interviews, case studies and analysis of information available from the leading organisations in the mobile industry.

As of now, the updated service is available only in the U.S.A. on the iPhone and on Android devices.

When a user views the results of a search query, tapping on a button to the left of the search box on the search results page will reveal the new search options menu. When the user selects one of the items in the menu, the search results get refined, just as is done on regular search.

The expanded search options menu will make the paid and organic search results slide to the right side of the screen. The user can still interact with the results by panning right.

New options, such as News and Products, have also been added to the menu.

Google has promised to roll out the updated interface on other devices and in other locations as soon as possible. They will also offer more options soon.

While speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Google’s Steve Lee hinted that a new version of Latitude would be available shortly. The updated version will allow users to access information and data about where they have been. Access to this information will be restricted to the user only.

Contrary to initial reports, the geo-location service is doing pretty well, TechCrunch reports. Latitude has 3 million active users. This is especially significant when compared to competitors, Foursquare and My Town, which have 1 million and 2 million users respectively.

In fact, 8 million people that have signed up for Latitude since its inception. It is believed that this year, Latitude grew 30% each month. The current growth of Android and Blackberry is no doubt helping fuel this growth.

Google hopes to have several third party mobile applications working through the Latitude API in the near future.

The new Place Pages for Mobile will provide relevant information about places of interest in a given neighbourhood, to people on the go. Apart from giving the exact location of a shop, hotel, restaurant, tourist spot or any other business, the service will also provide a lot of detailed information about the place, including opening times, users reviews, ratings and images of the place.

As with the regular Place Pages, the mobile Place Pages can be accessed by clicking on the relevant location pinpointed on Google Maps.

Instead of including a mini map within the place pages, Google requires users to instead have to click on a ‘map’ button, which isn’t really smart for a mobile interface where fewer clicks are always better.

At present, the new Place Pages for Mobile are only available on Android-powered handsets and the iPhone and iPod in the U.S.A.

Interested users can view the service through a google.com search on their smartphones. They then have to click on the relevant local business listing on the search results page.

Google is sticking far too many fingers into the mobile pie to leave any mobile provider comfortable. They’ve stomped over other mobile search engines, mobile operators, mobile application platforms, even mobile operating systems and are developing their own Operating System which will compete with the Apple Mac OS.

These facts do not seem to have gone down well with Apple, and undisclosed sources revealed to BusinessWeek that for the past few weeks, Apple has been in talks with their one-time arch rival, Microsoft, which is also a rival of Google.

The talks have been centered around the possibility of making Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, the default search provider on the iPhone.

If the deal between Apple and Microsoft is finalised, users will have to actively change the settings on their iPhone, if they then wish to use Google as their search engine.

At present, Google’s position as the default search engine earns them a considerable amount of money from mobile search advertising on the iPhone. This revenue is then shared with Apple. Needless to say, Google would lose out on this revenue if it is replaced by Bing.

If Bing does become the default search engine on the iPhone, Microsoft will not only get a higher market share in mobile search but will also earn significant revenues from mobile search advertising on iPhones.

Realistically, though, even if Apple and Microsoft could put aside years of rivalry, which is still going strong (look at the I’m not a PC, I’m a Mac ads!) and strike the deal, one wonders how long it will last, especially since Microsoft is also believed to be working towards making its own smartphone.

Add to that, speculation that Apple might try to develop its own search engine definitely precludes any relationship with Microsoft, as the last thing Ballmer and company need is more competition in search from yet another major rival.

According to Gartner’s research, mobile phones will overtake PCs for Internet access in 2013. As per their estimates, the number of PCs in 2013 will reach 1.78 billion, while the number of Internet-compatible mobile phones will be 1.82 billion. Of this, the number of smart phones is predicted to be 1.32 billion, while the number of enhanced phones, which have media or application capabilities, but no local operating system, will be 0.5 billion.

Gartner also expect that PCs will continue to be used for the majority of page views in 2013, but website access will be mostly through mobile phones. By 2015, however, mobiles are predicted to become the main mode of accessing the web.

Assuming that these predictions will come true, it would be prudent for companies to ensure that their websites, portals and Web applications are fully supported for mobile access.

Another fact webmasters must keep in mind is that mobile users are generally less patient than the average PC user. Hence, ensuring that users can access the desired page with a minimal number of clicks should be a priority.

Organisations that deal with consumers through their website will soon need to make sure that their sites support mobiles, as they would face greater losses than those who have business-to-business applications. For instance, banks, online retailers, government offices, educational institutions especially need to heed this change.

