High Speed Internet Access (HSIA): Mobile Broadband

People want a different experience from traditional home and office computing when using mobile broadband. They’re not sitting in front of a large screen with a keyboard. They’re on the move with a smartphone or a netbook and the overall experience has to reflect the different requirements of this environment. In addition to this, a large percentage of mobile broadband users are fully immersed in social media which means sharing, communication and interactivity.

Touch screen devices like the iPhone make it easier to browse the web in a mobile environment. The challenge is now on for developers and content providers to respond to the mobile trend and create user experiences appropriate for mobile Internet.

Taptu are launching a new service which will enable mobile search on touch screen devices. The service will provide a new experience for mobile users in a number of areas:

• Searching will be more collaborative in that popular searches will be displayed for easy access. Search results will also be searched between friends easily without having to type friends details but by integration with email and twitter.
• The search results will be displayed in a card format rather than a list format. Cards can be flipped over to reveal more content detail.
• The search results themselves will be pulled from a variety of sources and are likely to include more social media content from sources such as YouTube and social media sites like MySpace.
• Related content will be suggested and can be explored easily enabling deeper, exploratory searching.
  Advertising will be more interactive giving users the option to explore the ads and see more detail using a variety of media.

So, where is it all going? Taptu offered some industry predictions as summarised in the excellent msearch groove blog.

1. Total global mobile search volume will grow rapidly from 63 million searches per day at the end of 2008 to 620 million in 2012 – almost 10 fold growth in just four years.
2. The volume of searches from touch phones will grow even faster, to overtake the volume of searches from normal phones by the end of this year.
3. By 2012, over 60 percent of all mobile searches will come from touch phones alone, representing less than 10 percent of the installed base of phones and just 20 percent of annual shipments.

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