Texperts’ fearless Chief Product Officer Thomas Roberts was recently interviewed by web design and search optimisation site Distilled.co.uk. Lucy Langdon chatted with Thomas about mobile search, geo-location, and his mum, and it’s available on their blog.

The interview follows up an article that Distilled did on the future of mobile search, which used Texperts as an example of forms of searching on the go that could challenge for the title of Mobile Search Champion. Naturally, we registered our opinions in their online poll!

Thanks to Distilled for a fruitful discussion.

(Image from Distilled)

At Texperts, we get all manner of saucy questions, but we also notice that people are often more comfortable seeking out quality information sources about sexual health via SMS. So we’ve partnered with Pasante to help people do just that.

This is an innovative partnership, as it’s designed to help promote sexual health and to make sex safer. Texperts has trained experts to help people with answers to sexual health questions. SMS is a private, personal medium, and that can help young people feel less intimidated when asking what can often be uncomfortable questions.

The Pasante website gives details of the partnership:

Pasante Healthcare ( http://www.pasante.com ) is launching, ‘Desire’, a range of smartly packaged, designer condoms aimed at savvy, streetwise females aged 16-25.

Attractive packaging and unusual shaped tins have been used to cleverly disguise the contents while all references to condoms are printed on adhesive labels which can be easily removed after purchase. An informative instruction leaflet offers tips on when to bring up the subject of condoms and how to get a partner to wear one.

The packs also endorse a 24/7 sexual health text service, in conjunction with ‘Texperts’, where young people may text their sexual health questions to a trained expert and receive an answer within minutes at any time of the day or night. The usual cost of the service is £1 per answer but Desire customers can get their first message free by texting 66000 and following the in-pack instructions.

Texperts is delighted to have this opportunity to help young people find the answers they need. It’s an issue close to Texperts CEO Sarah McVittie’s heart, as she’s been working with the social enterprise community and charities to promote sexual health and responsibility in young people for a number of years. She views Pasante’s ‘Desire’ range as a pragmatic (and dare we say, fun!) way to do that.

Texperts CEO Sarah McVittie has been doing the rounds at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, and some great debate in the industry stemming from the event has surfaced in the blogosphere, particularly in relation to “mobile search” concepts.

“It’s the User Experience, Stupid” was a blue-ribbon panel of human behaviour and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And the iPhone stumped ‘em. As David Benjamin reports in the EETimes,

In an ominous note for mobile operators, the iPhone respondents credited their happy experience not to AT&T, the channel through which iPhone services were delivered in the U.S, but to Apple, the device maker.

The panel [...] agreed that iPhone represents a model for mobile operators, but they reached little agreement on how to follow.

However, a really interesting metaphor for the mobile search experience emerged:

Panelist Mike Yonker, general manager of worldwide strategy and operations for Texas Instruments’ wireless terminals business unit, said that the way for the user to get the rich content now available on a mobile handset is through the “search” function. But this isn’t so easy. He compared the limitations of a mobile handset to a full personal computer screen.

Searching on a computer, he said, is like going to a store, where the customers sees every product displayed, and can make comparisons, touch the products, even try things on for size. Doing the same search on a mobile, he said, but like trying to shop in the same store but “through a drive-up window.” No matter how much stuff is in the store, you can only find out through the cashier at the drive-up window.

The dilemma, left unsolved by the panelists, was how to squeeze the user through that window, past the cashier, to sample all the things in the store, without guilt, while still feeling grateful to the cashier who seemed, all along, to be standing in the way.

Everyone agreed that, so far, only Apple has been able to turn this trick. For users, “the content is the core,” said Lipman of Power2B somewhat ruefully, “and we have to get out of their way.”

This is an interesting way of phrasing the problem, and a suitably polemic way of solving it. But it doesn’t address the relatively recent concept of human-assisted search, or “mobile find“, as Texperts likes to call it. Texperts has been aware of these issues for quite some time, and has first-hand experience on the front lines of the “window-shopping” style of searching. The reason is simple: people’s search behaviour when they’re on the go is much different from when they’re at home (as Yonker rightly points out), and their needs are different.

