Interesting story at SearchEnginePeople.com this week about the coming boom in local search on mobile devices. In the piece titled Local Search Predicted to Be Killer App for Mobile Phones author Tom Tsinas wrote "According to a new Juniper Research report, 1.3 billion 

mobile users are expected to use local mobile search services by 2013. While the trends bode well for for the mobile search industry (agencies and marketers alike) the report goes on to caution that these numbers are based on a good user experience. Mobile devices however appear to be catching up to user expectations with the iPhone getting 50 times the amount of searches than the other leading handsets!"

Since the iPhone (and other products in the pipeline) can deliver readable versions of current websites, this news, from a domain perspective, will probably further fuel the debate over how much need or demand there will be for the scaled down websites prescribed for developers in the .mobi extension aimed at mobile devices.

In any case, the Juniper report said that local search is expected to account for 43% of cumulative mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013, reaching total revenues of $4.8 billion by 2013. User response rates to advertising which supports mobile local search are expected to be significantly higher than for advertising on general mobile web search.
(Posted May 8, 2008)