UpSnap To Launch Mobile Audio Search

Ed’s note: Peggy Anne Salz, who you know has been doing our executive interviews for a couple of months, will now be contributing on mobile search and discovery for our site.
So far, most of the excitement around mobile search has been about text-based scenarios where search points users in the direction of content they like – in some cases before users ask for it. There are even some indications that personalized search – delivered by the likes of FAST, Medio Systems and JumpTap – could eliminate the need for search altogether. Such technologies use the clues users leave (such as their profiles such as usage patterns, content preferences and download history) to predict user tastes and match the right content with the right user.
The end-game is about harnessing artificial intelligence to deliver a new kind of predictive search, but even this new breed of search on steroids is largely limited to text-based content. Video search is in its infancy as is visual search promoted by Neven Vision (which harnesses camera phone capabilities to help users search for content related to what they see and capture around them.
The obvious gap is audio search, and UpSnap, a provider of mobile search and streaming mobile audio entertainment, is trying to combine the two things and help users to search for podcasts they like. Tony Philipp, UpSnap CEO tells me the service will launch as “more of a directory approach rather than a peer search approach.” Like the early days of the Internet, there’s just not enough podcast content out there yet to merit a full-blown search engine for it, he thinks.
The company has also released a beta of a downloadable mobile search app that will allow users to search for audio content using soft keys. Users who text to UpSnap’s shortcode will get back results divided by radio genre. ‘Rather than searching for something that you didn’t know was there, we tell you what’s there, we let you choose the streaming content you want and we direct you straight to it.” In the next 30 days watch for UpSnap to take the wraps off a scheme to “combine mobile search with audio and pay per call.”

Comments have been disabled for this post