Mobile search has grown 5-fold for Google in the past year. A slew of Android-based devices are hitting the market this year, and the Nexus One aims to be one of the best. Google’s mobile phone’s features include:

1. Nexus One phone hardware includes a 3.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen touchscreen interface with 800 x 480 pixel resolution, Wi-Fi, GSM EDGE, Bluetooth and a trackball
2. The phone will run on the Android 2.1 mobile platform
3. Basic features include a compass, gps, accelerometer, light sensor, proximity sensor
4. 2 microphones on the Nexus One allow noise cancellation
5. The phone is 11.5mm thin and weighs just 130 grams (with battery)
6. 5 megapixel cam + LED flash. 1-click upload to YouTube
7. 5 home screen panels to add more widgets
8. Live wallpapers – including animation – will sit behind widgets on the home screen
9. Live wallpapers are interactive and react to touch!
10. 3D framework introduced into the Android platform
11. Quick photo loading, 3D gallery and photo clustering
12. Google Earth for mobile due to be released soon
13. Voice activated searching and GPS-based search localisation
14. Voice enabled ALL text fields in the device, which means you can speak your emails, tweets, facebook updates

The Nexus One will be sold exclusively online via the Google website:

www.google.com/phone

Unlocked phones will be sold for $529. Alternatively, users can buy a subscription to T-Mobile and get the operator-subsidised phone available for $179.

Pricing of the Nexus One is disappointing, and this sentiment was reflected by some of the attendees at the press conference. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, had in the past voiced hopes that we may one day see an ad-supported mobile phone. They seem now to be falling short of their own hopes.

Vodafone will be the first operator to sell the phone in the UK. Spring 2010 is the estimated time Google has given for the UK launch of their new mobile phone. Users on other networks can simply plug in the other netowrk operator’s  SIM card.

At the Q & A session following the press conference, Google mentioned that the core revenues and income they aim to gain from the mobile phone business is not meant to be from sales of the hardware but from the usage of their mobile search service and the ensuing mobile advertising.

Vlingo’s list has been compiled after studying the data they have collected in 2009 across the millions of searches conducted using their service.

Over three million people worldwide currently use Vlingo’s services on their mobile phones. All they need to do is simply speak into their handset, to carry out various tasks such as sending mails, searching the Web or even to update their Facebook status.

According to their findings, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace hold the top 3 positions in the list, which only goes to prove, how popular social networks have become, even on the mobile Web.

Dave Grannan, President and CEO of Vlingo says, “unlike traditional Web searches that focus on specific search terms, such as Michael Jackson or Twilight, our data shows that on mobile phones, people tend to search for specific destination sites and resources.”

The findings are not too surprising, though, as navigational searches are extremely popular even on the wired Web. On the mobile Web, users find it a lot easier to speak the name of the site they wish to visit than having to key in an entire URL on the phone’s number pad.

The top 10 voice-powered mobile searches, according to Vlingo, are:

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Weather
5. Movie Times
6. Twitter
7. Yellow Pages
8. MapQuest
9. Craigslist
10. White Pages

Google base their claim to openness on the fact that they have opened up the source code for the Android mobile operating system, Chrome Web browser and Chrome operating system and a few other products so that the larger developer community can improve on them.

Rosenberg says, “at Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant profitable and competitive ecosystem for businesses.”

While all this discussion about openness is fine, one cannot help but notice the fact that Google’s largest source of income is their search engine, which ranks web pages to create relevant search results for user queries. And nobody really knows how the algorithm for this ranking system works, apart from the few people at Google who are in charge of the algorithm.

Google’s argument against making this algorithm public is, of course, that spammers would misuse this information if it were easily available to all.

This argument seems weak, however, as it has been proved by other open source projects such as the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, that while an open algorithm may seem to help spammers, there would be an army of developers ready to combat the spammers.

If anything, all of Google’s talk about the importance of being open seems to be a cheap dig at Microsoft, and an attempt to make Microsoft seem like the bad guys just before Google launches a full-blown attack on Microsoft Windows by launching their own operating system.

The confirmation has come through none other than the Wall Street Journal.

While it was earlier speculated that the new phone would be launched before the end of this year, it has now been confirmed by sources close to the matter that the phone will in fact be launched early next year, possibly in January itself.

The new phone has been given the name Nexus One, and the hardware required for it is being built by HTC. The phone has actually been designed by Google. This new phone may be similar to the forthcoming HTC Passion or might in fact be a renamed version of the same.

The operating system for this phone will of course be Android. The other features expected on this phone are that it will have a capacitive touch screen, on-screen keyboard, a thin scroll ball and animated desktop wallpaper.

It will be sold in the unlocked state and will be sold without any subsidy from a wireless partner. At least initially the phone will be available directly from Google online.

The launch of this new phone by the Internet giant will not only give competition to all other smart phones in the market, but it also highlights Google’s ambitions of expanding their own horizons further.

A survey of 22,000 US consumers conducted by BIGresearch shows that consumers are increasingly expressing a negative attitude towards mobile marketing.

The percentage of people who are not in favour of mobile marketing has grown since June 2008.

67% of consumers surveyed said they dislike text ads, up from 64% in 2008. 60% dislike voicemail ads, also up from 57% in 2008. And 60% dislike video ads, up from 56% in 2008.

In fact, 52% of consumers surveyed actually felt that mobile marketing is an invasion of privacy. This number too is up from 2008.

The majority of users expressed the view that marketers should take prior permission before sending any such ads to consumers.

These findings are sure to give some sleepless nights to mobile marketers, who must now find a way to get their ads across to users without upsetting them, as that would defeat the whole purpose of advertising.

On a more general note, it was found that the mobile marketing audience consists of 58% males. The average age of these users is 39.2 years. These users also tend to access social networks in large numbers. 38% use Facebook, 23% use MySpace and 13% use Twitter on a regular basis.

