Finding a restaurant, getting directions or checking movie times is a quick phone call away on a mobile phone.
InfoSpace, Inc., a leader in online and mobile search, announced the launch of InfoSpace Local, a new local search Web site which allows consumers to find highly relevant listings including neighborhood businesses, white pages listings, event information, maps, directions, and useful Web pages. The site also features multiple keyword searching, time-based results such as movies and events, and a send-to-mobile feature which allows users to send information to their handsets, creating continuity between their online and mobile experiences. The new service, currently in beta, is available at local.infospace.com.
InfoSpace also announced the launch of InfoSpace Find It! with Sprint Nextel. The industry’s first comprehensive local-based search product for mobile phones.
InfoSpace Find It! allows consumers to easily and quickly find everything from nearby restaurants and movie times to people, maps and driving directions all in one integrated application. Both InfoSpace Local and InfoSpace Find It! demonstrate the Company’s commitment to providing the highest-quality local search experience online and on mobile devices.
They have long talked about using this technology to offer commercial services, although, like many data services such as cell-phone Web surfing, such services have been slow to emerge in the mainstream.
The $2.99 a month service, called "Find It", combines location aware phones and directory information from InfoSpace Inc. that lets users search out locations without having to enter a postal code or even know where they are.
U.S. operators are required by law to put positioning technology in their cell-phones that allows safety workers such as police to pinpoint a mobile caller’s location in an emergency.
But the service from the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider may be the first with potential to create mass appeal as it is easy to use and was designed to work on 70 percent of the service provider’s roughly 48 million subscribers’ phones from the most expensive to the cheapest, according to analysts.
For most mainstream consumers I do not think they have had the option to have an application like this before, said M:Metrics analyst Mark Donovan, who believes consumers are more likely to use their cell-phone to find information when they are not obliged to type in location details.
"InfoSpace’s new local search services are the result of extensive research on user preferences and experiences from online and mobile devices," said Rod Diefendorf, vice president of online and local search.
The service works on GPS-enabled phones and phones that do not have GPS by using the nearest cell-phone tower as a locator.
The application is pretty basic. The main menu provides three options: search by name, search by category and map or directions. At the top of the screen is the address where you are.
By clicking on categories, you can search through a number of options, such as the nearest ATM, movie theaters, banks, malls, parking garages, cleaners, restaurants and more. Click on "restaurants," and you can choose type of cuisine. If you need help finding the place, it will provide turn-by-turn directions or a map.
"InfoSpace Local and InfoSpace Find It! meet the consumer demand for more personalized and relevant local information and helps consumers easily and quickly discover things to do around where they are or will be."
InfoSpace is not the only company targeting this space.
Initially Sprint and InfoSpace do not plan to charge businesses for being listed in the directory but such services are eventually expected to create advertising revenue.
InfoSpace Chief Executive Jim Voelker said the company could charge merchants for example if they are put in a prominent place in the list or if they want to display coupons for free coffee or ads indicating current sale products.
"I think that stuff will develop over the next few years," Voelker said in a recent interview.
Kelsey Group analyst Neal Polachek estimates that the advertising market around such services could worth $561 million a year by 2010 but he said it ‘could be significantly more than that,’ if services like InfoSpaces gain popularity.
Voelker said the agreement with Sprint was not exclusive and that InfoSpace is talking to several other mobile service providers about providing the directory product.
Existing services, including a local search service from the most popular Web search engine Google Inc., are more awkward to use on cell-phones than the InfoSpace offering which was designed specifically for phones, the analyst said.
"What is very elegant about what they have done is they have made it possible for me to search a wide range of information using just my thumb and a single button on the phone," said Donovan, noting that if for example the user searches for a movie, details of nearby restaurants and ATMs are also shown.
InfoSpace Local breaks out of the limitations of city, state or zip code search by allowing users to personalize their searches according to their neighborhood, a landmark or a point-of-interest. It also allows users to do more targeted searches using multiple keywords.
For example, users searching for a hotel that has a fitness center simply enter the keywords (hotel and fitness center), and a location — perhaps a landmark — in order to receive a comprehensive list of hotels with fitness centers near a certain landmark. Each result displays highlighted keywords to indicate its relevancy to the search and each result is accompanied by contact information including an address, phone, maps and directions, and the ability to send the contact information to a mobile phone.
To deliver the most relevant local search results, InfoSpace Local searches its comprehensive business listings, which have been augmented with product, service, movie and event information drawn from a wide variety of databases such as the yellow pages, newspapers and other sources. Additionally, InfoSpace leverages its proprietary metasearch technology to search the Web and return the most relevant local results to a user’s query.
InfoSpace said about $3 billion is expected to be spent on mobile directory assistance this year.
The opportunity is not only in collecting a monthly fee, but also in advertising revenues, said Polachek. "It is potentially much bigger," he said. "It would not be just directory assistance, but local mobile search with an ad revenue model."
Voelker said that eventually he could see InfoSpace’s application becoming free, but he is not sure how that would work yet. The mobile phone does not have the PC’s advantage of having plenty of screen space for a banner ad. "We have to watch the volume in order to justify the administrative work that would be required to do it," he added.
Altogether, InfoSpace Local is able to deliver an enhanced local search experience that connects users to the local information they need.