SnapTell, which we’ve covered before, is a leading provider of image-recognition based mobile marketing services, that today announced they’ve reached a milestone with their revolutionary service.

With their recently released “Mobile Entertainment Explorer” user’s can simply snap a photo of things like CD covers, DVD and BluRay covers, and various games with their camera phones, send it via MMS to SnapTell, and instantly be returned a series of content related to the specific title.  Content like reviews, prices, run times, descriptions of the content and links to buy the DVD, CD or video game, plus more can be sent back to the user via MMS.

Even though it’s still a relatively new service, SnapTell has already grown it’s database to over one million titles, which is quite an accomplishment.  Since it’s ever-growing, it won’t be long until users can access just about any information regarding any media title available using it’s image recognition technology.

The system uses their popular Snap.Send.Get platform that’s available on any mobile device with a camera.  Since it uses MMS transmissions, it needs no special software running on the device, and since the image recognition server can decipher an image of low or poor quality, almost any camera phone can be used to snap the photo.

“…We’re dedicated to providing consumers the simplest means to access desired information on their phones, and now reaching one million in entertainment titles empowers the consumer to make smart decisions when they are out and about and away from their PCs,” said Gautam Bhargava, CEO and Co-Founder of SnapTell. “As we push the image-recognition technology frontier, we will provide solutions similar to the Mobile Entertainment Explorer that help consumers with their day-to-day decisions…”

If you’d like to try out their Mobile Entertainment Explorer, head over to their website to view a demo.  You can simply snap a photo of a DVD cover they’ve displayed, send it as an MMS to fun@snaptell.com, and see the technology in action.  Pretty cool stuff.

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Of the myriad mobile sites and services on the horizon, those that capture my fancy are the ones that serve the most practical of purposes.  Needless to say, when I learned of PhoneFavs, a mobile optimized web portal and online bookmarking service designed for cell phones and portable gadgets, I was instantly intrigued by the prospect of gaining mobile access to my frequently used and abused bookmarks.
 
According to the site, PhoneFavs “allows you to view and use your bookmarks on a mobile device in an easy to use small screen format. You can store, organize and share your bookmarks and access them on any device, anywhere. You can even import your existing bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and del.icio.us.”

Perhaps most conveniently, PhoneFavs additionally provides a mobile web directory, a mobile software store, and a mobile web transcoder that “mobilizes” more elaborate, larger web pages for optimal viewing on a small cell phone screen.

• Favs Portable Bookmarks: PhoneFavs lets you keep a list of bookmarks online in a mobile friendly format. Your Favs can be tagged, searched, shared and mobilized at your convenience. PhoneFavs’ bookmarking utility works best in combination with your primary desktop computer. With the browser buttons in place, you can easily save sites you might want to bookmark or visit later on your mobile device.
• PhoneFavs Mobilizer: The Mobilizer is a mobile transcoder that automatically adapts standard web pages for better viewing on a mobile device. It removes most images and formatting for greatly improved readability and faster load times. An icon on your Favs list will open your saved Fav with the mobilizer or you can enter any website address from the PhoneFavs homepage to browse the web in a small screen friendly format.
• Directory: The PhoneFavs mobile link directory includes over 300 handpicked sites optimized for use on mobile phones. There are over 25 categories and subcategories of destinations and you can suggest a site if we don’t have it listed.
• Mobile Software: PhoneFavs offers a mobile optimized software store. The store offers thousands of free downloads and commercial titles for many popular smartphones including devices running Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian (Nokia S60) platforms. Customers can download free trials and even purchase applications right from their handset.

Although it is customized for mobile access, PhoneFavs is said to work best in conjunction with a desktop browser. The PhoneFavs browser buttons allow users to quickly bookmark webpages or other content of considerable length and store it on PhoneFavs for viewing on your mobile device at a later time.

In addition to being free and able to safeguard the privacy of the sites visited and content saved, PhoneFavs is easy to use and a quickly addictive tool.

Visit pfavs.com with your web browser and check it out for yourself.

