March 29, 2004

Overture Services has launched a mobile travel directory in the UK provided by location-based mobile marketing firm Mobile Commerce.

Overture and Mobile Commerce will start distribution through Vodafone UK and Orange; other participating operators will be announced shortly.

Users browsing the travel section of a network operator's Wap portal -- such as Vodafone Live! and Orange World -- will see links to a menu allowing them to select the travel service they are interested in.

The system will return a basic display of results, and the user can click through to the advertiser's Wap page for more information.

Advertisers can bid for paid listings against specific keywords, which are prioritised according to the top paying advertisers for the category requested -- advertisers will pay Overture once the user has clicked on their link.

Martin Child, managing director Overture Northern Europe, said: "It is our mission to provide paid-for listings to find new ways to connect with customers online and so mobile paid listings are a natural transition.

"Initially we will deploy our successful commercial search model on text and location-based services, gradually moving on to more sophisticated applications allowing easy migration to 3G."

Steve Page, chief executive officer at Mobile Commerce, said: "Mobile is one of the fastest growth areas in Europe and we expect that non-voice sectors such as mobile search, will grow exponentially over the next five years."

Ben Taylor, Vodafone spokesman, said: "We are always looking for opportunities to offer a range of content to our customers under our easy-to-use menu.

We have around 200 content providers, one of which is Overture, and through this partnership we are able to extend our ability to get news to the customer."

Source: Revolution.com

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.