Mobile evangelists pine for killer app

The waiting game for a mobile Internet surge continued at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco, but there were glimmers of reality, too.

"What can I do with this that's going to fundamentally change my life?" asked John O'Rourke, general manager of ISV developer and competitive strategy at Microsoft, referring to a mass-market killer app for handsets that have become as powerful as the PCs of a few years ago.

Even RIM, which won over enterprise users to mobile with push email, sees an urgent need for things that stick with customers.

"The key issue we have in front of us is increasing the number of compelling applications" for both consumers and businesses, said Alan Brenner, senior vice president of RIM's BlackBerry platform. "Today, we are still underserving the market in a major way."

Although most companies aren't yet making much money in location-based services, it's one area where users are getting more active, according to a panel discussion on that topic.

One-quarter of all searches on JumpTap's mobile search engine have been for local results, with 40 percent of those are searches for a place where the user was heading, said Paran Johar, the company's chief marketing officer.

On Yahoo Mobile, ten percent of searches are for local business listings, according to Lee Ott, global director of Yahoo OneSearch. Skyhook Wireless, which makes technology for showing mobile users their location based on Wi-Fi hotspots and nearby cell towers, has received "billions" of location requests from users, said Ted Morgan, the company's co-founder. "It's an incredible volume, and a huge spike just in the last three months," said Morgan.

The recently introduced location-enabled version of Google Maps for Mobile was getting double the use of the previous version, said Steve Lee, a project manager at Google.

But the big breakthrough for location capabilities will be integrating them into applications that aren't built around location, they said. For example, Sprint Nextel is trying to get consumer electronics manufacturers to build location capability into devices such as cameras to enrich the experience of using them, said Rick Robinson, vice president of products and services at Xohm.

Location data will be most powerful in combination with other information, for tightly focused advertising. For example, there are already databases with demographic information about people who live in a particular neighborhood.

"There are databases that know a tremendous amount about you based on where you live ... that's how you get all those catalogs in the mail," Morgan said. Adding in information from mobile phones could add, for example, knowledge about where people who live in an area go during the day, which has never been done before, he said. "This is a piece where you tie together Internet, mobile, and thirty years of direct marketing experience," he said.

"The dry cleaners, they're barely advertising online. They're not going to start advertising on your mobile phone any time soon," he said.