AOL’s video search site Truveo hasn’t seen its name on this blog in some time. Founder Tim Tuttle used to speak at our conferences back in the day (as in 2005 … Internet years). Since then the company has quietly built itself up to the second-largest video search engine behind “Google sites” (which include YouTube and Google video), with 26.5 million monthly visitors.

This week Truveo announced a relaunch for the 17 countries where it operates. This will include a cleaner interface, fewer ads, and an extension of its index to sources that are now in the thousands and videos that total 350 million.

There will be new navigation features to better search this index, including browsing and discovery features to watch videos based on channel, category, show title, popularity and other viral features such as “most Twittered” (presumably most followed or mentioned). This is what the company needs to do if it’s to take share from the comparatively spartan YouTube experience.

Lastly, the company announced it will work with Univision to power the video search on its site. This could be a good combo, as Univision brings more and more of its video content online. Stepping back, this also represents a model Truveo could move toward, as more and more television properties move content online and will need ways to index, search and present the video in a compelling way.

More partnerships like this also presumably add to Truveo’s library and boost its content that can be accessed across its network and on Truveo proper.

Following our recent conversation with Verve Wireless’ Greg Hallinan, the company announced today that it has expanded its list of newspaper partners to include MediaNews Group, A.H. Belo Corp., Hearst Corp. and Cox Newspapers.

This will bring The Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News, The Palm Beach Post and Examiner.com into its roster. With this list, it’s becoming a powerhouse for building mobile Web sites and apps for local media companies. All totaled, it now mobilizes about 450 properties and covers the top 200 U.S. markets.

The other notable part of this release plays off Hallinan’s main point in our last discussion: utilizing the iPhone 3.0 upgrades to build better Web apps. In other words, the enhanced capabilities of the Safari Web browser now make it an attractive place to build mobile Web sites — having some functionality previously reserved for more resource-intensive native apps.

So as projected in the last conversation, Verve will now offer publishers an easy way to create a specialized version of their mobile site that takes advantage of these new Safari capabilities. These include location awareness, a shortcut for users to place a bookmark on their home screen, and the rich page layout and navigation fit for an iPhone screen.

This should be a compelling proposition for newspapers and should lower the barriers for them to create highly functional mobile sites. The press release, in fact, calls out the same newspaper we used in our last post, indicating the demand for mobile news content from iPhone users in certain geographies.

“The demand for this new module was stemming from news organizations like The Orange County Register,” reports the release, “who see in excess of 40% of their mobile web traffic coming from iPhones.”

Today I had the chance to talk to Big in Japan cofounder Alex Muse. The company is behind the popular ShopSavvy mobile application that scans bar codes to offer consumers product info.

This includes pricing, specs, online availability and other info that is continually building into the product. Recently, for example, the company partnered with Krillion to pull in its local inventory data. This localizes it by allowing users to see who has what products nearby and how much they cost.

ShopSavvy gets most of its use from the Android platform, as it’s not yet available on iPhone (coming soon). It was one of the winners of the Android developers’ challenge for mobile apps about a year ago and now has about 3 million users.

“On a slow day we’ll get 600,000 scans per day, and on a good day we’ll get closer to 1 million,” said Muse. “We look forward to ‘Black Friday.’ ”

Evolving the Product

Next up, according to Muse, could be a “quick pay” button that lets users preprogram in their PayPal, Google checkout or other payment accounts so they can order things quickly. This “one button” payment takes the friction out of online ordering and could be particularly useful on the mobile device where the name of the game is minimizing input requirements for the user.

The scenario basically is that you can scan items in stores, see if there are cheaper options online and then quickly order them. I guess it would have to be significantly cheaper to recoup shipping costs, rather than just pick up the item you’re standing in front of, but I can see this being valuable for expensive items that have wide price variances.

Next up could also be some user-generated content features such as letting users indicate items or prices that may not already be in its system. It’s also working on a “wish list” feature for the holiday season. This will let people scan items in stores and create a kind of registry that can be shared with friends via Facebook or other social channels.

A few other things are on the horizon that I can’t talk about yet, but they are exciting. We’ll also get to see much more of the ShopSavvy app as Android will start to power many more devices throughout the remainder of this year and into 2010. There is also an iPhone app being submitted for Apple approval, which Muse hopes will be launched by next month.

Overall, the transparency allowed by ShopSavvy is one of the things that’s made it so popular. Unlike the majority of the apps out there, it’s also built for and around the unique aspects of the mobile device; it’s not just a Web site on a small screen. It gets points for utility and “cool factor,” and could gain more recognition as Google educates the marketplace through its own similar mobile shopping product recently released.