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In a fight to become the first point of contact when accessing the mobile web, Yahoo is set to launch yet another mobile service aimed at bringing together all the content user’s scour the web for into one centralized portal.

We reported on another service set to launch in Q2 2008 called OneConnect that searches the net and a user’s various social networking accounts to find contact details for their friends and incorporates that info into a user’s mobile address book to centralize communication. OnePlace, set to launch in Q2 as well, is a similar concept but aims at bringing together all the various content a user searches for and checks on into a central portal on the user’s device.

Using familiar bookmarking techniques and RSS feeds, the content you access often can be easily organized and dynamically updated without interaction from the user, providing a quick one-stop access point to the content you access often. Basically any type of content you access on a daily basis can be organized, updated, and accessible with one click. As per the onePlace website;

Because it’s based on a familiar bookmarking process, it will be easy to link practically any piece of content (news feeds, websites, videos, images, emails, search queries, etc.) into Yahoo! onePlace from anywhere across the Internet. It’s also designed to make it a snap to instantly link to all your favorite content that you’ve already personalized on Yahoo!—such as your My Yahoo! feeds, Flickr photos, stock portfolios, etc.—as well as from other popular websites including Digg®, YouTube®, Last.FM®, Facebook® and Google®.

Yahoo has been busy producing dynamic mobile applications and inking deals with mobile providers to become the first point of “mobile web” contact on mobile devices. Why you ask? Advertising. So far Yahoo has found it’s way onto 600 million mobile devices worldwide through it’s connections, but aims at being on 750 million by years end. In addition to OneConnect, and OnePlace, Yahoo has introduced OneSearch, and an iPhone-specific Yahoo portal to their arsenal of mobile applications.

Yahoo is trying to position itself as the starting point to accessing mobile content across all mobile devices. By doing this, they set the stage for themselves to reap the advertising revenue benefits. Marco Boerries, who’s leading Yahoo’s mobile drive, stated that there’s just to many different mobile platforms and technologies, and that until they’re somewhat centralized to one distinct platform, it’ll be difficult to access a broad user-base.

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Mother always said nobody likes a know-it-all. But the folks behind AskMeNow, a US based company offering consumers an exciting mobile search product, have made mom’s advice as outdated as the pay phone itself.

Although still in development and haunted by the occasional bug, this fast, easy, and dare I say addictive service is off to an impressive start. By using proprietary technology mobile customers can gain quick access to telephone listings, weather reports, sports scores, movie times, directions, travel information and even horoscopes.

If you’re wondering how AskMeNow is different from the other mobile-enabled search engines, you can ask almost any reasonable question and receive a prompt and “specific” answer in return. That is, instead of receiving a list of links to help you search further, you’ll get a direct answer to your initial inquiry. Utilizing both groundbreaking search technology and a little bit of human assistance, virtually any question text messaged will result in a helpful answer returned via text message.

Of the three questions I asked today, two were replied to in fewer than thirty seconds, while the other took about a minute. All three questions, however, had one thing in common: the right answer. When asked who won the NBA All Star Game, the current temperature in Chicago, and the Capital of South Dakota, the technology and humans behind AskMeNow (maybe they’re cyborgs) were accurate each time.

It’s a fun service with a lot of potential. Best of all, in the US and Canada the AskMeNow SMS service and downloadable applications are provided at no charge from AskMeNow. However, standard messaging and data fees do apply. And as the official website acknowledges, some carriers do charge an additional premium fee for the service. But no one is charged without first being notified and agreeing to the premium fee, which is charged directly to your carrier bill.

To check it out yourself (and maybe learn a thing or two), visit AskMeNow’s applications page and get started.

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Generation Y will dramatically change the face of retail marketing over the next 10 years. Bold statement right? Not really if you ask me, folks in this generation are totally at ease with mobile technology and it’s their goto method when they do just about anything which increasingly includes shopping.

