Local Search & Share™

Local Search & Share™ is designed to equip partners with a customisable turn-key local search and share service that they can brand and offer to their consumer customers.

In addition to offering standalone services that can be deployed on web-sites and mobile phones (browser and client based), Local Search & Share™ can also be fully integrated with existing touchpoints with consumers – such as web-sites, voice directory enquiry services and mobile operator portals.

This is summarised in the diagram below:

Search

m-spatial’s search capability is underpinned by the Local Search and Discovery Engine (LSDE)™.

This delivers a search experience that is underpinned by rich and dynamic structured content – rapidly aggregated from both commercial and user generated sources. The resulting ‘rich experience of place’ not only ensures a ‘sticky’ user experience attracting high levels of repeat use – but one that specifically removes the significant barriers to mass market usage on mobile devices.

For example, Local Search & Share™ offers the ability for consumers to ‘discover’ the business that best meets their needs via a map-centric ‘assisted browsing’ user interface, to complement the search box interface most relevant to searches conducted ‘by name’.

In addition, the mobile local search capability can be quickly integrated into third party mobile search products handling on and off-portal search of non local content.

Share

Having obtained an accurate and rich result to their query, Local Search & Share™ importantly allows consumers to ‘take it with them’ for access via a mobile phone or personal navigation system. This can be achieved through a ‘send to mobile’ button or toolbar for use via web-sites, or via the addition of WAP links to standard 118/411 voice directory assistance services – effectively allowing the user to ‘Spacemark’ a place, underpinned by the same mechanisms used within the Spacemark service.

In addition to gaining mobile access to the results of search queries, this mechanism importantly provides the user with the ability to access a full ‘rich experience of place’ centred around their chosen business – offering maps, directions and a mobile local search capability.

Consumers are also able to share results with friends and colleagues via email, mobile messaging, or an existing community infrastructure,– providing an extremely effective viral mechanism to achieve ‘self promotion’ of services.

Monetisation

In addition to ensuring a compelling user experience, Local Search & Share™ also offers a compelling advertising inventory for advertisers wishing to reach consumers who intend to visit a business of a known type in known area – most likely with an intention to make a purchase, either of goods or services.

m-spatial maintains a network of relationships with advertising partners that can be used to help monetise services in this way. m-spatial is also able to work with brands’ preferred advertising partners if required.

In both cases, m-spatial offers a sophisticated mechanism that enables highly contextual advertising to be deployed as the prime mechanism for monetising service usage – which optimally balances the needs of consumers for non-intrusive and relevant advertising with the advertiser’s requirements to get relevant messages in front of as many consumers as possible.

As an alternative, m-spatial is also able to support an ‘end user pays’ model for circumstances where brands prefer to bill consumers for service usage, either on a subscription or per event basis.