So I am playing around and see there is a new app from Bing.  I like Bing maps on the PC but was curious that a Microsoft service would be on Android (Google) phone. LOL  I noticed Greg Sterling briefly commented on the app at Search Engine Land, Bing Mobile App Comes To Verizon Android Handsets. Right now I am holding off on it, but we will see. 

As I am looking over the app(s), I got an email from my good friend Stacy Williams over at Prominent Placement.  The article,  written by Star Bradshaw, was entitled The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance Will Affect Your Business. Thought it was interesting that as I was looking at the Bing app, I get an article about Bing. “Got to write about this one” I thought.

Overall I thought it was a great article. Star says, “This impending alliance shouldn’t be ignored – it will produce a significant change in the search landscape. Though Google’s dominance is undisputed, with more than 65% of the market, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo combined hold a 30% share, which represents a viable alternative to the search behemoth.”

Star comments on how to deal with or protect your organic listing(s) and your PPC visibility with the coming change.  She provides a nice set of links to Bing resources as well as Yahoo and Microsoft transition centers sites.

So if you are actively marketing and listed in Bing and Yahoo, you need to spend the time and see what is in store for you (and us). Thanks for the article Star and Stacy!

Q. What is schmap.me?
A. Schmap.me is a simple way to share map links using a meaningful, memorable, custom url.  For locations that you share frequently this can be a much more effective way of communicating location than sending a cumbersome google map link. For example, you can see the schmap.me url for Donald McMillian, VP of marketing. It includes additional information related to the location, such as phone numbers, directions, and photos – schmap.me/donald.mcmillan

Coincidentally, venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently commented on exactly this issue on his blog – http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/linking-to-google-maps.html (we’ll have to get him a schmap for Union Square Ventures)

Q. I see you have a limited number of preloaded cities on your publish or widget programs. Will those cities listed be expanded at any time?  What if someone like myself wants to publish or schmap about something not in one of those cities?
A. We do plan to expand those cities for which we offer browse-able guides, but do not have a release schedule at this time.  However, our services, including schmap.it, schmap.me & geotweeter, are designed for the sharing of information from any location.  And in fact we have seen schmaps created for places in all corners of the world, in cities as wide ranging as Singapore, Moscow, New York, Reykjavik, and many many more.

Q. So how can a small business benefit from using schmaps?
A. Many small businesses are already using Twitter for local marketing: bars tweeting happy hours, stores with discount sales, restaurants promoting lunch specials, realtors marketing property – these are examples of local businesses trying to drive foot traffic from Twitter for commercial gain. Schmaps give these same local businesses a much better way to do this – extending a 140 character tweet into a rich local marketing resource.

Q. Are they any costs involved in using your site/services?
A. The basic service is free, with an optional $9.95 /month PRO account for power users. The PRO account has some nice additional marketing resources, including tweet scheduling, direct message and @message marketing campaigns, and the ability to track campaign metrics. We’re currently offering a limited number of free PRO accounts – details at www.schmap.it/PRO-account-for-FREE – if any of your readers would like to take advantage.

Q. Where do you see local mobile marketing going in the near future.
A. Right now, we’re seeing an epic commercial migration taking place at the intersection of ‘local’ and ’social’. The same local restaurants, bars, shops etc. that took ten years to discover the Internet are now adapting to Twitter and Facebook with much greater speed, finding some great opportunities to engage local consumers with a blurred mix of content, service and local marketing. Local consumers are increasingly accessing social networks and local content from mobile devices: we see the future of local mobile marketing being driven by these two trends – local businesses going ’social’ and local consumers going mobile.

Again, I want to thank Paul for his time and insights.

Mobile-local and social-local are growing areas small business needs to understand and areas where they can reach more potential clients. Schmaps is one of those companies doing some interesting and cool stuff online in the mobile-social-local market. I wanted to learn more, so I reached out and was able to interview CEO, Paul Hallett of Schmap. Below is part 1 of that interview. (The more I investigated their site and business, the more questions I have. I hope I covered everything you might have a question one.)

