InfoSpace.com is an interesting mobile company. It’s a mobile web pioneer<\/strong> – launching it’s first mobile site – a phone directory search eight years ago. It’s a real survivor<\/strong> too. The company weathered the original Internet bubble, the early failure of WAP and it’s own mismanagement<\/a> to build a relatively successful business creating mobile sites and back end services for mobile providers. Some of the services InfoSpace provides to carriers include portals, messaging, white label web and directory search services and content storefronts. InfoSpace’s customers include ATT, Virgin Mobile, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Verizon. The company has been much in the news of late. First a rumor that it was about to acquired which gave the stock a nice, if temporary lift and then news that InfoSpace had sold<\/a> it’s Moviso <\/em>mobile content (ringtones, graphics and games) division.<\/p>\n
One thing I like about InfoSpace is that the branded mobile sites they create for carriers are sometimes served on public IP addresses. That means they can be browsed from any carrier or even using a desktop browser. Current examples include the ATT Media Net<\/a> portal and an astrology page<\/a> for T-Mobile.<\/p>\n
InfoSpace also has a big desktop web<\/strong> presence with phone directory and local search sites Switchboard <\/em>and Infospace<\/em>.com and a bunch of meta search engines including Webcrawler<\/em>, Dogpile <\/em>and Zoo<\/em>.com. In spite of this, InfoSpace hardly participates in the off-portal mobile web at all. Until recently the only non-carrier branded InfoSpace sites were a wml-only portal (infospace.com\/wap\/index.wml<\/a>) that has been around for years and another long running portal site for Avantgo (infospace.com\/__info.avant\/<\/a>). Both of these portals provide News, Sports, Weather and the company’s directory search services<\/p>\n
I was surprised when exploring Frog<\/a> (review<\/a>) to find that one of the optional links that you can add to your Frog homepage, an ATM Finder, was a deep link into a new unbranded local search and directory site from InfoSpace. The site is called InfoSpace FindIt<\/em> (wap.infospacefindit.com)<\/a> . InfoSpace has just launched GPS enabled Java version of FindIt which is a $2.99\/month (60 day free trial) subscription product. More information on the Java version of FindIt can be found on this product page<\/a>. It looks like the free mobile website is being offered as an alternative for phones that can’t run the Java application.<\/p>\n
I was curious to see how FindIt compared with the other six mobile search engines I reviewed in Local Search Shootout<\/a> last month so I ran FindIt through the same two tests, a search for “Sushi” in 94132 and another for “Western Wear” in Dublin CA.<\/p>\n
InfoSpace FindIt scored as follows:<\/p>\n
Total:<\/strong> 9 points<\/p>\n
Link: <\/small>
wap.infospacefindit.com<\/a> (xhtml-mp\/wml)<\/p>\n
InfoSpace.com is an interesting mobile company. It’s a mobile web pioneer – launching it’s first mobile site – a phone directory search eight years ago. It’s a real survivor too. The company weathered the original Internet bubble, the early failure of WAP and it’s own mismanagement to build a relatively successful business creating mobile sites and back end services for mobile providers. Some of the services InfoSpace provides to carriers include portals, messaging, white label web and directory search services … Continue reading