What Yonker doesn’t address, though, is that although the iPhone experience is great, it’s still more or less built on traditional searching behaviours. Third-party providers like (ahem) Texperts have stepped in to bridge that gap by providing bespoke answers to specific queries. This role has two main benefits: it allows customers to continue other tasks rather than waste time sifting through hits, and in most (but not necessarily in all) cases it vastly reduces search time.

Perhaps we can take Yonker’s metaphor a bit further? When you are out and about and need to know something (notice the word ‘need’, I’m not referring to some spare time waiting for a delayed flight) then you don’t want to browse at all. If you need a Jubilee clip for your car radiator, you don’t want to browse at all, you want to go straight to the item with as little time spent as possible in the shop. The same goes for information you ‘need’ when mobile. But isn’t that the service you get with the cashier at the window? No. We’re stretching this metaphor too far here, but the cashier in this instance has no idea what a Jubilee clip is let alone whether they stock one. Moreover, and even worse, rather than telling you up front that they can’t help, you stand at the window while, one-by-one, the cashier brings you hundreds of items from the store that bear some (often vague and bizarre) similarity to what you are looking for, but none will do the job. You tell the cashier to try again each time. At some point you are likely just to walk away.

So Texperts doesn’t act like a cashier and “get out of the way” of the customer - we’re like a personal shopper who goes in and does the dirty work. We interact with the customer who’s trusted us with the task. The Texpert personal shopper in each case is an enthusiast who really understands your needs. Hell, sometimes we’ll even come back after looking really hard and, assuming it’s not, let you know that your item simply isn’t out there. All of which saves you the trouble of discovering that yourself. It’s a neat comparison that distinguishes the concept of “mobile find” from “mobile search,” in other words…

The iPhone is great - many denizens of Texperts Towers own one - but although it slices, dices, and basically folds your laundry (it’s only a matter of time!), it still won’t find things for you. From our standpoint, though, the iPhone is a powerful tool that makes delivering richer content to customers an exciting and more viable prospect. We’re already delivering map content in partnership with Multimap and other exciting projects are in the pipeline too.

Breaking news! Texperts CEO and one-woman army Sarah McVittie has stormed into another award short-listing, this time in the “Rising Star of the Year” category of the inaugural MediaGuardian Innovation Awards.

The panel invited nominations from MediaGuardian readers, and from the many hundreds of entries Sarah has emerged as one of the three finalists. The awards ceremony will be held at IndigO2 on March 6.

Texperts has a distinguished history of grabbing prestigious awards in a variety of categories, from innovation, to management, to HR, to cutting-edge technology. Sarah is delighted with the MediaGuardian Innovation nomination, saying “it’s a real honour to be shortlisted for the MediaGuardian award, especially in the inaugural round. At Texperts we take great pride in our track record, and I’m proud to lead this exceptional team of innovators.”

According to Mac users, Mac users have always had more fun. But now they have “empirical” evidence to back it up. So, are they enlightened operators and creators or smug, brainwashed androids?

The technology news site Tom’s Hardware recently reported that according to Mindset Media, “open minded liberal thinkers” are more likely to purchase a Mac:

Open minded people are more likely to purchase a Mac, according to a new survey released by Mindset Media. The company interviewed 7500 people and found that liberal thinkers were 60 percent more likely to buy a Mac. These same people were also less modest and more sure of their own superiority than the rest of the population.

Other stories constructed from Mindset’s press release state that “these purchasers are also more liberal, less modest, and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large.” This information raises a whole lotta questions, and it led me to wonder (if that’s a mental process that cuboid PC users such as myself are capable of) if this survey didn’t say more about Mindset than it did about Mac?

