News and Press Releases

Mobile Europe Magazine talks about Mobile Search and Discovery with Alatto's Neil Flanagan


Mobile Europe, February 2006 Issue


Mobile Search and Discovery is one of the hot topics in mobile data services at the moment. Mobile Europe caught up with Alatto Technologies CEO Neil Flanagan last month to look at the space.

Mobile Europe: Mobile Operators and Web search companies are making a lot of noise about Mobile Search and Discovery. Why the sudden activity?
Of course one reason is the recent interest of Yahoo and Google in the space. Another driver is the increased penetration of WAP provisioned handsets and reasonably priced data bundles. The mobile content space is growing exponentially and everybody has suddenly realised the revenue potential, especially from advertising.
Look at what mobile operators need for any service to reduce cost, increase margin or reduce risk. Then ask the question – how can mobile search and discovery do this? The answer is that MSD can deliver real new revenue and help increase and retain WAP and i-mode subscribers. There is some uncertainty over business models and who should pay whom, but we see this flux is the sign of a healthy market growing against a background of rapid technical evolution.

ME: But haven’t Operators got mobile content portals already what does Mobile Search and Discovery bring?
The problem with mobile content is that people can’t get at it. If a subscriber has to click more than 4 times you lose 85% of users – they just don’t have the patience to wait. Unfortunately many content providers still see mobile as an extension of web – sorry, those paradigms just don’t work on mobile.
Go and try to use Google or Yahoo mobile awkwardly type in a search term and get back thousands of results. Maybe what comes back in the top 5 is a match – maybe not. Their approach to search assumes people will search from their mobiles. Some will, but what we see is the majority of subscribers want Service Discovery – not Search, a very different animal solving different problems. Service Discovery is about one-click navigation, personalisation and recommendation – a very rich and compelling user experience.
Some rules of thumb we use
- If anything takes more than 4 clicks, it probably isn't going to happen.
- 5% of mobile content gets 95% of hits. The long tail doesn't get traffic via hierarchical navigation.
- People can't/won't change their phone settings. Geeks will. Not the majority.
- Don’t rely on people downloading Java or Symbian clients.
- Usability issues don't go away because you have faster access.

ME: So does Alatto have the Silver Bullet?
For Mobile Operators improving data use and FMCG brands looking at mobile marketing we have a very good solution. Mobile Service Discovery is uniquely focused to meet the constraints of mobile devices. That means no menus, no search keyword entry. Single-Click browsing really works for content discovery, for entertain ment, for time-filling while commuting. In our Tribes product we’ve coupled single click navigation with recommendations, social bookmarking and past history analysis there is a lot of heavy-lift AI behind a very simple interface on the handset. But the basic, "one-click gets you great content" is always there.

ME: Search on the Web means Google, Yahoo or AskJeeves. Does moving search onto mobile bring anything new?
The 800 pound gorilla in the market is of course Google and the level of blog chatter on its intentions is marked, but Google tend to play the long game and will probably surprise everybody with their product rollouts. Follow the value chain in mobile data services and you can see that either MSD makes its money from the end-subscriber, or the content provider/brand. The end-subscriber can’t/won’t pay much more so the next revenue source is from advertising. This is the mother lode in terms of mobile revenue. Our Tribes product is positioned exactly right for this.

ME: What’s your view of M&A activity in Mobile Search space at the moment.
At Alatto we are building a great company focused on Mobile Search and Discovery