Speaking of Google

Meanwhile, ShopSavvy is shooting for affiliate revenues through finished transactions that come through its system. It also has an auction model built around the SKUs — the basic units of its product searches (compared with keywords on Google). Muse cited  Forrester data that clicks on Google average about 5 cents to 6 cents per click, while a mobile bar code scan is valued at about 15 cents.

“They are worth more, but the challenge is that there are relatively few of them now,” he said. “The numbers aren’t as attractive for Google. But for a company like us, on the lower end, if I get 15 cents for 600,000 scans per day, that’s not so bad.”

MobileCrunch reports leaked info that the Sirius iPhone app has been downloaded 500,000 times in the past week. Along with the growing success of other music apps such as Pandora and imeem, this is telling of the level of demand for radio-like music discovery mobile apps.

It’s also telling of the opportunity for the radio industry to reach users on their mobile devices. Currently there are iPhone apps from television and radio stations from companies like News Over Wireless that are consistently in the top 100 list of news applications.

But the real opportunity for radio could come with sending an actual broadcast signal to mobile devices. It will require chips that receive broadcast signals, costing about 50 cents each to install. Factions of the radio industry are currently hard at work lobbying for federal mandates for these chips.

Their argument is that it can enable a much more effective mobile emergency broadcast system than the currently proposed SMS system. But it can also open up business opportunities such as identifying and ordering songs (via iTunes perhaps) that are received via broadcast.

There is a parallel effort happening in television: After all this talk of 3G and 4G requirements to stream mobile video, what about the broadcast technology that is already pervasive for video delivery (short of chips at the receiving end). This was a big topic at the Winning Media Strategies conference last month.

This is a big opportunity for broadcast media, but there are lots of moving parts to making it happen. Mandating embedded hardware is just one. For me, cultural adoption is another: Overall, the media world is moving away from scheduled content and toward on-demand content. Broadcast media’s capabilities tend to be more toward the former.

On the other hand, there are technically ways to integrate the two-way communication inherent in a Web-connected mobile device in order to interact with the incoming content. And again, the popularity of music discovery apps (less based on content “pull”) such as Sirius and Pandora is supportive of radio’s potential on the mobile device.

Federal mandates for embedded chips will be the next big step though. Either that or the required hardware will be integrated into a future version of the iPhone. Given Apple’s ability to move markets, other ODMs would follow. Maybe in addition to lobbying Washington, the radio industry should lobby Cupertino.

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Some of these topics will be on the roster of a webinar we’ll hold at 2 p.m. EST today.

Intel and Nokia announced yesterday that they are working together to build a mobile platform.

This will utilize the mobile chipsets to which Intel has increasingly been devoting resources lately. It will be an open platform built on a Linux-based OS, available for mobile devices including smartphones and netbooks.

We’ve heard rumors that Intel was working on actual mobile device hardware (read: phone), though it seemed rather unlikely. It’s clearer now that this will involve a line of Nokia mobile devices built on Intel chips.

After TomTom’s much touted iPhone app announcement, made in conjunction with the 3G S announcement, AT&T yesterday announced it will launch an iPhone version of its Navigator personal navigation system. It will include spoken directions, business listings from Yellowpages.com, and a pretty standard list of features for navigation apps and PNDs.

Here are the rest:

– Automatic Content Updates: No manual updates required. The latest map and navigating details are automatically available to subscribers at no extra cost.

– Voice and On-Screen Turn-By-Turn Directions: Real-time voice and visual guidance, including street names, automatic re-routes, ETA and total mileage updates. Drivers can also choose among multiple route options, including ‘traffic optimized’; ‘fastest’; ‘prefer streets’; ‘prefer highways’ and ‘pedestrian mode’ to ensure the most customized navigation experience.

– Speech Recognition: Touch and talk capability for instant turn-by-turn directions to destination.
Traffic Alerts: Real-time route monitoring and proactive searches every five minutes for traffic congestion or incident. Voice and on-screen alerts, plus faster route options provided.

– 3D Maps: Full-color 3D moving map brings navigation to life. Maps provide details on current location, plus streets and interstates within driving distance.

– Business Listings: One-touch access to more than 10 million business listings from YELLOWPAGES.COM. Plus, access to business ratings, phone numbers and one-touch dialing.

– In-Route Customization: Users have the advantage of finding convenient rest stops for gas, food and other needs along their current route - saving both time and mileage.

– Online Trip Planning: Preplan trips, save addresses and manage travel accounts online at www.navpreplan.com. Save locations and send directions straight to iPhone.

