MoMo Bangalore: Mobile Search

Last Monday, I was at the Mobile Monday Bangalore. I have talked about my experiences with MoMo in my earlier post. This time the topic on hand was on Mobile Search. The founder and CEO of Ziva software Ajay Sethi presented there mobile search platform Zook.

Though the presentation was mostly on what Zook and how to use Zook. The ensuing discussion brought some interesting points in the mobile search space. The discussion brought the following issues to the forefront.
i) LBS in search. The influence of search results based on the location of a person.
ii) Search results based on the previous searches. (The system capable of adapting itself to previous search)
iii) Use community as source of information.
iv) Voice based search.
v) Results based on recency, frequency of the data.
vi) Phonetic based search to eliminate typos.

Check out the last lines of this post for a summary of my views.

There were some other questions on the business model of Ziva Software but was not discussed at length. Zook is the technology behind JustDial. For more juice about Ziva and the story behind check this interview with Ajay Sethi by Ashish from Pluggd.in

I have mentioned Active Mobs! in my last post about MoMo. This time around I got to see one more start up, this is in the Social Networking Space. Check out BabaLife, I got to meet the person behind this and see a preview of what is to come. I am sure if it is anywhere close to what it promises it's going to give a run for money to all others in the space. Infact, I might be the first blogger to release the juice about BabaLife here. I promise you, I will get you more juice on it. Just keep tuned over here.

Apart from that I got to meet Param from Onwardresearch, had a brief talk on what his company does in the area of user research. Check out his post on mobile search here. He's also a very good photographer, check his work here. Had a great time with a few folks over beer. And that's about it.

To come back to the mobile search, it is definitely a different ball game. In here apart from what is searched, the context, time plays a very important role. The usage patterns matters a lot more than what it does in the web search. Will have to see how Google, Microsoft Live Search, and others take on this area. What do you think??

If you have something in the space of mobiles, drop by a few comments. I will be happy to take it up further with some of these folks who are really cool and know their turf i.e. Mobiles.