AdMob is based in Silicon Valley and was founded by Omar Hamoui in 2006.

Google has agreed to pay $750 million for this acquisition which will help them to improve their mobile advertising technology. So far Google has been concentrating on Mobile search ads, while AdMob’s specialty is mobile display ads and in-application ads.

Besides helping improve Google’s technology, this deal is sure to bring cheer to publishers of mobile websites and applications as it will provide them with better tools for monetization, thus helping them to offer better services to their users.

It will also help advertisers to reach out to their audiences on the mobile web by providing them with more relevant ads through engaging formats.

Eventually these changes are good for the user, who will receive better mobile content, information and ads which will be useful to him for free or through low-cost mobile apps.

In other words this deal is a win-win situation for all concerned and will be good for the future of the mobile web which has already been gaining in importance in the recent past.

Go Mobile! provides tips to help marketers realise how best to reach their mobile clients. Google aims to make the site helpful to both new comers to the mobile marketing as well as to experienced marketers.

At present, the Go Mobile! site merely provide a one-page write-up with tips on mobile marketing, as follows:

Mobilise your website – if pages are specifically formatted for the mobile browsers, it becomes easier and faster for the user to see the highlights of the products or services being offered, thus saving the user’s time and improving the chances of making a sale.

Know your place – instead of asking the user for his location, make use of information from the mobile browser, or use Google Maps or other applications to know the customer’s location, thus impressing customers and providing more locally relevant information.

Offer ways to engage at any time – Since the mobile handset is always with the user, the marketer can engage them by providing a QR code or a phone number on a bus, for example, or by creating a downloadable mobile game to reinforce the brand.

Help customers spread the word – Encourage users to take part in events and ad campaigns etc. by sending MMS, IM, email etc to their friends.

Help them find you – make use of the ad products which Google offers to place relevant ads alongside the mobile search results when a customer is looking for something.

These basic steps are more common-sense than strategy, but could help marketers focus their mobile marketing initiatives more effectively.

Google Go Mobile!

The study was conducted through an online questionnaire, answered by 4,000 users and through a behavioral study across 2 million users.

The results show that the number of people depending on digital sources for local sources is increasing along with the number of digital sources available.

Thus search engines have now become the primary source of local information, while the print media seems to be declining.

The number of local business searchers who own print directories has gone down from 89% in 2008 to 84% in 2009. The use of Internet Yellow Pages however has been increasing steadily.

While the online media is obviously prospering, the offline media also continues to hold a fairly steady following especially among users over 45 years of age. 40% of this section of users, uses the print directories, while only 24% of them use search engines by choice.

Social media and mobile searches are also growing sources of local business information and thought hey account for only 1% and 3% of market share respectively, they are definitely on the upswing and marketers would do well to keep this in mind.

Not surprisingly, Google Maps has improved their market share of local search from 15% in the fourth quarter of 2008 to 24% in the second quarter of 2009.

The usage of consumer ratings and reviews has gone up from 22% in 2008 to 25% in 2009 among Internet Yellow page searchers, and has gone up from 22% to 27% among general searchers. While the overall usage of ratings is only 24%, it goes up to 57% during the business selection process as users depend on these reviews while selecting companies whom they wish to do business with.

The availability of smartphones has also increased the use of mobile search. While only 19% of regular mobile users use mobile search, 60% of smartphone users do so, and this may well become the primary source of local search in time to come.

Yahoo! has now started serving ads from the Yahoo! Search Marketing system on mobile phones. These ads are served on all smart phones including iPhones and Android mobile handsets.

Ads on Yahoo! Mobile Search

The best part about this new feature for marketers and advertisers is that unlike Google AdWords, the Yahoo! Search Marketing system will not require the usual process of creating new campaigns, mining keywords and writing new ads.

Standard sponsored search ads are displayed automatically on mobile search results pages. The ads are just 2 lines long, consisting of the ad title and the display URL.

One ad is displayed at the top of the search results page and two more ads are displayed at the bottom of the page.

All advertisers will be able to reach an ever increasing audience of mobile Internet users with the introduction of this new feature.

Marketers who wish to specifically target mobile search users will also be able to continue using the Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search service at:

Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search

The study conducted by Scarborough Research has shocked most people by revealing that as a matter of fact it is the working mom who makes the maximum use of mobile phones.

A working mom has been classified as a lady who has a full time job and at least one child at home.

Thinking about it, it does make sense that these multi-tasking women should make full use of the technology available to them, in order to be able to coordinate the several tasks that need to be done by them. This way they can be reasonably sure that things are in control back home, when they are away at work or commuting between their homes and place of work.

According to the study, the average mobile telecoms bill incurred by a working mom is $94 which is 21% more than that of the average mobile user in the U.S.

What is even more of an eye-opener is the fact that these working moms do not use the mobile phone only to make and receive calls and messages, but they are also likely to download content from the Internet on their mobile phones.

These ladies have also been found to be responsible for the purchase and use of several other high tech gadgets in their homes, which would help them to do save time by doing their work faster and thus enabling them to accomplish more in a given span of time.

Mobile search volumes have been a long-requested feature that Google representatives have been historically reluctant to share. Speculators always concluded that this was due to the low volume of mobile searches.

