Telecom & Wireless

Cell Phone Nation: No Mobile Search Unless It’s Free

Note to Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), and Yahoo! (YHOO). Handset users don’t want a local search feature on their phones if they have to pay for it. According to The Inquirer, IDC and Trueposition did a study in the US…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published September 27, 2007, 8:01am ET · 1 min read

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Note to Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), and Yahoo! (YHOO). Handset users don’t want a local search feature on their phones if they have to pay for it.

According to The Inquirer, IDC and Trueposition did a study in the US and Europe. About 70% of people would use a local search function, but only if it is underwritten by advertising. Some of these search features would be provided by the large search engines. Others could come from companies that provide GPS people locators.

Just don’t ask them to pay.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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