Q. Good day Paul, can you tell us a little about your company?
A. We started out in 2004 – at that time, there were just three of us, developing a platform to combine maps with local content (reviews and photos) in a compelling and dynamic way. This platform became the foundation for our popular Schmap guides – www.schmap.com – a series of desktop and mobile local guides for 200 worldwide cities.

Q. What is schmap currently doing?
A. Our current focus is at the intersection of local and social, making it easier for local businesses to reach local consumers, and help these same consumers discover vibrant, real-time local content. One aspect of our rollout here is the geoparsing of content shared on social networks. Taking Twitter for example, at any point in time, there’s a wealth of vibrant local information being shared in tweets: people tweeting about great restaurant experiences, bands tweeting about gigs, bars tweeting about happy hours and so on.

The challenge is filtering and deciphering: if someone tweets ” Cool bash tonight at Joe’s”, has that person just returned from a private party at a friend’s house, or is there some kind of event coming up at Joe’s Bar? What is the event, where is Joe’s Bar, and who might this information be relevant to? The second aspect of our local/social rollout is http://schmap.it – a Twitter app for event marketing and local promotion.

Q. I recently signed up for that app,  can you tell us what this new tweeter app does?
A. Our schmap.it Twitter app basically allows the user to add rich local content to a tweet, in the form of a schmap – a map with text, photos, hash tags, and functionality that allows the recipient to retweet, add comments and RSVP to local events. The app is designed for commercial users – event promoters, marketing professionals and local businesses trying to drive folk from Twitter to real world locations: we saw a gap for this type of service left by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla (services that focus on individuals sharing their current location).

Q.  After looking at your website, can you tell us a bit about your mobile apps….Schmap GeoTweeter?   Any Android or Blackberry versions coming out?
A. Geotweeter is an app that allows users to share their location via twitter as a customized map that can include photos, notes and custom icons. It was among the first iPhone apps to combine GPS coordinates with Twitter’s service.  We are currently developing a new iPhone app that uses many of the concepts from Geotweeter, but will integrate with our offering of real time local information.  We are considering Android and Blackberry platforms for development following the release of the iPhone app, but have no firm plans at this time.

I will end Part 1 here.  Tomorrow I will finish up the interview but if you are interested, you can sign up for a Free PRO account at  http://www.schmap.it/PRO-account-for-FREE.

“When a user visits 8coupons.com, the map on the homepage will automatically populate the Top 8 most popular deals based on his or her IP address. This ensures that anyone who visits the site will see the deals that are most relevant to them specifically.  The Top 8 deals will change dynamically as the user moves the map around to different locations, zooms in on a specific street, or narrows down the deals by sub-categories such as restaurants, entertainment, beauty & spas, services and shopping.”

From reviewing their website, it looks to be a pretty cool service. I checked for coupons in my neck of the woods and really did not see any, so I am assuming it will take some time to filter down to the small markets.

Greg Sterling also commented about 8coupons on his site, so you might want to check it out. Greg did say (and I agree)  “Coupons, wither mobile or online only, are extremely popular and successful as a marketing tool with consumers. It’s also one of the few forms of mobile advertising that consumers are highly receptive to.”

“Poynt’s restaurant search feature rounds out the already robust business, movie and people search offering, while maintaining its ease of use and outstanding graphical user interface. The section features enhanced restaurant listings and enables users to easily find nearby restaurants, read reviews and book dining reservations. To enhance the user’s experience, icons are displayed when restaurant reviews or dining reservations are available for a restaurant listing.”

I was allowed to test a beta copy of the updated app and I must say, they are doing everything correctly. Poynt makes it so easy to find, map, and contact businesses or people.  I highly recommend this app for any Blackberry user.

Why do I tell you this? If you are a small business, you need to take notice that more and more apps are making their way into the consumers’ hands (either via Blackberry or iPhone). To be found via these apps, you need to make sure your business is listed in the appropriate places. For Poynt, they use such sources as SuperPages, WhitePages, Yelp, CitySearch, YellowPages.com

You can’t win if you are not in the game!