The new feature is not immediately obvious in the new keyword tool. Advertisers need to click the “Advanced Options” link and then check the “Show stats for: Mobile search” box.

The network statistics setting allows advertisers to change search volume data to show mobile device statistics only. This setting changes only search performance columns and does not affect traffic estimate columns.

Mobile website owners and mobile search marketing agencies will welcome this new feature as it finally gives them the ability to estimate PPC costs and traffic volumes they can expect from search.

A quick review of the mobile search volumes shows that even in popular mobile search categories such as local information and gaming, the volume of mobile searches is a mere fraction – as low as 0.3% – 0.6% of traditional Web searches for the same 1-word keyword queries.

Data pulled from the 4 billion page views collected across more than 3 million websites that use the StatCounter analytics solution showed that Google monopolises the mobile search market. The search giant, whose brand is now a neologism for searching, delivered 96.23% of mobile searches worldwide in the first half of 2009.

Yahoo! follows second, worldwide, with 3.24% mobile search market share and Yandex.ru is third with 0.14%.  Ask Jeeves (0.11%) and AltaVista (0.07%) round off the top 5 mobile search providers. The rest, including Microsoft, account for no more than 0.21% of the worldwide mobile search volume.

In the UK, the situation is similar, with Google commanding 98.8%, followed by Yahoo! (0.86%) and, surprisingly, Ask Jeeves (0.14%).

Before screaming “anti-trust” or falling into depression caused by the world turning into a Googleopoly, let’s take a moment to examine the data…

While the size of StatCounter’s data set is nothing to laugh at, most of its volume comes from fixed internet websites rather than mobile sites. In fact, the page views and number of sites using StatCounter to track visitor data on the mobile Internet is bound to be much, much lower.

That’s not all. StatCounter data itself is not wholly credible due to the fact that they use cookies and JavaScript to track visitors, both of which often don’t work when websites are viewed 0n a mobile device. Therefore, any data delivered by StatCounter is only valid for a small subset of all the different mobile phones consumers use to search the Internet.

Last year, Nielsen reported that Google’s mobile search market share in the USA was an estimated 61%, while Yahoo! and Microsoft got 18% and 5% respectively. Not a lot has changed in the mobile search market since June 2008, which makes it safe to assume that Nielsen’s numbers would not be drastically different today.

This still leaves us back at square one, asking “has Google already won the race for mobile search supremacy before it even really began”?

The report says, “The emergence of devices such as the iPhone and HTC Dream (G1) that deliver truly compelling Internet experiences has generated discussion of which Web consumers will use on mobile – mobile Web sites or HTML sites.”

This question is what must have encouraged AdMob to undertake this survey. The survey was based on data collected from ad requests on their own vast network of about 7,000 mobile websites and 1,600 apps, and also from details provided by Gartner.

According to the findings of this report, smartphones have a smaller market share compared to other handsets, but they still account for almost 3 times the usage compared to the usage by other handsets.

Some of the findings of the survey are listed below.

While the iPhone OS holds only 8% of the market share, it is responsible for 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of HTML use.

The Android OS has even less than 1% of the smartphone market share but it generates 3% of the mobile web requests and 9% of HTML requests.

On the other hand the Symbian OS which holds a huge chunk of the smartphone market share – 52%, carries only 36% of requests for mobile web usage and a mere 7% of HTML usage.

The survey also found that 24% of requests made from the U.S. were made using a Wi-Fi network. The iPhone, iPod Touch, Sony PSP, HTC Dream (G1) and HTC Dash are the most popularly used Wi-Fi handsets.

The study concludes that overall, mobile Web sites are used far more on smartphones than HTML sites on those phones which operate on the RIM and Symbian operating systems.

In fact a few months ago Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had even said that “mobile Search revenues will overtake those on the PC within a few years”.

Google hopes that PC and mobile searches will soon become identical, and to facilitate that they have already incorporated some new features into their search engine.

It is now possible for users to conduct searches on PC’s as well as on mobiles with improved search results, which are restricted to specific time periods such as month or year. The page summaries now available are also more detailed than they used to be and the introduction of the Wonder Wheel has further improved the result quality by providing related queries.

It is also possible to coordinate searches across various platforms like mobile phones, notebooks and set top boxes etc. with the availability of better developer tools and user interfaces.

According to a recent study carried out by Google and researchers at Stanford University, searches conducted on the latest smart phones are more akin to searches conducted on PC’s than to those on the older generation of mobile phones. The average length of a smart phone query is now nearly three words, while that on an ordinary phone is only 2.5 words.

According to Google different types of handsets require different search interfaces to operate, and that of the smart phones is now looking similar tot hat of the PC’s and users of smart phones would be able to avail of more personalized features for their search operations.

The newly formed alliance will be capable of providing search services to China telecom’s wireless subscribers across the entire country, of which about 33 million are CDMA subscribers while about 43 million are PHS subscribers.

Users will be able to receive solutions to almost any query sent by SMS, SIM card, OTA application, or menu operations which are preloaded on certain new handsets.

The search providers will give almost instantaneous answers to questions related to a variety of topics ranging from the latest news and weather to education or knowledge and business directories.

The service will initially be available only in the important markets of the country, but by the second half of 2009 the service will be accessible all over the country.

According to reports from Analysys International, mInfo is the clear market leader for search solutions in China. They are also on the final selection list along with Baidu as search partners for Unicom, which is the other major mobile service provider in China.

mInfo had also been chosen by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic games as the official search providers for the games.

In the meantime mInfo’s competitor Baidu has announced that they will be providing search services to the 3G subscribers of China Telecom, as they have formed a partnership with China Telecom’s directory information service which is known as Best Tone.

Reports from Forrester predict a high rate of growth for all the online sectors, but growth rates will be especially high for mobile advertising and social network advertising.

The overall growth for the online sector is expected to be a respectable 17% in the six year span from 2008 to 2014. However, the rate of growth for the mobile advertising industry is expected to be much higher, at about 27% per year, and for social network advertising, the growth is expected to be at an explosive rate of 34% per year compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Actual figures are likely to go from the current $716 million to $3.1 billion during the six-year period ending in 2014. The overall interactive marketing spend in the U.S. is expected to just double, from $25.5 billion to $55 billion during the same period.

Forrester Research Vice President and Research Director, Christine Overby said, “Marketers don’t need to start revolutions in order to innovate, they need to solve problems”. She further says, “Social technologies allow for accessible innovation where the risks and costs are not as high, but the return is significant”.

The Mobile Search Benchmark is a means of ranking mobile search providers, with regards to five different criteria. They are, discoverability, readiness, availability, response time and consistency for a search operation carried out through a mobile handset.

Only the larger, better-known search providers have been considered for this survey. The selection was based on comScore’s Expanded Search Query Report published in July 2008.

Nine companies were selected for this survey: Yahoo!, Amazon, Ask, Google, AOL, Craigslist, eBay, MySpace and MSN. Facebook was not included in this survey, as their mobile web applications did not meet the technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a uniform playing field for all participants, a predetermined task was set out, with a fixed set of steps to be used while performing the search operation on each participating provider. One had to first navigate to the home page of the mobile web site, type a search query, and then click on ‘search’. The search results page would then be displayed and would show the search result obtained for that specific query, which were then graded.

According to the study, Yahoo! has currently been ranked the best site for mobile search operations. The provider rankings within individual categories were as follows:

Discoverability

Ability of a consumer to discover the location of a company’s mobile site on the Web.

1. Google
   MySpace
   Yahoo!
2. AOL
   eBay
   MSN
3. Amazon
4. Ask
5. Craigslist

Readiness

Ability of the mobile web site to be rendered on popular mobile devices.

1. Ask
   eBay
   Yahoo!
2. Amazon
   AOL
   Craigslist
   Google
   MSN
3. MySpace

Availability

Percentage of successful transactions out of the total number of transaction attempts.

1. Google
2. Amazon
3. Craigslist
4. eBay
5. Yahoo!
6. MySpace
7. AOL
8. Ask
9. MSN

Response Time

Time required to download each page in an entire multi-step transaction.

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Craigslist
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. MSN
9. eBay

Consistency

Standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions

1. Amazon
2. Craigslist
3. Google
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. eBay
9. MSN

Overall Ranking

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
   Amazon
   Ask
3. AOL
   Craigslist
   eBay
4. MySpace
5. MSN

The research also measured performance of mobile sites in other industry verticals. AirTran was found to be the highest ranked mobile airline site and Bank of America was ranked top for mobile banking.

Overall, though, the results indicated that mobile websites are 30% less efficient than traditional Internet sites.

tapMatch

Companies can now advertise their products on this service by bidding on keywords and categories. The ads will then be displayed on mobile web pages and above mobile search results.

Jumptap claim that the service uses technology to relay ads very selectively, so that advertisers do not waste their money.

The service allows advertisers to target ads to certain handset models such as the Blackberry and iPhone. Google AdWords mobile ads do not currently provide device targeting. Like Google, other targeting options such as location, mobile carrier and language are also be available on tapMatch.

In the past pay per click mobile ad services have not been able to target audiences too well, in spite of the personal nature of the medium. TapMatch will allow advertisers to select their target audience by building client profiles through various sources such as search queries, context and previous click-through history of the client. Accordingly only appropriate and relevant ads will be shown to the mobile user.

Additional levels of audience demographic targeting present in the ad delivery system are expected to produce high levels of user engagement, which should eventually translate to high a conversion rate for advertisers.

Signing up for tapMatch is easy. Advertisers who are used to Google AdWords will find the process of signing up and setting up campaigns to be remarkably similar.

Pricing of these ads will be auctioned just as it is for Google AdWords. Advertisers will be required to pay only if the user carries out one of the click actions the service offers, which include:

• Sending users to a website
• Displaying an SMS landing page that includes a title, 250 character description, an image and instruction to text something to a short number
• Capturing an email address via a landing page that includes a title, 250 character description, an image and a text box with a button to capture user email addresses
• Showing a phone number on a landing page with a title, 250 character description and an image – this would have worked better as a pay per call action
• Delivering a 250 character marketing message along with a title and image.

