Mobile Search

Stephen Ives

The technology for desktop search is well established and its mass adoption by internet users has driven the growth of two big global players: Google and Yahoo. Yet adoption of search technology by mobile internet users remains astonishingly low — less than 0.5% of desktop search volumes. In my presentation I examine a number of possible reasons for this:

Limitations in device screen size and resolution
Length of user navigation time to get good results
Fragmentation of device types making user interface optimisation difficult
Low usage of microbrowsers and the mobile internet in general
Lack of interesting mobile-optimised content to search
Lack of optimisation of desktop search engines to the mobile user context

During the next five years, some of these constraints will remain but others will be swept away. A new generation of mobile search technology is being created, much of it by start-up companies, which will radically change the way we use mobile devices. I will present some of the work that Jamtap and others are doing in this area and will then open up the topic for wider discussion.

About Steve Ives

Steve Ives is founder and CEO of Jamtap Ltd, a Cambridge, UK-based startup company working in the field of mobile search. Between 2000 and 2004 Steve was founder and CEO at Trigenix Ltd, a pioneer and leading innovator in the field of mobile user interfaces. After its recent acquisition by Qualcomm Inc, Trigenix technology now powers the user interfaces of many of the latest 3G handsets being launched into the consumer market.