With growing smartphone capability and penetration, expect to see many more of these. Increasing numbers of navigation apps for smartphones (versus a separate PND) will cause price competition. The AT&T Navigator app for iPhone will cost $9.99 per month, billed by AT&T.

This is also an interesting model that answers one of the criticisms toward the business of app development — the challenge in making sustainable subscription revenue. AT&T is in a unique spot to do this because of it’s ties to the iPhone and existing billing system for its subscribers.

But we’re also seeing lots of transaction and payment systems developing in the mobile space, which could cause an increase in subscription services for more functional native apps. Currently subscription services are mostly limited to mobile web based services from carriers — again tied to carrier billing.

See the video on AT&T Navigator here.

Following our interview with location-based mobile company Geodelic, it put out a release today announcing a $3.5 million funding round and an app for the upcoming HTC MyTouch 3G (a.k.a. “G2″). The funding, led by Clearstone and Shasta Ventures, appears to be the public disclosure of an earlier round.

The app, customized for the G2, will be known as “Sherpa” and will have many of the features we profiled in last week’s post. Covering the news today, TechCrunch echoed our sentiments that the application’s passive or automatic features will minimize typing, and boost its appeal and market penetration.

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Related: In other mobile funding news, SMS campaign management company Tagga announced a $400,000 funding round led by independent investors in the U.S., Canada and U.K.

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

JitterGram for Local Merchants: ‘Show the Phone!’

A lot of small businesses are tinkering with mobile media, especially adding Twitter. We heard recently from sales consultant Mel Taylor that Naked Pizza in New Orleans, which is backed by netpreneur Mark Cuban, is getting 15 percent of its walk-ins via Twitter. (read more…)

Can Coupons Revive Yellow Pages?

Here is an interesting item from the local CBS station in San Francisco. Apparently a 20 percent off coupon in a San Francisco Yellow Pages directory (the item doesn’t say which one) for the Rainbow Grocery in the Mission District is so popular that it has made the local book a hot commodity, at least for bargain organic grocery shoppers. (read more…)

Publishers Moving Into Social Media With New Brands

According to an article this week on Forbes.com, AT&T will launch a Yelp meets Yellow Pages site later this year. The new site will carry a new brand that does not invoke Yellow Pages, but something that appeals to the non-Yellow Pages crowd, namely people under 30 who rarely or never use the phone book or an IYP. The article cites AT&T’s David Yoo in explaining how the site will perform in a different manner from Yellow Pages, while leveraging YP content: (read more…)

TV and SMS: A Conversation With SinglePoint

Today I had the opportunity to catch up with SinglePoint Marketing Director Philippe Poutonnet. SinglePoint powers all the text-in response campaigns for Bravo (”Top Chef,” “Project Runway,” etc.), MTV, Viacom and other top networks. This usually involves “American Idol”-style voting for a variety of programming.Users who text in are typically given a response that SinglePoint has begun to utilize for targeted opt-in ad delivery. The response could include a link to a mobile site, a mobile video, click to call or a coupon. (read more…)

3GS to Cause Another Bump in Mobile Web Traffic

Apple’s much awaited iPhone 3GS has shipped and will be available in stores tomorrow. Some pre-orders have already been fulfilled, and the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade was released yesterday (compatible with previous version iPhones). Needless to say, the news media and blogosphere have been abuzz over the second coming of the iPhone 3G. (read more…)

SuperpagesDirect’s DM Card Pack

The extension of Yellow Pages’ reach via other media is well under way. We’ve seen versions of Yellow Pages advertising on the Web, CD-ROMs, billboards and interactive TV. And we’ve heard Yellow Pages advertising on various phone services as well. (read more…)

Geodelic: Drilling Deeper on Mobile Local Content

Today I had the chance to talk to Geodelic founder Rahul Sonnad, former Microsoft engineer and founder of thePlatform (acquired by Comcast in 2006). Geodelic, founded in 2008 with funding from Clearstone and Shasta Ventures, is working on a somewhat novel approach to location-based mobile apps. Instead of just locating the nearest gas station or coffee shop, it goes deeper to provide info on what different locations are all about. (read more…)

AdMob: 40% of iPhone Users Access Mobile Web More Than Wired Web

AdMob today released the latest in its string of data points of consumer mobile usage. Like many of the past data the firm has released, these are supportive of the opportunity to advertise on iPhones (mobile Web sites and apps).Most notably, the data reveal that 40 percent of iPhone and iPod Touch users access the Internet more frequently from these devices than from their home computers. This is a pretty significant figure. (read more…)

MapQuest Launches iPhone App

MapQuest today announced the availability of its MapQuest 4 Mobile iPhone app. Its previous moves into the iPhone were limited to an iPhone optimized site, otherwise known as a Web app. MapQuest 4 Mobile is a native app, which can be downloaded in the App Store and has much more functionality. (read more…)

Today I had the opportunity to catch up with SinglePoint Marketing Director Philippe Poutonnet. SinglePoint powers all the text-in response campaigns for Bravo (”Top Chef,” “Project Runway,” etc.), MTV, Viacom and other top networks. This usually involves “American Idol”-style voting for a variety of programming.

