Get Your Ask.com On-The-Go
Amit Chowdhry | Thursday October 12, 2006 | 818 views
IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) owns search engine Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves.com). The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) announced today that Ask.com has launched a search service for mobile phone, Blackberry, and PDA users. The mobile service is called Ask.com Mobile.
One of the cool things that Ask.com did to provide swift information-collecting for users is minimizing keystrokes. An example mentioned in the WSJ article is that if people are looking for a weather report in a certain area, users just need to type in the area code and click on one the weather link that comes up. I have not heard of any other mobile search providers where you can find a weather report for a certain area in 1-2 clicks.
Ask.com’s VP of product management, Doug Leeds stated “We know that consumers are increasingly looking for search offerings while they are on the go. Ask.com wanted to develop an offering that would help to minimize thumb strokes so that consumers find what they are looking for faster.” Other Ask.com features on the mobile service include an image search, directions, yellow pages, currency conversion, and horoscopes.
As I mentioned in a previous [post], many companies have an increasing desire to profit from mobile advertisements. Microsoft signed a deal a couple of days ago with an advertisement provider and already have mobile phone ads whereas Yahoo! and Google are working on doing the same. Right now, it is unclear as to whether Ask.com Mobile will be pursuing mobile advertisements as well.
Ask.com was founded in 1996 and is now a part of IAC Search & Media. The founding architect of Ask.com, who now works at Symantec Corporation is Gary Chevsky .
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