In Search Of …

New York City restaurants. So many options! There are places where every plate is a pretentious tower of protein, veggies and various flavors of crème fraiche and/or coulis, and places with magical sparkly atmospheres that offset simple food. There are bistros and overpriced Mexican taquerias, and a hundred Indian restaurants that all appear to have the same menu and same penchant for Christmas lights. There are also Korean delis with rosters of ancient homeless guys outside that like to tell patrons how hot they are, and Italian money-laundering fronts with terrible food and the Chianti that comes in a basket-wrapper. And the question becomes, how do you separate the plastic grapes from the filament lighting?

I submit this: Carriers need to get into the restaurant biz. At least, they can help us find them. And grow a long tail in the process.

Oh sure, there are sources like Yelp and Gayot and even the New Yorker restaurant section. But these are far from comprehensive – or based on objective criteria, for that matter. And what if you know just exactly what you’re looking for, say, a clubby steakhouse that’s discreet enough to take the guy you might be replacing your business partner with, but with an interesting and modern vibe to make you feel less wrong about it? You know, so you can tell yourself: “Hey, it’s just dinner – I really wanted to try out this modern and interesting new take on the classic New York steakhouse.”

Try Googling that six ways to Sunday and I’ll bet you end up with Peter Luger every time, though it is neither modern nor discreet nor a new take on much of anything. Besides, their porterhouses have gone downhill.

So how can we cut to the chase already, without plugging in various combinations of similar search terms in a desperate attempt to find what you know is there, out there, somewhere?

We find the answer at that often-visited corner of mobility and content. Example A: Microsoft Bing. Example B: Alcatel-Lucent’s geofencing application.

Next week, MSFT is launching Bing. Bing is its new search engine, and the idea is to return results that are relevant and personalized with intuitively related content, not just based on the search terms themselves.

(seriously...”Bing?” And Bing-o was its name-o. Maybe MSFT's search fortunes will be more akin to a bowl of (bing) cherries now. I guess Microsoft thought, if you like it then you shoulda put a bing on it. But I digress.)

What is this smart search concept, you might ask? Say you plug in “clubby discreet modern steakhouse NYC not Peter Luger.” Google would take out “not” and just serve up Peter Luger, and maybe a review of Peter Luger and its attempts to modernize. A search engine with more smarts however (and I’m not saying Bing does all of this) would offer a range of results, categorized under headings: steakhouse modern, steakhouse clubby, steakhouse clubby and modern. And allow you to filter them to better refine your results. Along with those results and mapping information, it would offer every review available, and photos, which you can get to by clicking on “reviews” and “photos.” And maybe there would even be a recipe section, if you’ve been known to search for recipes in the past, and a link to the OpenTable reservations service. If you’ve bought tickets to movies online in the past, maybe one of the results sections will be a calendar of events and ticket information for things going on in the area of the restaurant. And the results page could dynamically shift as you click around on the content you’re interested in. If you click more on filament lighting and less on ravioli, the search engine parses that and gives you more of what you’re looking for.

In other words, the idea of smart search is to deliver targeted, relative information to the user, rather than a mass-market, one-size-fits-all, 10-link search results page.

So if a red-checkered tablecloth and linguini kind of joint is what you want, you can find it easily. Bada-bing!

Sorry, I just wanted to say that. Anyhoo, smart search in and of itself is interesting, but where it gets interesting for operators is the ability to embed this type of functionality into connected devices. Imagine the business models on offer when this type of personalized search is combined with location information and mobility.

That brings us to ALU, which has developed a handy-dandy location-based mobile advertising platform that enables something a little different from the “walk past a Starbucks and get an SMS coupon” model. Mobile users opt in to a carrier service that delivers ads, information and promotions based on the concept of geofencing: Walk across a certain boundary and trigger the delivery of relevant information.

Why would anyone want to opt into this, you ask? Because the user is firmly in control: They choose which brands or businesses or types of information they would like to have offered up (sign up for “clubby modern steakhouses,” let’s say, or sales of hand-cut, grass-fed porterhouse steaks in the area). Today, you might not go to that restaurant the service just told you about, but it’s handy to know it’s there.

Users also choose at what time of day, and under which circumstances, the information gets delivered. The offers are based on previous behavior as well, though the advertisers, which give the operators a revenue share, won’t know any personal information about the user – the platform masks that kind of carrier network information. Anyway, the result? Think of it as a mobile concierge.

So what should operators be doing? Taking smart search and mobile concierge out for a steak, maybe. Get to know them just a little bit better.

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