That is what Kansas City, Mo.-based startup Leap2 hopes its new search site that combines the web, location and social in a way that delivers detailed results while allowing for serendipitous discovery, will be: Disruptive in a way that draws search market share from Google. The startup launches its site Tuesday on mobiles and also said today it had raised $1.6 million in first round funding. The round was led by Dundee Venture Capital, with support from OpenAir Equity, Linseed Capital and the Wichita Technology Corporation.

Mike Farmer, the CEO of Leap2, is no stranger to search, having tried seven years ago with a web site called Kozoru. But this time he thinks that focusing on mobile, as well as bringing in social elements to a search gives end users better results as well as a few nice surprises.

The Leap2 web plus social results page.

For example, when the app opens, you see a home screen that offers the day’s news as a slate of pictures. Some are self-evident and others are perhaps a mystery. Clicking on a picture offers you one of the day’s top news stories. Once you enter a search term, the screens splits in half with the top half showing Twitter results related to the search and the bottom half showing images of the web sites that match your search.

Here’s where it gets dicey. Searches for “the best brunch in Austin” or “tacos and tequila Austin” (it’s a restaurant) worked well. I saw relevant websites, pictures of places, and even tweets from people who were there and a tweet promising me a discount next weekend at a brunch locale. But when I searched for my name and other people’s names, I started running into what is the bane of the mobile web — requests to download apps.

My people searches drew up magazine and LinkedIn results that I couldn’t see without clicking through to the “no thanks” button on the screen that pops up asking me to download a mobile app. I, like the rest of the population, hate those screens. Farmer is hoping that the mobile web becomes less about apps and more about the web soon, but I’m not holding my breath.

Location results page.

Things like the discovery of discounts or even insights from Twitter, (Farmer wants to integrate FourSquare, Yelp and Facebook eventually for the social aspects) plus the integrated location and directions, help make this a contender against Google Now, which I adore for its ability to read my calendar and tell me when to leave the house to make a meeting. Leap2 can’t offer that, and it’s going to face the same challenge that all search engines face, which is enticing users to click on it as opposed to going with the already-integrated search functions.

As for monetization, Farmer said that some time in the future Leap2 will integrate sponsored search results, initially among the social cards on the top half of the screen. The goal will be to play relevant results based on the location, the search or other information gleaned. Farmer gave the example of real-time deals. He plans to have the same image-filled-card-like interface that spans the app now, be the same interface for showing sponsored search ads as well.

The mobile app for iOS and Android launches Tuesday, with the website launching on Wednesday. Give it a try. I thought it was worth using, especially when I’m on the go, as it gives a much richer picture on the small screen than I might otherwise get.

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The new app is from a startup called Grokr, which was founded by former McAfee CEO and founder Srivats Sampath. The app, which officially launches in beta Wednesday morning, aims to predict the information that users want and give that to them without them asking for it. And when they do ask a specific question, Grokr takes them directly to an answer or a source, rather than to a bunch of links.

Grokr tries to personalize its answer to a user based on a whole load of data it can gather through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more than 50 other sources. After a few weeks in use, Grokr can tell where you live, where you work, what kind of music you like and what teams you follow. It can even figure out a user’s ethnicity and demographic data though it keeps all of this anonymized.

Then it pairs what it knows about a user with a knowledge base built on top of Freebase, which is also used in Google’s own Knowledge Graph. Grokr has built out its knowledge base with another 50 sources including Bing, Factual, Yelp, Songkick and others. Grokr has more than 700 million facts in its database, covering 25 million entities, which represent the meaning behind all kinds of words it comes across.

When it all comes together, Grokr can tell you if there’s traffic on your route to work or feed you pre-game info on your favorite team. It can remind you of upcoming concert tickets for your favorite artist, show you trending topics tailored to your interests and even bring you personalized data reminders that cater to your demographic. Grokr does this through a handful of tiles that cover local information, breaking news. sports, trending topics and recommendations.

This may sound like Google Now, but Sampath said it’s potentially more powerful because it’s not relying on Google products and services. By engaging with an array of data sources, Sampath believes Grokr can be even more prescient and helpful for users because it knows more about a user and can steer them to more data.

“The differentiation is just purely the number of signals we have about you. We have a lot more than Google Now,” Sampath said.

Sampath believes that Grokr has an advantage over Siri as well, which is still built around pulling data via voice. He said Siri doesn’t work in many environments and it’s not built for the future of mobile search, which is all about pushing data to a user.

This does sound intriguing because it’s another sign of how our devices and apps can become even more personal in the way they cater to our needs based on data it can absorb.  And I like that it acknowledges that search on mobile needs to be different, more immediate and intelligent using as much context as possible.