Users who text in are typically given a response that SinglePoint has begun to utilize for targeted opt-in ad delivery. The response could include a link to a mobile site, a mobile video, click to call or a coupon. Because this is done on an opt-in basis to a self-selected audience, response rates tend to be high when compared with average online CTRs.

This also allows for attractive ad targeting, said Poutonnet. It’s essentially the same audience segmenting afforded by television programming (a subset of the same audience) for a fraction of the cost. SinglePoint’s advertisers include top brands interested in this type of targeting, such as BMW, Dell and P&G.

Going Mobile

There is still an imbalance between the sell side and the buy side, however, said Poutonnet. Though mobile engagement rates are rising rapidly, advertiser interest is still in an early adopter phase. Many still see it as “experimental,” a scenario made worse by the current economic environment.

Poutonnet sees an upswing however, and believes we are crossing the mark when it is becoming more of a mainstream ad medium. SinglePoint has, in fact, started about 100 new campaigns since the beginning of the year. Ad fill rates are currently only at about 30 percent of eligible SMS inventory, but this is rising, he said.

Following advertiser adoption will come greater degrees of sophistication with respect to targeting age groups, genders, income levels and location. SinglePoint’s ad marketplace SingleBrand (see video) offers this AdWords-type dashboard for ad targeting.

One of these targeting metrics, location, will become more and more important as advertisers realize the location targeting capabilities of the mobile device. Many advertisers are just entering the mobile space and will need some time to figure this out.

An increasing amount of SinglePoint’s inventory is location targeted, according to Poutonnet. For that it’s working with HipCricket, a good source of locally targeted SMS ad inventory that we’ve written about in the past. HipCricket CEO Ivan Braiker was also a speaker at our recent WMS conference.

Brand Extension

For now, SinglePoint is in a good position with the SMS search inventory it has, and the rising interest in mobile marketing on the part of many brand advertisers. As discussed at WMS, the opportunity for many brands is to use SMS calls to action to extend the brand beyond the impressions they’re getting from traditional marketing.

Media companies at the local and national levels meanwhile benefit from this same concept. Their opportunity is to provide mobile as a component to the media they are selling. It can be either a retention tool or a means to incremental ad revenues. Either way, it adds a measurable component to what was otherwise an impression-based media.

Demand will continue to shift toward more measurable, trackable and performance-based media — good times or bad. This will be discussed in a BIA/Kelsey webinar next week. The challenge for media organizations, agreed Poutonnet, is training media ad sales reps to know how to sell it.

“We spend a lot of time training sales forces how to sell our product,” he said. “Some advertisers know it and are asking for it. But many need to be educated.”

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Related: Here is more on how SinglePoint is working with NBC Universal.

Apple’s much awaited iPhone 3GS has shipped and will be available in stores tomorrow. Some pre-orders have already been fulfilled, and the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade was released yesterday (compatible with previous version iPhones). Needless to say, the news media and blogosphere have been abuzz over the second coming of the iPhone 3G.

We’ve been light on coverage of the 3GS because many of its features, though notable, don’t have a lot of direct ties to mobile local search. The mapping and location awareness baked into the new version of the Safari mobile Web browser do have important implications though (see SEW column).

I discovered another interesting angle last night (via GigaOm): The improved capabilities of the 3GS and the new 3.0 software will bump up mobile Web use. Usage gains will come from increased iPhone sales as well as existing iPhone owners accessing the mobile Web with greater frequency. Don’t forget, the iPhone accounts for the majority of mobile Web traffic happening today.

Specifically, Chetan Sharma predicts that the iPhone 3GS will increase mobile Web users 1.5x to 2x over current levels. He supports this by pointing to the increase in mobile Web use in Europe after the releases of the last two iPhones.

IPhone aside, competitive pressures will continue to drive innovation and pricing that make smartphones more mainstream friendly. Palm Pre’s availability for 80 million Verizon subscribers at the beginning of next year, and a continued march of new smartphones (see latest T-Mobile Dash) will ensure this. Google has already stated publicly that Android will power at least 20 new devices by the end of the year.

Get ready for the smartphone wars.