Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

Speakers included Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Rich LeFurgy (Partner, Archer Advisors), Kirsten Mangers (Co-Founder & CEO, WebVisible), Robert Scoble (Managing Director, FastCompany.TV), Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land), and Tim Westergren (Founder, Pandora).

Conference Chair and moderator, Kevin Ryan, framed up the introduction to the panel by using numerous pop culture video snippets to emphasize the impact of Google, social media, and the overall internet on everyday lives. Some of the funnier snippets included quotes from South Park and Californication.

Moderators Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan engaged the panel speakers on topics as diverse as whether it was reasonable to consider the possibilities of a “Google Killer” in the near-term, and what were the trends to watch for in search and internet/mobile app development.

One particular topic of interest to me that panelists highlighted was local search and how mobile still hasn’t “arrived”. Danny Sullivan noted that each year for a few in a row now, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has stated that “THIS will be the year mobile arrives…” (my emphasis), but mobile still hasn’t really arrived.

Also, Robert Scoble joked about how he loved his iPhone, but “it doesn’t do everything well”, so he carries two other phones — and will likely start carrying a fourth when Google’s Android phone comes out. A number of panelists commented about how entertainingly compelling the iPhone Urbanspoon application is — it certainly has some coolness, but I wonder how widely it’s adopted? Kirsten Mangers commented about how it ranks restaurants and whether it gives users what they’re really wanting.

The commentary on the Urbanspoon has been recurring from a number of top internet commentators, so it’s definitely one hot app to watch.

Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble show each other their iPhones

This is good, because it will help promote better standards across mobile application development. Until now, developers have been all over the map in terms of how such apps or mobile-enabled sites are created.

So, the big question in my mind — what sort of domain name do they recommend for mobile apps?!? Do they recommend using the .mobi top level domain (“TLD”)?

The answer to this is, they’re suitably neutral about what the TLD should be. They recommend short, short, short — so, they recommend using domains without subdomains such as leaving off the “www”. This is good, because as I’ve pointed out, .Mobi TLD isn’t good since it was launched with heavy rules and I think consumers should only be expected to remember one, central domain name for a site. Even better, the W3C recommendation falls in line with the No-WWW Initiative which recommends setting a site’s primary domain to be the non-WWW version.

So, just based on the W3C recommendation, one might want to avoid using .Mobi extensions because it adds yet another letter to the domain name that cell phone users would have to type in.

Interestingly, one of the W3C editors working on the mobile document is Jo Rabin who is the Director of Industry Initiatives at dotMobi (mTLD Top Level Domain Limited).

Yahoo! Local’s Frazier Miller

It was very interesting to hear the take on local & mobile from one of Yahoo! Local’s top thought leaders. It was obvious that Frazier has a very tight grip on understanding what motivates consumers and where the trends may be headed in local/mobile evolution.

Some highlights of Frazier’s presentation included:

• Mention of how Yahoo Answers has incorporated a local component;
• How SearchMonkey could provide more compelling listings in SERPs;
• Need of users to be able to easily search government sites;
• Heavy interest at Yahoo in Events, which is why they purchased Upcoming in late ’05;
• They consider Local Product Search to be the “holy grail” of local search;
• The convergence of Local and Social is compelling, although Yahoo feels it’s not yet been adequately addressed and there are needs for managing privacy considerations in the way that it ultimately gets implemented;
• The “hyper-local” trend is perhaps getting filled out by a number of niche players;
• Geotargeting will provide the next acceleration of ROI in advertising;
• Educated the audience on the “ROBO” acronym: “research online, buy offline”;

Frazier’s candidness was refreshing when he spoke openly about other companies’ services which he found to be highly compelling for local work. These included:

• Walkscore.com – a service which helps users decide how difficult a walking route could be — something that’s highly useful to many during these gas-crunch times.
• Yelp – the highly-popular business rating and directory site;
• Craigslist – the well-known classifieds site;
• Facebook – the growing social networking site;

What Yahoo! may be working on for the future:

• Better geotargeting capabilities for advertising;
• Expanding Ad Exchanges and Ad Networks – “making the local ad market”;
• Increasing merchant awareness — channel resellers are transforming sales teams to educate merchants about online marketing. Some of these include major IYPs such as Yellowpages.com, Yellowbook.com, and Idearc Superpages.com.

Frazier stated that there are reasons to believe that mobile search marketing may finally be arriving, despite past predictions of critical mass that were off-base. The devices and hardware have evolved, with Moore’s law reducing down the cost of the products. Connectivity rates and badwith have improved. And devices and carriers are both opening up for app developers, with the technology getting beyond just SMS.

