You can search from your desktop PC for nothing more than the cost of Internet access, but if you want to use your mobile phone to search-- for a restaurant, a movie theater, a florist or a taxi—then get ready to pay $1 to $1.50 for a 411 directory call. That is, unless you’ve signed up for UpSnap, in which case the cost is the penny or two that most wireless carriers charge to send or receive a text message.
San Francisco-based UpSnap lets callers use Short Message Service (SMS) to request connections to businesses, services or even people in their vicinity. The start-up rolled out its first vertical service early in November: a free wireless directory service, using search results from sponsored listing provider LookSmart.
“We were trying to figure out how to bridge wireless with paid sponsorships and Internet search,” says UpSnap CEO and co-founder Tony Philipp of early brain-storming sessions for UpSnap. That’s understandable; Philipp was formerly the COO of Web portal Lycos Europe and business development VP for upstart search engine Vivisimo, and his co-founders came from the search and mobile-calling industries.
Discarding visions that relied on mobile Web browsers and GPS positioning satellites, they realized that 160 million cell phones in the U.S. can now send and receive text messages—and do so easily, to the tune of 2.5 billion SMS messages a month.
Here’s how it works. Users set up a free account by entering their mobile numbers on UpSnap’s Web site. They program the UpSnap contact number into their phones. When they need a referral anywhere in the U.S., they can send an SMS to that number, listing the name or type of business to be found and something to indicate where they are-- a city name, an area code, a zip code or even the local airport abbreviation. They can also simply request certain keywords, such as “taxi”, with their positioning info. UpSnap goes to LookSmart for the paid listings of up to four subscriber businesses that fit the bill and sends those back to the user in a text message.
Beyond getting addresses and phone numbers, users can request to be connected automatically to one of the businesses. Callers choose merchant A, B, C or D from the text message and hit “reply”. Receiving that reply, the UpSnap platform initiates calls to both merchant and user, then connects the two. UpSnap charges merchants for this service on a per-use basis.
“The value-add here is tremendous at both ends,” Philipp says. “For businesses, it’s an adaptation of the toll-free model that grew up in the ‘80s. At the end of the month, the business owner gets a bill for the number of calls connected, so he or she only pays for results.” (Businesses also pay for LookSmart listings.) Callers not only get mobile directory assistance for next to nothing, but they don’t have to hang on the phone waiting for the merchant to pick up.
Mobile search has recently attracted the attention of some of the biggest engines on the Internet. In late October, Yahoo unveiled a browser-based search feature for Web-enabled phones. That was seen as a counter-move to a Google announcement weeks earlier of an SMS search function for finding local businesses.
Philipp says UpSnap’s query platform is more flexible and usable than Google’s, which relies on zip codes—something travelers rarely have at their fingertips. “Why should you have to remember the zip code for New York if you live in Denver?” he says.
The mobile directory space is just developing, so it can grow in any number of different directions, Philipp says. One possibility is letting merchants include discount coupons in the SMS listings sent to users. Given the upper limit of 160 characters in a text message, the coupons would be short and plain-spoken; but they could be effectively convert already-motivated seekers into buyers.
Another future scenario made possible by UpSnap: A customer prices a power washer at Home Depot, then text-messages UpSnap to search out the address and number of the nearest Lowe’s hardware outlet. He is connected, and the merchant offers him 10% off the list price if he buys in the next 15 minutes.
“That kind of selling is only possible if you catch the consumer in real time at the moment of the buying decision,” Philipp says. “UpSnap can do that.”