Crisp Voices Blog

What’s Next in Mobile: Point, Snap, Talk and Search

20 May 2008 - Tamara Gruber

What exactly will be the nature of mobile search in the future? How will technology enable people to conveniently search and retrieve relevant information from the touch of a button from their mobile handset (be it an iPhone, Blackberry or some other smart device)? Say, you are visiting the Grand Canyon or the Empire State Building for the first time and you want to know the history of the site or the building, wouldn't it be nice to point your phone, snap a picture and do a search on the building and get your answers instantaneously. This type of sophisticated search is not far in the future.

A number of companies are looking into capitalizing the new wave of mobile search. For instance Microsoft is working on software called Lincoln that, once downloaded into phones, will allow people to access online movie reviews by just snapping pictures of movie posters, DVD covers, or from an advertisement on a magazine or displayed on the side of buses.

But Microsoft is not alone. There are other players in the market. Kooaba and SnapTell services allows you to point to a real-world object, snap it and send pictures to their servers that will return results relevant to the context of the object.

This technology is not only useful for consumers but also a boon to advertisers who intend to promote products or services through this untouched medium. For publishers it is a great way to measure how readers engage and interact with ads they see. This could be a data mine for advertisers to do further marketing.

There are others who are exploring ways to detect your location using your phone’s GPS location mapping functionality to serve you targeted content. For example, Sprint and Microsoft are teaming up to offer local maps, location of nearby retail outlets, post offices etc based on your location (assuming you carry a GPS capable phone). GeoPedia uses your iPhone’s positional data to find your approx location and then sends wikipedia articles about points of interest around you at that moment. More sites are looking to integrate localized information with social networking capabilities. GyPSii’s WebTop uses GPS, user generated content, photo and video sharing to instantly connect and track people anywhere in the world. Yahoo’s oneSearch allows you to speak your query as you would type in a search box and get relevant results.

Personally I believe that we only just started to scratch the surface of the mobile search technology. Keep reading to stay on top of what’s next in mobile.

Are We There Yet?

16 May 2008 - Tamara Gruber

On the way back from CTIA this year, I read a great blog post on MobileStance called Mobile Publishers Dance with the Ad Networks, which inherently summed up the complexities in the mobile advertising space. The beginning of any new market is exciting and even as fans of mobile advertising we can all agree there is some confusion and much waiting.

Crisp has always served the premium brand publisher to create an attractive and robust mobile presence that scales and easily integrates into an ad network of the publisher’s choice to help monetize. Pretty simple business proposition, right? If only. The industry as a whole lacks standards and I’m not just talking about banner sizes. For example, it would be great if everyone could synchronize the bot filter lists on a monthly basis so that we’re all working off the same page. But, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Market Complexities

I recently counted and found sixteen established, as well as newly funded ad networks, and I hear the song “Lost in the SuperMarket” by The Clash play in my head every time when I think about the abundance of choices. If I were a publisher, I assume I would like to sell some of my own inventory if I could, in which case I need only a basic ad server solution and then give the rest to an ad network to sell on my behalf. To a certain degree my choices are limited if I want to ad serve on-deck. Verizon and Sprint (and I’m sure AT&T will follow suit) require enablements with their selected partners. So, my choices then become about whether or not I want an ad network which will focus on premium placement or will serve the remnant market. In either case, no one company can do a great job of selling the inventory and who can blame them? Just like the MobileStance article suggests, it is truly almost impossible to get an easy and comprehensive view to enable a media buyer to buy effectively.

Technical and Other Complexities

Crisp has long been involved in ad network integrations and has integrated with most major ad serving players in this mobile space. People can dumb down the integration to dropping in a snippet of code or urls into our pages and while we had hoped integration could be that easy that isn’t always the case. [Caveat: we have great ad network partnerships but I would like to point out general problems that we see for the better of the whole market.] What are some of the potential snags?

My Questions for Nielsen Mobile

4 May 2008 - Boris Fridman

Finally, there is a study that looks at the impact of mobile Internet usage on online traffic. Not surprising to me, mobile web sites, according to Nielsen, increase the audience of many online sites on average by 13%.