Yahoo’s Blueprint platform for mobile is different from Google’s Android, and may be superior in terms of easing development. Yahoo’s motto for this is “write once, run anywhere”.

Based on Frazier’s presentation, I think it will be interesting to continue to watch what Yahoo! is developing and deploying in the Local Search space.

Every shopping engine that doesn’t have this local store data will suffer at the hands of those that do. The significance of this and its potential impact on online shopping (and by extension mobile) cannot be overstated.

My initial gut reaction to NearbyNow is along the lines of: “I’ve seen this during the era of dot-bombs, and it didn’t work — why should it work now?”

NearbyNow’s press release and other articles about it mention the iPhone and how that demographic is a great target for their service and that iPhone users are a perfect fit in terms of discretionary income and such. The press release mentions NearbyNow’s new iPhone application that will allow consumers to graphically navigate shopping malls, search the inventory of stores by product, and list available sales in local stores.

The business concept reminds me a lot of StoreRunner, a local product shopping search engine back in the dot-bomb era which offered similar services, and ultimately filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in 2001.

So, why wouldn’t NearbyNow be prone to the same sorts of problems that StoreRunner had in making local product shopping search a viable enterprise? On a high level, they both have a number of parallels: they take in local store inventory data; they make that data searchable so that endusers may be able to find products listed at local stores and they can compare prices; they both are distributing the data through other sites; and both are founded on startup capital with the hopes of achieving eventual profitability.

I agree with Greg that the information and services conform closely to what consumers often are seeking, and that this syncs up nicely with existing consumer behavior (consumers have been shown to frequently research products online, find local stores online, and then go and buy the products directly at their local stores — so a service which enables one to find local stores carrying a particular product matches up with this need pretty nicely).

There’s lots of cases where some idea came about before its time, and perhaps local product search is one of those. Consumers are more educated about search these days, and may be more open to being helped by specialty search engines. Also, it could be that some of the fine-tuning of the concept could actually get it into a sufficiently profitable shape.

Some reasons why NearbyNow might perform better than StoreRunner and other predecessors:

• Greg notes that NearbyNow offers a “reserve online, pick up in store” feature;
• While mentioning the iPhone app may seem like they’re opportunistically hopping onto a popular trend of the moment, mobile apps and mobile usage could very well appeal with shopping consumers;
• Broad syndication / free API – open APIs weren’t the flavor of the moment back during StoreRunner’s day, but NearbyNow’s effort to embrace the power of Web 2.0 in this way might help them achieve broader distribution of their content than earlier companies could have hoped for;

If NearbyNow could also now achieve partnership with a major search engine, or at very least, if they could enable natural search optimization for their content, they could grow adoption of their information up past that “critical mass point” where users will wonder how they ever did without such a service. For instance, if Google were to desire to take the next evolutionary step in development of their Product Search vertical, they would provide local product search features like this along with the pure online product search they’ve been offering.

I find myself a bit skeptical, just because geolocation data has been around for so long now, and I’ve heard people saying that it will revolutionize how information is presented to us for quite some time. This concept is nothing new, though if you look at it from the perspective that Messina has provided, it’s a fairly compelling-feeling twist as a sort of infrastructure given that could and should be incorporated in the planning and development of any given internet site — particularly social ones — at their very inception.

What isn’t plain is just how integral all the locative information could be, considering the issues of unknowable error rates involved in geolocation data (see the section on “The issue of error rates” in “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space And Key To Click-Fraud Detection“) and consumer interest group resistance to pinpointing of users’ locations based upon privacy concerns (just today there was an article on how groups are complaining to the FTC about the ease of geo-pinpointing of users of mobile devices). I wish he’d touched on those aspects in some way, although I do like the techno-evangelist spin he’s provided on location as a foundational aspect in site design.

Update: Susan Mernit, formerly of Yahoo!, also points out that security is a major concern for applications like dating sites, and that there’s consumer irritation involved with some contextual advertising.

He posts an interesting graph from the Kelsey Group that estimates some fantastic growth figures for ad-sponsored directory assistance usage over the next few years.

Although I don’t really question any of the points Gregg made, I do think there’s some caveat to voice search: it’s still very prone to error, and there are some significant issues with making usable interfaces with voice/audio systems and introducing advertising into them as well. All of us have very low tolerance of phone tree navigations when we try to call company help lines, and this could easily transfer to low tolerance of audio ads. We have a fairly high tolerance of visual ads which don’t obscure info we’re trying to access on webpages, but using audio interstitials could very easily result in reducing user acceptance of some ad-propelled directory assistance, or if a user has too many experiences where they encounter errors while using them.