But it can also be a little creepy. Sampath showed me how Grokr figured out he’s South Asian based on his name and then gave him a headline about the need for South Asians to get tested for diabetes, which Sampath actually has.

I’m not sure how people will feel when an app starts to really understand someone. There will be moments of delight when you get a spot-on recommendation but you can also be taken aback when you realize the picture that forms when all of your data is put together in one place. Sampath, however, said that Grokr doesn’t identify a particular user, just looks at the collection of words and topics they represent. And he said Grokr will never sell or rent user data.

If Grokr can gain a following, there’s some real money to be made. Google is the leader in local search advertising, which means a lot of search advertising revenue. Sampath believes that Grokr can build a similar monetization strategy presumably around search ads. Right now, it’s leaning on Bing to complete index-based search results. Grokr previously raised $4.2 million from NEA, U.S. Venture Partners, Triple Point Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

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The team behind Leap2, which is based in Kansas City, Kan., set out to create a mobile search app tailored to smartphone use: touch-oriented, one-handed, and fit to a small screen. In other words, the opposite of Google’s desktop search standard. In my original look at the app, I talked about how it was successful, as well as areas that it needed to work on, especially speed and the overall look.

The update addressed some of that, though the app’s speed still isn’t as snappy as I’d like. However, the new navigation and simplification, on the whole, are positive changes. I rather liked the scrolling wheel in the previous design, but the volume of choices it offered could be a bit unwieldy. With the new look, the results of your search appear under tabs in the lower half of the screen — images, local, web, a sharing tab for Twitter, Facebook and email, and social buzz results. Tapping (instead of scrolling down from the top of the screen) gives you a fullscreen view of any of your results, and an icon in the lower right takes you back to your results when you’re done.

The social part is the major project the Leap2 team has been working on. They’re repositioning it as a place to search for things in the present, but also as a tool for extending that search out into the future for topics you want to stay on top of across the entire web. You can use Leap2 to create a hashtag and anywhere that tag appears on a social network or somewhere on the web, it’ll show up in a specific tab in the app.

It’s like a news alert or a Twitter hashtag search, but put into context and brought up to real-time speed for the whole web, Michael Farmer, CEO of Leap2, explained to me:

If I’m searching for a Canon D500 camera and I want to buy it in the next week, I can create a sepcific query and receive price deals. For the first time we’re taking the element in time and moving it foward with real time for the broad web, and not just news alerts. It’s taking any slice of information and moving it forward.

Just because someone is searching for a topic now, it doesn’t mean their interest ends once they find an answer. In the image above I searched for an upcoming festival. There aren’t any results yet, but there will be this weekend when it’s taking place. Leap2 can keep multiple hashtag searches going at the same time. I can have “baseball trade” and “Philadelphia restaurant opening” going simultaneously since those are topics I’m always going to want to be updated on. And it won’t just be a list of links; Leap2 delivers results based on the currency of the information, links that are being shared often and things that people are talking about — for example, things that have been retweeted.

Adding context and making search results relevant to what people are talking about is great. My issue is still the overall look and feel of the app — it needs to be smoother and it needs a more polished look. But it’s still a decent idea. And we can always use apps rethinking how we’re using our mobile devices, especially for a category like search or discovery, which continue to be major challenges as we deal with the overflow of information that the web brings.

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A few use cases demonstrated included the morning commute, with Google Now telling commuters when their next bus is arriving, flight notifications, bar recommendations and even sports scores. In the last case, Google Now doesn’t even need to be told who your favorite sports team is – it already knows, based on your search history.

Google Now works well for existing and upcoming mobile phones featuring Android 4.1, but there’s one obvious platform that wasn’t mentioned when Google Now was introduced during today’s keynote: Google’s Project Glass, the wearable computing the device the company has been working on.

In an augmented reality application, users don’t want to search – they want to get bits and pieces of information when they’re relevant. That’s exactly what Google Now promises to do – and we shouldn’t be surprised to see Google Now become a centerpiece of Project Glass.

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By the numbers, Page and Co. did well during the first quarter of 2012: revenue and earnings were up sharply. The most interesting thing that emerged from Google’s first-quarter earnings announcement was a stock split that’s not exactly a stock split: Google has proposed the creation of a new class of non-voting stock that will double the number of shares held by shareholders without diluting the number of people who actually get to vote on the future of Google.

In some ways, it’s classic Google: an unconventional solution to a conventional problem that big public companies with high, slow-growing stock prices can face. The nature of the split means that Google’s top executives: Chairman Eric Schmidt, co-founder Sergey Brin, and Page — will retain control of Google for years to come, rather than seeing their stakes in the company dilute over time as new shares are issued through acquisitions and other shares change hands. So it throws investors a bone while ensuring that Google will always be a Page and Brin production.