I suspected that all along by examining the behavior of users of Crisp-powered sites from mLogic usage reports. For example, readers of USA TODAY Mobile, yours truly included, frequently use the Email Story option, a clipping feature of sorts, to email articles they like to themselves or to their friends. Invariably, this drives online usage and attracts new readers, mobile or otherwise.

The results of the study, however illuminating, made me think of other questions that I would love Nielsen to answer. I must add that I am yet to read the report. My questions might have been answered but I will list them nonetheless.

1. If audience begets traffic, and traffic begets advertising, and advertising begets revenue, doesn’t mobile drive more online revenue? I bet it does. That seems almost too obvious.

2. How much additional traffic is created from mobile-first visitors rather than those who have been traditionally visiting online sites? In other words, how many users started frequenting online sites after using their mobile counterparts? I bet many.

3. Is the audience increase greater for publishers that built and launched WAP sites, i.e., sites specifically optimized for mobile? I bet it is much greater. Sites that have not been optimized for mobile are simply unusable. Accessing non-optimized sites even on the iPhone is painful.

And lastly, do the findings of this report provide yet another argument that publishers derive considerable tangible benefits from mobile optimized sites?

Web to Mobile Transcoding vs. Mobile Content Management

3 May 2008 - Xavier Facon

When Crisp Wireless first started with powering mobile sites using its proprietary content management technology, I got a fair amount of surprised reactions from technologists and programmers who knew me. We weren’t only known back then to power the content for downloadables (J2ME mainly), we also found WAP significantly flawed. Back then one would have expected mobile site software to scrape HTML from the web, and reformat it to WML, cHTML and XHTML automatically or via customizable templates. Considering our experience with mobile and our unusual positions on mobile technology, it should be no surprise we took a different technical road. Luckily … because as far as I'm concerned the transcoding approach doesn't hold much value in today’s even further fragmented mobile browser landscape. The famous Russell Beattie knows what he's talking about when he considers it difficult to derive revenue by stripping down web sites for the mobile users. To create more compelling and well distributed sites, what is needed, is a Content Management System that is designed to ingest, manage and create XML content feeds of all shapes and formats. (Creating feeds is important for efficient on-deck distribution and integration with aggregated content sites) What's also needed is a product that with the help of solid mobile device intelligence can render mobile sites in all shapes and formats. It does not suffice to create mobile compatible sites; you need the ability to create a different optimized site for every type of device. These sites should have a different data flow, graphic design and information architecture depending on how and when it is used. In other words, the mobile web is not just making PC web content into mobile compatible content. The mobile web is a more complicated and soon more sophisticated version of the world wide web that beats to a different rhythm. With a further evolution of mobile devices it might very well prove to be far more popular. This trend is evident looking at many recently launched mobile sites. I’ve listed them below. The idea behind many good mobile sites is not a commercial transaction, but the method of content discovery - asking the question "what's the best way to find movie reviews?" or with Fandango - "are there tickets available at this theater for Iron Man?" These sites are focusing on how to make mobile media and information management better, which requires that content is organized and accessible in new ways. Some sites go pretty far in experimenting with this mobile behavior. For Twitter there is no shortage of mobile sites trying to perfect the way to manage status updates. When you are on a small screen you have different modes of behavior and you look at different times of day and have different goals: such as you need something right away or you want to check something before you go to bed or you are just trying to waste time. The point is, the mode and motivation of the interaction is different from when you are sitting at your desk. Great new research shows these new modes of behavior where consumers interact with mobile websites are not cannibalistic to desktop web traffic; they actually improve overall web performance by 13%. You'll notice that many of the sites below are specifically designed to help iPhone users. The mLogic technology is perfectly suited for innovative iPhone sites . Our technology is also great for distributing content to 3rd party applications in modular formats on carrier decks, in applications like Yahoo OnePlace and for powering new content interfaces like Flashcast or other device side applications . Our platform offers content management that is centrally managed to serve content to all other downloadable applications, browser plug-ins or mobile widgets. As promised, some interesting mobile sites: