Interview With Fast CEO: Mobile Search Triple-Play

[by Peggy Anne Salz] A flurry of activity and a raft of announcements, involving market giants including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, since the start of the year point the way to the industry’s next mega-trend: mobile search. Mobile search is indisputably a potent way to generate value. Consumers find what they want; marketers gain traffic by providing relevant offers and advertising; and mobile operators and service providers capture increased revenue as a result of the increase in mobile content purchases by consumers.
However, the much more lucrative business opportunity may be in combining search, personalization, and recommendation (modeled on Amazon – this technology suggests content on the basis of the individual user’s past preferences or on the basis of what a user’s peers consumed, or both). The end-game is to boost content sales by providing users personalized and relevant results – as well as the tools to discover other cool content they might not have otherwise known existed.
I refer to this as a kind of “mobile content triple-play” and (after interviewing some 40 C-level execs at search, discovery and personalization companies – as well as mobile operators – for my own report on the topic) I see evidence that the mobile content industry is ripe for it. In fact, many these companies have told me they fear mobile search – particularly the big-name brands like Google. Content owners want users to come directly to their sites and not be directed by search engine results to explore their competitors’ portals. In a D2C play, they tell me, it’s all about improving the accessibility and discoverability of their content.
In view of the increasing importance of personalization and recommendation in the search mix, I caught up with John Markus Lervik, CEO of FAST. His take on search: Close, but no cigar. He confirmed that more operators and content owners are embracing a triple-play approach, relying on personalization and recommendation (through social networks) to monetize their content.
In a nutshell, mobile search has moved on. It’s not about delivering what users ask for – it’s about delivering relevant content before they ask for it, Lervik said. “Search is really [about] pushing content to you that’s personalised, contextualised, and localised to your needs at the moment.”
On Vodafone/Google [Google also has a partnership with FAST Vodafone]: “We hope to remain partners with Vodafone, but we also understand that they are planning to work with GoogleĆ¢

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