Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The telco industry may be coming around to intelligent mobile search vendor AskMeNow’s way of thinking. The company relies on proprietary technology to let users use natural language to make their queries, and it’s also the semantic/natural language brains behind AskWiki.

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Just launched in October, AskWiki is billed as a natural language search portal that provides specific answers rather than articles to many basic queries, and is built in a way that lets the AskWiki engine improve the accuracy of its results based on user feedback and collaboration.

In a conference call this week to update investors on the status of the three-year-old start-up, chairman and CEO Darryl Cohen noted that the company has for the last couple of years had to fight an uphill battle with carriers that wanted to charge for using the application. Acknowledging that it’s been a tough year for the stock, Cohen noted that the fee-based approach doesn’t fly in an age when people are used to getting their content (mostly) for free on the web, and expect the same from the Internet or WAP sites. After waiting years for the telco industry to offer content for free with advertising support, Cohen says that there is now acceptance for and validation of ad-supported mobile search engines.

“Now that our product is available free, and we have relationships with some of the premier ad-serving agencies that sell ad space for us, as the product goes live on many phones … we will be attaching ads to every single answer, sometimes one ad, sometimes two ads,” Cohen says. “The net of it is that the entire industry of telecom has moved to the understanding that people are going to the Internet on their phones, they are doing text messaging, and they are reaching out away from their phone. Now is the time to start using these impressions to put ads on them.” There are 250 million mobile phones in North America, and about 100 million text messages sent daily, he noted.

The company is partnered with two ad-serving companies that sell its ad inventory. Ads go for at about $20 to $30 per one thousand impressions, which AskMeNow splits with the agency, carrier and/or content partner. Cohen said that AskMeNow could be live on as many as 30 million mobile phones in North America over the next twelve months, not to mention about 10 million more as the search engine that drives customer service interactions for some of the most sophisticated cell phone users.

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Because of the semantic nature of its technology, AskNow is poised to provide more substantial customer interactions than the fairly basic communications so far common to advertisers that want to have a presence in the mobile world.

“Imagine a pharmaceuticals products [company, which offers] through text messaging or a WAP site the potential for customers to ask more involved questions” about an ad they’ve received, he says. They could use natural language to ask, for instance, whether they can take the medication they’ve learned about with another medication. “This makes it a much richer experience,” he says.

It’s now all about getting impressions, and getting page views. Each daily push from content partners’ services, such as Encyclopedia Britannica sending out a word of the day, is another impression for an ad and another opportunity to generate revenue.

“If 100,000 people a month get one push a day, that’s 3 million page views. That’s a lot of views. And they will ask lots of other questions during the month and most likely get lots of other alerts. So it doesn’t take a lot of people to generate a lot of ad impressions,” Cohen says.

The company also says its new WAP site, in beta now, should be live in the next three to four weeks.

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