SubscribeMInfo: Nature Language Mobile Search
mInfo, a Shanghai-based mobile search startup who intends to understand natural language queries from users and delivers highly relevant answers, has raised $3.36 million in its first round funding from Staenberg Capital (via ChinaVenture).
Before mInfo, founder Alvin Wang Graylin established two startups in the US, one in e-marketing personalization/datamining and the other in online personalized financial analytics. The experience and technology developed in those startups help him to launch mobile search business which delivered personalized search result to users.
In a market with over 440 million mobile subscribers, mobile search is no doubt one of the most important application in future. However, none of the existing players could provider satisfactory usering experience now. mInfo tries to touch this problem by accepting nature lauguage queries and delivering specific answers to questions rather than a page full of blue links.
Now you can use SMS or WAP to use mInfo to search local information, weather, stock quote, price comparison, ringtone, flight/train schedule information, sports scores and others. mInfo also provides an IM bot for users to seach in IM.
mInfo allows users to send SMS for query in nature language such as “What’s the weather like today?” or “The flight between Beijing and Guangzhou”. I tried it several times, when I asked what’s the weather like the day after tomorrow, it can only reply today and tomorrow’s weather information. It seems that mInfo can only understand “weather”, but don’t know what is “the day after tomorrow”. I also tried to ask for “Cafe around Internation Trade Center”, but got no result, I’m not sure it is because they don’t have enough local business in database or they could not understand my query. It is obvious that mInfo’s nature language search business still has a long way to go. In an interview with Pacific Epoch, mInfo said it also tracks every users to understand his/her profile and provide more relevant results.
mInfo is a free service, you should pay for your SMS and WAP fee, of course. As those web search engines, mInfo generate revenue from target advertising and bid for search result ranking. For example, when I sent SMS for coffee shop, I got a sponsored message of discouting information of another coffee shop, but can not get result for my query. mInfo thought about a third of their results are paid results.
You can read the interview by Pacific Epoch for more detailed information on mInfo, and also a Mobile Monday Beijing event report on mobile search.
Update: Alvin Wang Graylin, founder of mInfo, has emailed me to explain more on nature language technology of mInfo:
For natural languge, it’s more than just understanding simple semantic parameters like today and tomorrow, but also intent. i.e. you can ask things like will it rain tomorrow or should i bring an umbrella. We didn’t give you info for day after tomorrow not because we didn’t understand it, but we choose to focus on specific reliable data or category types vs. trying to answer all questions. This helps us provide better quality content. Also, if there are no data points that satisfy your search criteria, we’ll ask you to retype your question. i.e. there may not be any/many Cafe’s by the International Trade Center. When you put a reference point, we keep our search to that geographic area.
-
Related Posts
3 Responses to “MInfo: Nature Language Mobile Search”
Post a comment
hehe. I leak this news first yesterday. This deal has been closed at least several months ago.
Could you add my msn: zy.young@hotmail.com
Congratulations to Alvin, even if the funds were raised month ago as suggested by other comments. Anyway, you can refer to Mobilemonday Shanghai web groups for more about Alvin and mInfo (no disrespect to our colleagues in Beijing of course). mInfo was a speaker at MobileMonday Shanghai inaugural event 2 months ago.
ppt to be downloaded at:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/shanghaimomo
Our other links:
Blog: http://shanghaimomo.blogspot.com
Event page: http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/shanghai (registration only)
Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/shanghaimomo
Hope to see you all soon (in Shanghai) for our next event on Jan 15 to chat about mobile TV.
Bruno
[...] We previously reported mInfo’s $3.36 million funding in 2006. mInfo was selected as finalist for MoMo’s 2007 Global Peer Award. [...]