But on a conference call following the earnings release, financial analysts were mostly concerned about Google’s ability to make the transition from a desktop-oriented world to a mobile-oriented world and Google+ usage than the stock announcement. (See Janko’s take on the Google+ discussion.)

As desktop PC growth slows amid a transition to mobile, investors are a little worried about two straight quarters of declines in Google’s cost-per-click metric: the amount that Google advertisers are paying the company per user click on their ads. Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette urged analysts to stop worrying about this metric.  ”Our business is healthy,” he said.

In many ways, Google is well prepared for this shift. It (more or less) controls the marketshare leading mobile operating system, and “we don’t get many new operating systems, there’s only been a few in my lifetime,” Page said. Its share of mobile searches is even higher than its share of desktop searches, although we’re still in the very early days of mobile search habits.

Obviously, however, there is a lot of debate as to how much money Google is actually making from its mobile efforts.

Without revealing any new numbers, Page felt compelled to point out that he expects the cost-per-click figure on mobile ads to be larger than what advertisers pay for clicks on traditional Google ads, given that mobile allows for so many other possibilities like location-based advertising and integration with mobile wallets. “We’re where search was in 2002 or 2003,” Pichette said, referring to the maturity and sophistication of the mobile opportunity.

And Page continued Google’s pattern of dropping clues about its mobile strategy in hinting that Google will likely launch a low-cost Android tablet later this summer, saying “we believe there is going to be a lot of success at the lower-end of the market.” Android may be a smartphone powerhouse but it is an afterthought in the tablet market, which is hurting sales of PCs and changing the way people interact with Google products.

Google is a young company by most measures, but it has been fielding questions about its plans for a post-search world for a very long time. The conversation surrounding the company is still not based on what it continues to do well — search — but around whether or not it can successfully grow into the future if search becomes a less important part of our computing experience.

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A small Midwestern startup is rethinking the way we use web search on our phones by tweaking the now-standard Google layout. Their solution is a mobile app called Leap2 Navigator, which is available now in the iOS App Store. It’s initially for the iPhone only, though the company plans to make the jump to Google’s own Android very soon. It’s an admirable — though still incomplete — solution to what can be a somewhat annoying aspect of smartphone use.

Make no mistake, Leap2 isn’t rethinking the search algorithm itself, just the way results are presented and contextualized. Google is the undisputed king of search, regardless of platform, owning roughly two-thirds of the total web search market. It’s in position to dominate mobile search as well, with Android on millions of phones, Google search apps for other mobile OSes, and of course Google is accessible via any mobile browser.

But the problem, according to the guys at Leap2, is that it’s the same desktop browser search experience, just shrunk down to a smaller screen.

There have been some other creative end runs around using Google to search on a mobile device lately, with things like Apple’s Siri, the voice control assistant on the iPhone 4S, which lets users speak questions you might typically Google, but instead Siri does the search and answers instantaneously.

Leap2 isn’t that drastic. It’s built on Microsoft’s Bing’s API, but the top results (in my experience) have never been from Bing. Its aim is to make a search app that works best on a smartphone screen because it was made for a smartphone screen.

“Google’s results [page] is 9,000 results and in descending order,” Leap 2 co-founder and CEO Michael Farmer pointed out in an interview. They have the data there, but it’s not as useful if you don’t happen to be scrolling with a mouse and or scroll buttons on a browser window.

Instead, Leap2 works with a simple but creative layout: the top half of the screen uses two slot-machine-like scrolling reels, the bottom half displays your results. The large one on the left is your search field you type into, and above and below your search you can scroll to suggested related search terms that pop up based on the keywords you provided. On the right, a smaller scrolling reel has icons you can choose to better target your search to a specific category, like news, social sites, images, general phonebook info (like business names, numbers and addresses), location/maps and shopping.

When you type in your search, instead of a results list of links a la typical desktop search, you get three tabs of websites that open up on the bottom half of the screen. The middle tab is what Leap2 thinks you’re looking for, the No. 1 result. The left tab is the No. 2 result, and the right tab the No. 3 result.

This layout is meant to be the quickest and easiest way to interact with your results, and it’s tailored to those who might navigate or search with with just a thumb or a few fingers.

“The biggest thing driving our navigation, it creates a sideways T,” explained Farmer. “If you hold your phone with your right hand, you can navigate easy across the center and with your right hand you navigate up and down [...] Leap 2 focuses on a six -square-inch display, and where your thumb is. That six-inch square is always in your field of view.”

The reason your No. 1 result is in that center tab is because the middle of the phone is easiest to reach with your thumb. And the idea of displaying the web page instead of just a link is so you can see if it’s a site you trust or not immediately.

