Zook.in the mobile search service by Bangalore based Ziva Software has been quite active over the last year or so. It has made strides by tying up with players like Open2save as well as launching features like Zook Alerts last year. This year it made two key announcements as well. One was itsbecoming a featured nokia application and the other was its tie up with Idea cellular.
Now it seems Zook had geared itself to venture into international territory by announcing its local search service availability for users across the globe. This means local queries (hotels, shops, places of interest, etc.) and media queries (music, video, images, etc.) for international locations would be answered by the mobile search service. For example local queries such as “Harvard medical school boston” (US), “thai orchid oxford” (England), “kinokuniya singapore” (Singapore), “boulders resort hampi” (India), “tryp hotel brasilia” (Brazil) etc would all be catered too.
Dr. Ajay Sethi, CEO, Ziva Software had this to say on the international foray “We strongly believe that mobile users should not need to scavenge through several web-pages looking for answers. Mobile users typically want results that can be consumed immediately – for example, address and phone-numbers, direct link to relevant mp3 file, etc. Instead of merely tweaking PC-based search services, mobile users need a service that directly caters to these requirements.”
Global Opportunity and Adoption
The global opportunity for mobile search is huge. Just to quote last years comScore report which stated that 20.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers and 4.5 million European mobile phone subscribers accessed search during one month. But the report also stated that over 60% of the market share in these markets lies with Google.
While going global is great on paper its difficult to imagine how adoption would happen for zook given the competition. Google being the numero uno search engine it would be difficult for zook to make a mark for itself soon. Even if it does it would take a lot of marketing dollars and great word of mouth to get their product going in international shores.