If you missed it, Jayne O’Donnell wrote a featured story on mobile shopping this past Wednesday in the Money section of the USAToday and it heavily focuses on how this younger generation is routinely turning to their mobile device as a primary method for their shopping needs. Go read it and you’ll see that this demographic is all over mobile things such as:

• mobile coupons
• text ads
• mobile search services
• cellfire
• NearbyNow
• slifter

NearbyNow is a unique mobile marketing service that the teens and twentysomethings are totally into. This 40-something gets it too. I used it this afternoon during my nutty Christmas shopping adventure. The shortcode for the mall I was at is CU to 632729 (lookup your shortcode). Within seconds I received a menu of options, I wanted to see Sales so I Texted back the sales option. Again, within seconds I had a few Text messages that listed all of the stores that had listed Sales within the NearbyNow system. I texted back the Disney Store option and received yet another text listing:

• Tinker Bell Fleece $10, Reg. $17
• Pooh Fashion Sweater $15, Reg. $20
• My Size Jasmine Plush Doll $23, Reg. $30

That’s mobile marketing folks and it’s how the up and coming generation is getting things done right now. Go read the USA Today article, Jayne writes about how the teen and the parent will both shop at the same store except they’ll use completely different methods. The teen or digital millenial as Laura Evans calls em, is all about using mobile services while the parent is not.

I receive the offline version of the USAToday and this story in the offline version has a graphic that illustrates a JupiterResearch study which indicates that teens are twice as likely to use their mobile device for Texting and other non voice related applications, this illustration doesn’t appear in the online version of the story. Not sure why but it’s important because that’s the shift that’s taking place in how consumers shop.

Oh, and I opted into the NearbyNow future sales list for this particular mall. That’s more mobile marketing because the system they are using is proactively looking to add users to their database. It was double opt in which means I agreed to join the list and then had a second confirmation. That’s the approach you want to take help keep a clean list.

If you’re a retailer and want to implement a campaign like the one I mentioned above, touch base with any of the mobile marketing firms that I’ve previously covered, they’ll be glad to assist you with your mobile marketing campaign. The mobile marketing companies listed in the top of the grid are all hyperlinked.

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  A couple of days ago Yahoo made a significant change to the main search bar on their home page by rolling out an auto suggest feature.

You’ve seen these before… start typing and a results panel starts filling in suggested search results; Google has one (not on the home page) and so does Ask (theirs looks the coolest). Heck, even I made my own with a search engine I built for the community I live in. Only Yahoo and Ask have it baked right into their main search bar though on the home page. Anyhow, that’s not why I’m posting though I love the feature.

Just at the edge of the fold on the right side I found Yahoo oneSearch. I’ve not noticed Yahoo promote their Mobile Search Channel via their home page before. I’m sure it’s been there but I’ve never seen it.

It just so happens that I’m in the market for one of those really cool Dyson Vacuum Cleaners. I was in Target about an hour ago and hesitated on their price point. So, I used oneSearch to see if I could find some pricing and I hope someone from Yahoo is reading this because my first impression isn’t so great. Why? Take a look at the marketing piece that got me to oneSearch and you’ll clearly see that it leads folks to believe that “pricing comparisons” can be made. That’s really a stretch, this is not a pricing comparison service.

Here are my first results for “dyson” with “tampa” set as my location. It’s easy to see why I was disappointed right? Prices, where are the prices?

I even wandered into the detail to see if I could get a price. Nope. Although, for you marketers in the crowd you can see the power of Mobile Search by looking over this next snippet… Here you’ve got a mobile device, a merchant, a hot linked phone number to immediately connect the buyer and seller.

I also searched for my hometown “Oldsmar” and oneSearch impressed me with the results. The oneSearch mobile results are 10 times better then the main Yahoo Search Engine that I use in my web browser. Those results are filled with spam. Oh and I learned how to leverage Flickr on oneSearch. At the top of the “City Guide” results for “Oldsmar” were 3 Flickr photos that are tagged with “oldsmar”.

I like the search, I’m still trying it out but I don’t like the marketing piece that got me there, that was sneaky. An idea for Yahoo would be to mobilize Yahoo Shopping which is a true Shopping Comparison Engine.

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 Earthcomber just announced in my comments that they’ve delivered an Earthcomber App for the iPhone.

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