In theory, all these features seem very interesting. However, reality might show that tapMatch has a long way to go before it provides serious competition to the likes of Google, mainly due to the higher volume of mobile users that default to the search giant even for their mobile search needs.

In September 2007, Google launched AdSense for Mobile Content, to enable publishers to monetise their sites on the mobile networks, with Google text ads.

With this new service, carriers and mobile site owners will be able to embed a Google search box on their portals or websites, thus allowing users to search Google from within the site.

Revenues generated from these searches will be shared with the mobile operator and website owner. Publishers will be allowed to co-brand the search results page with their own logos and insert links back to their site at the bottom of the mobile search results page.

This service is currently in beta, and testing is available to only a few network operators and website owners. Those interested in this facility can apply for it by filling out this form.

AdSense for Mobile search is aimed squarely at mobile operators and large publishers that have not yet joined forces with Google on mobile. While most larger carriers have already chosen sides – either playing along with Google or Yahoo! or trying to take on the giants by offering their own search service or partnering with search services such as Taptu and Medio, this product caters to smaller networks and those that Google has not deemed important enough to woo individually.

This move comes as something of a surprise to users familiar with Google’s advertising ethics, because during an interview in 2004, Google co-founders Sergey Brin had said, “One thing that’s important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There’s a clear large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence.”

Of course, in order to make sure that users can still differentiate between the ads and the organic search results, Google Mobile Search is using a different coloured background for the ads.

To be fair, the ads are not interspersed within the regular organic results. They are, instead, placed at the end of the plain text results on a universal search results page.

Mobile search advertising has still not found its groove. Google continues to test various ad placements to find the right solution. Google started by placing ads at the top or one at the top and one at the bottom of the mobile search results page. Recently, this changed and ads were placed only at the bottom of the Google Mobile Search results page.

Given the fact that the mobile screen is very small and there is really no place available to demarcate the page into a separate column at the side or at the top for displaying the ads, the only choices really are to place ads atop, below or in between organic results. Google already tested the first two options. They are now taking tentative steps towards the third option.

A really bold move, though, would be to intermingle sponsored links within the organic text-based results on the mobile search page. Will Google go back on its own word and implement such a system in order to get more money from mobile search?

Search, which has already become an extremely important feature of mobile technology, is now set to combine itself with the mobile camera and GPS.

The working of this new service is quite simple really. All one needs to do, is to “point” his mobile camera at an object, and as soon as the mobile has “seen” the object, it will “find” all the internet links, connected to the object in question and display them on the mobile screen. The user then selects whichever link is most appropriate and clicks on it.

Nokia and its content and advertising partners are in the process of tagging all the images to form a database for this new service of theirs. The service will be offered sector by sector, as the database gets consolidated.

To start with, they will offer this service for the movie sector only. If a user points at a particular movie poster, the service will find and provide various links such as, where the film is running, show timings, reviews, trailer, ticket bookings etc.

The links shown will also depend on the current location of the mobile GPS, reports Peggy Albright at Msearchgroove.

This service will thus create interactivity, and according to Philipp Schloter, Nokia’s General Manager for Point & Find, it could turn into a money spinner, for brands and advertisers, who could thus connect with their target audience and encourage impulse buying.

Initially this service will be beta tested in the U.S. and U.K.

If things go as planned, Nokia would be the first company to launch this innovative service.

It will be a free service for users, and will be accessible initially, only to users of the N95. Later however, it may be extended to include all GPS enabled camera phones, irrespective of the brand.

According to Nielsen, mobile Internet use has grown from 5.8 million to 7.3 million between the second and third quarters of this year. This is a jump of 25% as compared to only a 3% growth in the number of users accessing the net through the PC, during the same time period.

7.3 million users represents just 12% of the total market. Many believe the number of mobile Internet users to be closer to 28%. However, the higher percentage includes one-off visitors who try the mobile Internet and never return, whereas Nielsen’s numbers could be excluding these users completely due to their research methodology.

The type of searches conducted through mobile phones are quite different from those conducted through the PC, and while Google is the most popular website used by PC users, mobile users prefer to use the following sites in order of priority:

1. BBC News
2. Google Search
3. BBC Weather
4. Facebook
5. Windows Live / Hotmail
6. BBC Sport
7. eBay
8. Yahoo! Mail
9. Sky Sports
10. Gmail

It was found that the mobile is mostly used to for instant information needs such as news, weather, sports. Information regarding entertainment and commerce was usually sought through desktops.

Interestingly, Google Search has only 23% reach among mobile device users, compared to 79% for desktop users, according to Nielsen.

Expectedly, the reports also revealed that the average age of the mobile Internet user was less than that of the PC user. While about 25% of handset mobile users were between 15 to 24 years of age, only 16% of PC users were in that age group. On the other hand, 23% of desktop users are over 55 years of age while 12% of mobile internet users are over 55 years, which many will find surprisingly high!

Mobile Internet users access the Web about 7 times a month on an average, and each session lasts for about 10 minutes.

Speaking to the BBC, Kent Ferguson, a senior analyst at Nielsen Online, says that the sudden spurt in the mobile Internet usage is due to a variety of factors. The introduction of flat rate tariffs by mobile operators and better networks are among them.