So, there’s likely a very thin dividing line across how long one is willing to listen to an audio ad before it becomes unacceptable, and users who encounter problems while using voice search might not ever come back again.

The sort of folx working on these applications are undoubtedly working hard to find that happy medium in monetizing while improving quality, and the ones who get it right will likely win out in this marketplace.

I previously wrote a brief critique on Goog-411 service, if you’re interested in just one example of common issues in voice search.  People with accents or even mild speech impediments have great difficulty in using voice search systems, and voice search has trouble recognizing all sorts of unusual words/names even from people with clear, unaccented voices.

I’ll be speaking on the subject of “Managing a Local/Mobile Search Marketing Campaign” on the morning of the first day. There are also a number of other interesting presentations that I plan to attend, covering subjects such as Local SEO, Pay-Per-Call Advertising, Mobile SEO, Mobile Advertising, and LoMo.

For readers of Natural Search Blog, we’re able to offer a conference discount of 20% off the full registration price if you sign up now. Just go to the SMX Local & Mobile 07 registration, and enter our discount code:

SMX20OffLM

Google’s advent of Universal Search has propelled content from a number of search verticals into the main results page, including content from Local Search in many cases. This development has opened the eyes of many marketers to the fact that businesses with local components really need to specifically target their content to appear optimally under this new paradigm.

Also, there have been a few evolutionary leaps in the development of cell phones and other mobile devices, as shown by the rapid success of the iPhone. Industry analysts have predicted that usage of mobile services in the US is likely on it’s way to becoming far more popular and ubiquitous than ever before — a situation not unlike the introduction and rise in popularity of the internet itself.

Learning about Local Search, Mobile Search, and the combination of the two (“LoMo”) is going to be vital for effective broad-spectrum interactive marketing. The SMX Local & Mobile Conference will be a great opportunity for getting ahead of the curve and discovering the latest information.

I have a bit of insider information on this subject that might prove interesting.

Two days ago, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, Marissa Mayer commented on the iPhone, highlighting how well Google applications worked on it, and admiring the rich user-interface features:

Marissa Mayer, demos the iPhone (click to enlarge)
Photo Copyright © Chris Silver Smith

Obviously, Google executives have a very high admiration for the iPhone, and it’s common knowledge that many of their top engineers are also devoted Apple computer and iPod users.

Some have opined that the proposed Gphone could be intended to compete with the popular iPhone, but there’s some reason to not believe that speculation. Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, is a member of Apple’s board of directors, and the two companies have increasingly been partnering with each other.

According to some sources I have within Apple, only two second-party applications have been allowed on the iPhone thus far, and Google built both of those: Google Maps and YouTube for the iPhone. From this alone you may see how closely the two companies are allied in mobile application development. Statements from AT&T’s Glenn Lurie further underscore how important the iPhone creators consider the Google applications to be on the devices, and it seems open to question as to whether any other manufacturer could realistically provide Google with both the hardware and operating system necessary to improve upon the iPhone.

The two companies admire one another quite a bit, and after seeing Marissa Mayer practically endorsing the iPhone at SES, I couldn’t help but wonder if Google wouldn’t have asked Apple to manufacture a custom phone on their behalf, to be branded as the Gphone. But, Apple’s never previously done private labeling of this sort, and my contacts state that Apple has no plans to do this currently.

At this point, it seems most likely that Google would partner even more closely with Apple since they complement each other so closely, as reported in this Time article: iPhone’s Secret Ingredient: Google.

(click to enlarge)

As we recently highlighted Google’s mobile phone development project, they apparently have quite a bit of interest in the mobile space. Obviously, they consider the iPhone to have very good user-interface design, since this very nearly amounted to a product endorsement. From watching this, I’d predict that Google is likely to be in talks with Apple to see if they couldn’t partner with them in some major way in order to get prominent placement through the iPhone platform, or perhaps even to persuade Apple to develop the hardware for the Google phone on their behalf.

(click to enlarge)

I think it’s moderately unusual for a high-level company representative to tout another company’s product quite so dramatically, so perhaps this could be some advance indication of a potential deal between iPhone and Apple? It’s well-known that Google engineers are frequently dedicated Apple product users, so this wouldn’t be surprising.

Search Engine Roundtable reports on the keynote conversation between Mayer and Sullivan in more detail.