The presentation of the data available on most news sites is woolly at best. The survey was conducted using Nielsen’s Online panel with 7,500 survey respondents, but as Tom’s Hardware point out, very little has been said about the actual methodology. How were these more-liberal/more-smug respondents selected? Self-selected, or company selected? And how were they distinguished from the rest of the population? What were the purchase options? Such technicalities are of course less interesting than manufactured either/or scenarios, especially during Macworld 2008.

It’s a well-conceived release on the part of Mindset, coinciding with Macworld, with millions of Mac fans combing the web for the latest offerings wanting to have their purchasing habits re-enforced. Mindset even alerted me to a buzzword - psychographic - to distinguish psychological profile from the reams of other factors that comprise consumer populations. Here’s what they offer:

So what kind of people identify with your brand? Assertive? Creative? Spontaneous? [...] You may see any of the dozens of MindsetProfiles we’ve already created, or you can work with us and Nielsen Online to create a custom MindsetProfile for your unique target.

What person would not identify with those adjectives at one time or other? And what company, I wonder, would identify their target group as dull? Obsessive? Thick? Impulsive? Or flustered? Categories that we all fall into at one time or another, but which some marketers are loathe to broach. Market profiling is apparently a necessity these days, but I have to wonder whose interests, apart from marketing agencies, it serves to perpetuate this kind of self-congratulatory pseudo-science?

Presumably, Mindset can match a predetermined target group with the product in question and create a series of protocols & strategies for marketing to that group. Yet Apple surely doesn’t need it, having a marketing department who wrote the rules on technological branding. Still, Mindset have proven that they can tell people what they want to hear. It’s no secret Mac users associate deeply with the aesthetic and technical attributes of their chosen computing platform, and releasing a survey confirming that link is surely like shooting fish in a barrel. What about other brands though? For instance, what kind of psychographic buys piles medication?

But I digress. I still haven’t answered the original false dilemma posed in this blog, namely, are Mac users confident creative types or brainwashed prats? The answer is of course both/and rather than either/or. No, just kidding. We’ve got 4 dedicated Mac users in Texperts Towers, and I’ve conducted my own rigorously empirical survey to see what makes ‘em tick.

Fred Cheung, one of Texperts’ fabulous wizards, is actually a developer for Mac and I can confirm that he’s a creative and effective individual who, though frequently quiet and slightly eccentric, will never turn down a chance to assert his own superiority. And he’s right. How irritating.

Darrern Brierton is a talented graphic designer, web monkey, and former philosophy lecturer. He also fits the profile. Dammit.

Henry Addison is another whiz-bang techie who plays by no rules other than those created by him, Henry Addison. But he’s not particularly brand conscious, our Henry. He digs things wot work consistently and quickly. Creative? Does rowing count? Of course it does.

And finally, Texperts CTO Paul Butcher is also a technical ace, as you’d expect, as well as sagely and imaginative. But he’s also a former pc user. What gives?

I find his Mac conversion the most interesting one. As an experiment, he calculated the amount of time per day that he lost waiting for his mighty PC laptop to fully start up and shut down. It came out to a whopping half hour. He purchased a smokin’ Macbook shortly thereafter, and has not looked back. Rather than any brand identity, then, Paul opted solely for functionality. But given some of the limitations that beset the first release of the iPhone, why was Paul first in line when they were unveiled in the UK? I was going to launch into a clever, ‘ah, see, they got you to buy into their image after all’ jibe, finally trouncing Texperts Towers’ arch-pragmatist with a ’style-over-substance’ riposte to dismantle his consumer aesceticism once and for all. But as I should know by now, the answer was a simple, eminently sensible consideration. After persistently cursing various Windows smartphones, Paul wanted a device that did most of the things it was supposed to very well, rather than something that did everything badly. Its styling and cool web interface were merely bonus features. Or so he claims…

So with all of its talk of ‘brand identification’ and aesthetic infatuation, functionality has something to do with the equation after all. That’ll be £1.2 m. You want psychographics with that?