Also, Mobile manufacturing companies have introduced more user-friendly handsets that encourage consumers to access the Internet through their mobile. Buttons for direct access to Google and other popular social networks are placed on new phones to push this further.

The mobile phone company 3 launched a Facebook phone recently that allows users to easily access the social network as well as Skype, Windows Live Messenger and Last.fm by directly integrating the service into the phone.

While this application is certainly not new – Windows Mobile and Yahoo! Mobile already have similar services – it is reasonable to expect that due to the sheer popularity of Google and the simplicity of the process, a lot more iPhone users are now likely to use Google Search on their handsets.

Google will also combine this service with the iPhone’s GPS capability, to pinpoint the user’s location and the locations of various advertisers, reports Wired.com. However there is a downside to the voice search service. Search terms have been entered into the system in a typical American accent and hence the search procedure fails if the search words are spoken by people with different accents.

Given the diverse accents spoken in the U.K., the voice search function has quite “confused” the system. According to the Telegraph, when the word iPhone was spoken into the handset, using various British accents, the results ranged from Einstein, MySpace and Bonfire to Gorillas and Kitchen sinks!

A hilarious situation by itself, one might say, but one that was certainly never intended by Google.

When they discontinued the mobile video service, a spokesperson for 3 had said, “Mobile advertising remains an important part of our strategy. This change has created a great opportunity for a new supplier and we’ll be looking at options over the coming months.”

They now appear to have fulfilled that promise. 3 has now tied up with Mobix, which will deliver real-time in-video advertising, and 4^th Screen Advertising, which will be their sales partner, to restart their mobile video service before the end of the year.

The 3 million subscribers of 3 will now be able to receive personalised advertising from various brands, with the option of demographic targeting and frequency capping.

3 UK will begin with news, weather updates and movie reviews, and follow it up later with comedy music and cartoons. 3′s earlier entertainment and information services, mobile games, and full length music downloads will of course continue.

Videos will range from being free to costing up to 50 pence each, depending on the length and type.

3 UK’s Head of Portal Advertising, Neil Andrews says, “By allowing people access to video content at a consumer friendly price we can offer brands a potentially massive target audience.”

Mark Slade, Managing Director of 4^th Screen Advertising says, “Pre-roll video advertising is highly targeted, enabling campaigns to be far more effective, whilst reaching the right customer demographic at a time that suits.”

Read the full 3 UK official press release

It is open knowledge that Google has been in talks with Verizon for the same deal. Google wants Verizon to make Google the default search provider on all their mobile handsets.

Microsoft is probably making use of Google’s inattentiveness here – due to their recent preoccupation with the debacle of advertising on  Yahoo! – and is trying to woo Verizon away from Google. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft is offering much better terms to Verizon, by way of a higher percentage share of revenue and also a guarantee of considerably higher payments to Verizon.

According to the Wall Street Journal, if Microsoft succeeds in this attempt, it will not only compensate them to some extent for their failure to acquire Yahoo! earlier in the year, but will also help them to fight the search giant Google to some extent.

Verizon wireless, which is currently the second largest wireless carrier in The U.S.A, is of course taking its time to come to a conclusion as to whom they wish to tie up with, and will no doubt make the most of this opportunity.

Business Week reports that Motorola has invested $50 million in their Android Social Phone project, which will be managed by Motorola-owned mobile email company, Good Technology.
Motorola will require at least 6 months before they are ready to launch their new phone. They have not even announced a name for it as yet.

The phone is expected to have a touch screen like the iPhone, and a slide out QWERTY key board like the HTC T-Mobile G1. The look, though, is expected to be on the lines of the Motorola Krave, and it is likely to be cheaper than the G1 phone, at around $150.

The G1 phone is already capable of transferring contacts from ones Gmail account into the phone. It is likely that Motorola’s Android phone may take this one step further by tieing up with Facebook and or MySpace, to enable transferring contacts from these social networks into the phone’s address book. This would also enable users to check status updates and activity streams on the phone itself. Facebook has a similar facility with the iPhone, but they require a separate app for this, which may not be necessary on Motorola’s Android.

Whether people will be really keen on getting Facebook or MySpace on their phones or not will decide the future of the Android Social phone and indirectly that of Motorola too.

Though Motorola is the third largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, their mobile phone division has made losses to the tune of $1.9 million in the last year and is desperately in need of another success story like the RAZR. They hope the Android phone might be just the thing they need.

According to comScore, 20.8 million users in the U.S. and 4.5 million users in Europe used mobile search in the month of June 2008. This means that there has been a 68% and 38% growth of mobile search over the last year in the two regions respectively, which is phenomenal.

Google has stated in the past that they believe that mobile search would soon generate the highest advertising revenue, and they have moved accordingly to lure mobile phone users.

Presently, Google is already the default search provider for handsets by Sprint in the USA, T-Mobile in Europe and NTT DoCoMo in Japan and also for the iPhone. Their own mobile device, the Android phone, will further boost Google’s market share and revenue generation.

Yahoo! is next in popularity for mobile search and advertising services and holds about 35% of the market share in the U.S. They are the default search engine on AT&T handsets, except for the iPhone and are planning to provide some new services by the end of the year.