So the question I have is – Do small business owners need a smartphone? In general, I would say yes.  Statistics are showing that more and more consumers and business owners are using and “playing” with smartphones. I read one post recently (can’t remember where) that the author predicted there would not be any more cell phone packages, just a fee for data connections.  Mobile search and mobile apps are here to stay!

The two main smartphones are the iPhone and Blackberry. Each has it own pros and cons but both can accomplish the same goal-help you manage your business.  As more and more apps are being created for these phones, it is becoming easier for the small business owner to do almost anything he needs to on his mobile device.  You almost do not need a laptop.

As I said before, now that I have a Blackberry I can do so much while I am away from my desk. As a web marketer and webmaster from clients, I can:

• check email
• surf web
• manage my voicemails, call forwarding, etc
• manage my social networks
• read blogs
• update my own blog (began writing this post on my Blackberry!)
• ftp files to and from the server
• create, edit documents and so on.

It just amazes me, how much I can do on this small device.

As a small business owner, you need to keep an eye on what is happening in your business and community. If you find yourself on the road a lot and  not in front of the computer, but you want to be able to connect with customers quickly and easily, smartphones are the way to go.  When I turn on my Blackberry in the morning, I feel like I am opening for business that day. LOL.

So:  do you have  smartphone? what kind? what is the main thing you use it for?

Overall I like the app for the following reasons:

• easy to use interface
• excellent response time
• none or minimal memory leak
• was built specifically for the Storm
• great price tag
• company stands behind product

For some great screen shots, check out their  product website and click on the different components listed.

After testing the app, I sat down with Dan and picked his brain about fone book.

Q. Dan, one the big things, with Storm users is memory leakage. Did you guys test this?
A . We have designed the fone book to have a small device footprint and a very low operational memory overhead. With the app on and running in background, our bench-testing has been unable to detect any negligible additional drain on battery life.  We have done a significant amount of memory leakage and security testing on the fone  book. In over 100 hours of bench-testing, we have not been able to detect any memory leakage what so ever. Both memory leakage and security have been concerns of ours from the early stages of our development process.

Q. How does fone book search listings?
A. This comes close to some proprietary information but I can give you a generic answer. We use a couple of logic streams, one for People Search and one for Business Search. However, both use a 35-mile radius logic when either no exact match is found to a specifically named search target, or if you are searching within a general business category. The search system is something that we consider to be a continual work-in-progress for us.  Our data partner has been extremely helpful to us and has permitted us a wide range of input into the development of our search system. So this is something that will only get better as time and experience build and user feedback comes in.

Q. Where do you get your data from?
A. While not at liberty to name names at this point. For a typical user of the fone book or for anyone using a search tool of any type, they don’t want all of the answers to everything “ they only want the right answer to their query – now.

At the present we work with a data aggregation company. This firm draws data from three of the top directory sources in the US for our residential search and two of the top data sources for business search.

Q. Does fone book use the Storm’s GPS features?
A. No. Using the GPS as part of an upcoming upgrade/enhancement is under consideration, but there are two main reasons that I don’t feel that it is a core to our product. First, GPS as a feature has a number of user experience drawbacks and I don’t feel that it is one of the stronger features of the BlackBerry Storm. When implemented on our test application, it created memory leaks, degraded battery life and inhibited the speed of result delivery to the user. For now, we feel that until the GPS feature is significantly improved, we would just as soon not include it in our app. The second reason we have not included GPS is due to user feedback.

Q. What makes fone book different?
A.  The fone book does one thing and does it very, very well. But to more clearly articulate what differentiates us from the rest of the din in the market, I would have to say that first and foremost, it is our orientation. This is an app that was literally built by and for Storm users. We have resisted the temptation to build in opulent features, complicated menu trees and multi-step processes.

