Group items tagged

Anyhoo, more interestingly, mobile search is booming, with 32% of searchers with internet-capable cellphones now searching for local business information, an 11% increase from 2008. Some 60% of smartphone owners search either via their on-board browsers or via applications, and you can bet most of those will be iPhone users.

The study also shows that the most popular local content categories searched on mobile are directories (42%), maps (41%), restaurants (37%) and movies (30%).

Google showed off on December 7 a prototype of its mobile tagging technology. The company is “QR” barcodes to more than 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. Mobile users can snap a picture of the bar codes and obtain information about that business — including reviews, coupons, and other information. (Smartphone users need an app on their phones that can read the QR codes.) In January 2009, Microsoft launched a beta of its own bar-code search technology, known as Microsoft Tag. It also introduced a free mobile tag reader. Microsoft, being Microsoft, couldn’t simply rely on the QR standard. Instead, it announed it was creating its own bar code technology that stores more information, more dynamically, offering more user choice. It’s cool that Microsoft Tag allows developers to determine the content and experience users will have by allowing choices of text, video, maps, discounts, promotions. But the lack of QR support is a deal breaker for some.

The promise here is simply massive. The peril comes in alienating people from the concept of free-form visual search because the engine is running only on one cylinder.  

Google introduced several other products at its event on Monday. The most ambitious, called Google Goggles, allows people to send Google a cellphone photograph of, say, a landmark or a book, and have information about the contents of the image returned to them instantly.

About 72 hours ago, the RedLaser 2.5 update was published to the App Store.  It was a soft-launch with our new partner, TheFind, which is the fastest growing search engine for shopping in the US with over 400 million products in its search index.  In the 2.5 release we also improved our scanning speed (6% faster), and made a handful of interface improvements.

The number of people who use social networks from their smartphones skyrocketed 187%, to 18.3 million unique users, in July, compared with the same month a year earlier, says Nielsen. Social networking is among the fastest-growing activities on mobile devices, along with search and checking news, says Jon Stewart, Nielsen's research director for technology and search.

About 65 million of Facebook's 300 million members are mobile users. Eight months ago, it was 20 million. Of MySpace's estimated 125 million members worldwide, about 25 million use mobile devices. A year ago, it was 6 million.

For Apple (AAPL), the short answer is: The iPhone will continue to apply the Macintosh method—that is, controlling all or most of the user’s experience—with similar results: smaller market share, disproportionally larger profits than the separate hardware-software crowd. More on this later.