9.5% of mobile users in the UK use mobile search services and 9.2% of cell phone users in the U.S. do the same, and these numbers are expected to go up.

Among the main reasons for the recent growth of mobile search would be the easy availability of smartphones, better 3G penetration and the introduction of flat rate data plans.

It is reported that along with the number of users, the frequency of mobile search has also increased. comScore analyst Alistair Hill says “The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50% in Europe, with France and Spain leading at 69 and 63 percent respectively.”

To start with, this service will only be accessible on BlackBerry and some Java enabled phones, but they hope to bring this technology to other handsets in the near future.

Google Maps for Mobile will now be capable of the same level of imagery as the desktop version, i.e. it will show a 360 degree view of the point in question.

This new feature will help users to pinpoint the exact location of a shop, restaurant, office theatre etc. when they are on the go in an unfamiliar location. All they need to do is click on “Street View” on their mobile phone. They will then be able to see the appropriate street with all details in it, so there is no chance of missing the store, restaurant etc. and having to run around in circles. Even tourists should now have no difficulty going around a new town with the help of this service.

There is also a section here that gives detailed information about bus, train and ferry services to and from different locations along with the fares and timings of the local transport available.

It will be possible to use Street View from any location for which photography is available to Google. It is also possible to click on the map, and select Street View. Street View can be seen on the full screen or as an overlay on the map. The view can also be rotated to see the surrounding area from different angles as one proceeds along the road.

Another feature that Google has incorporated is ‘business reviews’, which will allow users to check whether or not a shop actually sells what the user is looking for, before making a trip down there.

It is also possible to go from one place to another on foot, following the walking directions which have been incorporated. (this feature is presently in beta.)

Google has also increased the speed of these search operations and improved the accuracy of location of a place, under their MyLocation feature. According to Brighthand.com, the MyLocation feature will work best in thickly populated places, which will obviously have more cellular towers, thus improving the cell tower triangulation on the user’s smartphone.

The latest version of Google Maps for mobile can be accessed at google.com/gmm.

The 3G industry has grown almost 80% in one year in the U.S. and now has 64.2 million subscribers, thanks to the availability of better networks and many new 3G-compatible handsets.

Italy and Spain still have better 3G penetration than the U.S. with 38.3% and 37.2% respectively, while Germany, France and U.K. have 23.9%, 17.1% and 27.6% penetration respectively.

A parallel survey conducted by comScore on the use of mobile search found that the popularity and frequency of mobile search has also gone up, both in the U.S. and Western Europe.

The growth of mobile search has been an impressive 68% and 38% in U.S. and Western Europe respectively, between June 2007 and June 2008, with the U.K. accounting for the highest mobile search penetration at 9.5% of all mobile subscribers, followed by the U.S. at 9.2% penetration.

According to Alistair Hill, analyst at comScore, it is not only the number of users using mobile search that has increased, but also the number of times each user uses it that has increased.

In Europe the number of people using mobile search at least once a week, has increased by 50% and in France and Spain it is 69% and 63% respectively. In the U.S. mobile search has more than doubled, thanks to better 3G penetration and the availability of 3G enabled handsets, as well as lowered tariffs.

Expectedly, it was found that Google was the most used engine for mobile search in all countries, followed by Yahoo! in Germany, Italy, the U.K. and the U.S.

The first Android handset, which will be called ‘Dream’, has been designed by HTC, a Taiwanese smart-phone company, and will be run by T-Mobile.

Android version 1.0, which will be based on an open source platform, will have to take on the likes of the already established iPhone, BlackBerry and Symbian operating systems in the highly competitive smart-phone market.

At present, Research In Motion’s Blackberry is the most sought after handset in the U.S., while Nokia’s Symbian phones are the most wanted worldwide.

Google has been spearheading the collaboration to develop Android in conjunction with several other mobile companies such as T-Mobile, Intel, HTC, eBay, Motorola, LG and Samsung.

The open source system on which Android is based will be able to provide several new features, such as tracking of family members and videos accompanied by local, map-based information.

In contrast to Apple’s policy of monitoring all programs manufactured for its iPhone through their App Store, Android will give complete freedom to its developers. To do this they are introducing the ‘Android Market’ rather than a store to give the feeling of openness. Users will be able to add any programme they find useful or interesting. Some of these programmes will be free, while others will have to be paid for.

Speaking to MSNBC, Francesco Roveta, Director of eBay Mobile, said that there should be no concern regarding lack of quality control in spite of the open market, as eventually, users will only accept programs that are well designed and user friendly. The rest would “rapidly fall into oblivion.”

Gretchen Grisworld, V.P. Marketing at Packet Video, says, “the beauty of an open system is the ability to innovate without restrictions and distribute without boundaries.”

To encourage programme developers, Google has announced prizes worth $10 million, to the top application developers in the Android Developer Challenge, the first phase of which were announced on August 29. One of the winning programmes, Life360, is based on GPS technology and allows users to track family members, store important documents and communicate in emergencies, through its ‘always-on background network connectivity.’
The winners of Android Developer Challenge said that programs such as Life360, GoCart and Locale could not have been created on any other mobile platform, as they were possible to build only in an open environment.