Taking the leap

I really like the idea of Leap2, and while the app works, it’s a bit rough around the edges. Here’s what I found:

• It anticipates what you want correctly much of the time. I searched for Hotel Monteleon in New Orleans and the first three windows it opened, in order, were the hotel’s website, the TripAdvisor page for it, and its Wikipedia page. In this case, Leap2 guessed correctly. I wanted to see the hotel’s site.
• It surfaces the content in smart, accessible ways. By spinning the righthand dial down to the icon that looks like a phone book it gave me the Bing, Yelp and Foursquare listing pages for the hotel. The Bing page gives me exactly what I wanted: the address and phone number.
• Sliding down to the thought bubble/chat icon button, I could see the “buzz” on the hotel: if anyone’s talking about it on Twitter, or checking in on Foursquare or Brightkite. Sliding up to the picture icon, I got image search results from Bing, Flickr and Picasa (probably not quite the right order for me, but close).
• Scrolling all the way to the bottom of the right dial to the “+” acronym brings up the option to share your search results via email, Twitter or Facebook. The process goes smoothest if you’ve authorized Leap2 to access your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

As I mentioned, the app is not perfect. It can be amazingly on target for some things, while inconsistent on others.

• A search for “bars near Lafayette Square New Orleans” brought back some odd results. The first page suggested was Hotels.com, then HotelPlanner.com, then NileGuide, which was actually results for Jackson Square, not Lafayette. In this case, I clearly was looking for Yelp or TripAdvisor recommendations, which Leap2 didn’t connect.
• When you click on one of the website results, it automatically fills your whole screen. To go back to the default view, you use a simple downward swiping motion. Unfortunately, where you swipe is very close to the new pull-down shade notifications menu in iOS 5. So occasionally I would mistakenly bring up that menu instead of returning to the default search view of the app.
• Google Maps renders slowly. In fact, several features would be much better if they were sped up.

Overall, this app needs its speed turbocharged, and the design could use some polish — it’s a little rough compared to really well-designed apps. But I like where they’re going with it and I think there’s a great idea here.

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To get a clearer picture of mobile advertising’s future, it helps to first explore the current landscape. Five trends in particular stand out:

More-relevant behavioral targeting. Currently, mobile advertisers use traditional methods of ad targeting: device, demographic group or context. But in five years, mobile ad targeting will become more relevant to a person’s behavior and current location. For instance, online advertising network Adverline has an AdNext server that builds a prediction model of spatial and temporal relevance for delivering ads to mobile users. The company has tested this with the COEX Mall in South Korea, and it found a 70 percent confidence level that ads displayed are spatially and temporally relevant.

Growing mobile search. Mobile search advertising is already a big driver of ad spending; this is where Google currently makes much of its money in mobile. In five years, this will still be the case, as people continue to use mobile devices to search for products and services. What will change is that, coupled with better targeting, search advertisers will deliver more relevant ads based not only on location and relevant keywords but also on more accurate predictability engines.

Better analytics. Right now, the tools for measuring mobile ad campaigns lack the sophistication that advertisers expect. The Mobile Marketing Association and other groups, such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, have set up good guidelines. But these are still evolving, and not everyone plays by the same rules. In five years, the standards will have matured. Companies will agree more about what gets measured, and analyzing mobile campaign effectiveness will not be as big of a hurdle.

Greater interactivity. Most mobile ads today are delivered as relatively simple text or banner formats. They are clickable but not very interactive. Rich-media ads are available, too, but they are not as widely deployed for a variety of reasons: more cost, and not all devices render them well. In five years, interactive ads will be common, and users will be expanding, collapsing and manipulating them in ways that are still unfolding. This will unleash creative minds to show off their capabilities. Also, technology like augmented reality will make the interaction with brands and the world around consumers more interactive: Imagine looking at your mobile screen and playing a Zynga game sponsored by Coca-Cola, based on your physical surroundings.

Mobile-social as the “personal cloud.” Today the mobile and social worlds already collide with services like Foursquare and Gowalla. In five years, though, this functionality will likely evolve into what some Stanford researchers suggest is the personal cloud, which will be personal data that surrounds us wherever we go. It will also be shareable with whomever we choose and will be used to make purchases, among other things. Savvy advertisers will leverage this trend with relevant offers that provide value but still respect user privacy.

Meanwhile, companies like Google, Apple and Millennial Media currently rule the mobile advertising space, and while some of those will continue to have an impact over the next five years, others leading the way today will fade away or be acquired. To read about these, as well as more trends to watch, please see “The future of mobile advertising, 2011-2016” at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image courtesy of Foursquare.

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