All that we wanted to do was to build a useful tool for BlackBerry Storm users. We wanted to build something useful to a broad spectrum of users whether they were a business user, a road warrior, a soccer mom or just someone who wanted a good phone that did more.  It needed to be something that would be used every day and would be as useful and used in 2 years as it would be in the first 30 days.

It is fairly innovative to show all the necessary information in one, single frame for the user. So if you have a contact, you can see the address, the phone number and can see the map of where that contact is located, all without having to page from one view to another. Fast, easy and efficient.  Then, within the same view, you can click-to-call or click-to-add to your contacts. All without a lot of complicated intervening screens and menus. To summarize, our main difference is that the fone book is a small, simple app that does what we say it will do. It does it very, very well and adds to the value of the Storm as an advanced, smart tool to the end user – all for a reasonable price.

Q. Speaking of price, what sort of price tag are we looking at?
A. We are being very aggressive here.  The trend in the greater BlackBerry apps eco-system for high price concerned us. We didn’t want to contribute to that trend, so we set $2.99 as our full retail price. Now I want to caution you. That is a lifetime price, not a 6-month service price and includes updates and email support for as long as you own your Storm.

Q. What are future upgrade plans?
A. We have a lot of ideas for future upgrades as well as other products along this same line for the future. First would be to fully integrate the BlackBerry Contacts into the fone book search UI. That would mean that if I am looking for someone and they exist in my contacts, the would be displayed in the fone book search results along with the same data display as is now done for search contact details.

Next, we are looking at the possibility of adding reverse search by address, in addition to reverse search by phone number. Then you can find, neighbors and people near by from your fone book. Then there is always working through the issues of GPS and beginning to find a way to bring that functionality into the fone book and add to the user experience at the same time. The one thing that we intend to do in moving forward though is to listen. We want to hear from our users.

Q. Where do you search mobile search going in the near future?
A. To me mobile search has had a bad rap up until now and for good reason. To this point, developers and applications have tried to take the desktop computer search experience and replicate it on mobile devices. It hasn’t really worked.

Mobile devices are getting closer to the speed of desk-top computing, but let’s face it is a tinny screen and doesn’t have the computing power, so it just isn’t working. The user experience is not what it should be and the overall performance of the search applications just doesn’y fit in the small box environment of mobile devices. Apps like ours specific or spot solution search tools  seem to fit this mobile environment far better than the search portal concept. The user experience is far superior and the utility and functionality of search as a function becomes far more human tool oriented when this approach is applied. Users benefit, mobile carriers benefit and those app developers who tap into this will benefit. To me, this is the necessary direction of search in the mobile device eco-system.

Congrats to Dan and BlindingRain on great new app for the Storm. As of this writing, the app should be available from Mobihand – more details to follow.

Q. Why did you decide to make a mobile app also?
A. I believe mobile is the purest form of local.  I also noticed that the IYPs rushed to the marketplace basic mobile apps.  Although they are good applications, most of the IYP companies just don’t get it when it comes to getting it right for mobile.  The core technology behind many of the IYP platforms don’t seem to be properly optimized and/or structured to offer relevant and personal search results. We thought that was a better way. And we set out to create it.

Q. Where do you see mobile search going in the next few years?
A. The mobile application that gets it right will move toward a personal advisor system that has the ability to learn, store, and predict your needs based on you search habits.  It will be able to offer quick, local, relevant, and personal (anonymous) information for the consumer.

Q. Is there any special features of the app that you do not have on the standard website?
A. With our iphone app, consumers can find local business information including driving, biking and walking directions to a desired location. As well as its unique accuracy, iLPS presents you with a map view first, so you can quickly determine which businesses are nearest to your present location. iLPS is truly a local positioning system for mobile searchers, as they can retrieve a map and business listing with only one tap.

Q. Currently it is for the iPhone and iPod touch, will any other platform be coming out?
A. As the iPhone dominates the smartphone consumer market for sales, YellowSpaces has invested in that platform first. Our next phase will be to develop an application for BlackBerry and then continue to monitor the market for other smartphone platforms that gain traction.

Q. Is there a mobile friendly version of the site?
A. YellowSpaces also offers a mobile site, http://m.yellowspaces.com for consumers with any smartphone to access our local search engine.

Here are a couple screen shots:

You can download this app via your iPhone by searching iLPS. Thanks again to Constantin S. Manta of YellowSpaces for your time and good luck with the new site.

Just recently the developer of app, updated it to work better on and with the GPS on the Blackberry Storm.  As any good Storm user, I downloaded Beyond411 and began to play around with it.

Beyond411 is a non frills apps that gives you lots of local search information. Some of the key features are (from their website):

• Speed: Beyond411 launches and searches faster than other search tools
• GPS support: Beyond411 can do searches and give driving directions based on your current location on compatible phones and carriers.
• Blackberry address book integration
• Local prices search using Yokel shopping search.
• Search Plugins allow you to add and share new kinds of searches.

The search feature will allow you to search near your home, work, and “other” addresses that you preset. Also you can search:

• Yellow Pages – local businesses by name or category
• White pages – residential listings
• Web search
• Movies
• Shopping

I reached out to the developer of Beyond411, Phil Bogle to get some more information and background info. Here is our conversation.

Q. Can you tell us what Beyond411 is/does and why you created it?
A. Beyond411 makes it easy to search for local and web information on your Blackberry.  When I created Beyond411, there was no easy way to find this information on your Blackberry.  Today, there are excellent apps like Google Maps, but Beyond411 retains an audience because of it’s emphasis on simplicity and speed.

Q. How can one get this app for their phone?
A. Just point your phone at http://thebogles.com/b411.jad, or use the form at http://thebogles.com/berry/beyond411 to email yourself an install link.

Q. What are the plugins, you have listed on the site? How do they work?
A. The search plugins are contributed by users; they allow you to do searches on a variety of web sites (e.g wikipedia) while taking advantage of Beyond411s content reformatting, search history and autocompletion, and location information.

Q. Can you tell us a little about you /company?
A. I am a developer at iLike, one of the leading social music sites on the web.  Beyond411 is a side project in my spare time, it has about 100K active users.

Q. Where do you see mobile search going in the future?
A. Search for local businesses and events will remain the most popular kind of mobile search. Mobile search will be dominated by the big players like Google with some innovation around the edges by smaller companies. Mobile advertising will become a viable business model. In the future, nearly everyone will have a smart phone with GPS and a large screen, and will install mobile apps to help them search.  Voice and image recognition will take off as ways of simplifying mobile search.

Q. Anything else you would like to add?
A. I am actively looking for partners to help me take Beyond411 to a larger audience.

Thanks for your time Phil and for you Blackberry users, here is another good local search app for your phone.

I have found a few great posts on where mobile search is going and what folks see coming.  As a small business owner, mobile search is a fast growing area that you should take advantage of.  Read on….

Cisco predicts 4G to boost mobile data consumption: “Cisco is predicting that global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013, with a compound annual growth rate of 131 percent over the same period. This growth in mobile data consumption reflects an adoption of 4G….but we’re also seeing a complete transition from dumbphone to smartphone.”

Mobile Internet will grow dramatically despite economic downturn: “Consumers intend to dramatically increase use of mobile data services over the next two years ? with a significant ramp-up in the next 12 months.”

Mobile data services are not a luxury, but a necessity that consumers plan to purchase despite economic conditions, said Pat Dolan, vice president, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Tellabs. By planning urgent and strategic network upgrades, operators can quickly and cost-efficiently address users issues and meet increasing demands on networks.

The Local Mobile Opportunity … “Yes We Should: “With estimates as high as 10 million iPhones sold in 2008 and smartphones being the fastest growing segment in the market, Internet-enabled mobile devices are a very attractive opportunity. Why? Because mobile search, at its core, is local search.

Consumers look up 58 billion numbers a year, most to connect with a business. So where do they look those up? Yellow Page Directories, 411, ask a friend? For how long, when it’s so easy on a mobile phone or mobile app? Consider what people are doing on their mobile phone every day.”