InfoSpace and FAST announced a partnership at 3GSM that seeks to marry InfoSpace’s carrier relationships and content expertise with FAST’s search technology and PPC platform on mobile devices. The companies will be offering their new “white label” services and platform to wireless carriers in the U.S. and Europe. That makes the combined InfoSpace-FAST effort immediate competition for JumpTap and Medio Systems, which are also offering similar services.
FAST and InfoSpace also have considerable experience in local search, a key content category for mobile.
The private label mobile search market is thus quite crowded given that there are only five mobile carriers in the U.S., not counting MVNOs, and seven when you include Canada. In Europe the field is more open but European carriers are reportedly discussing creating their own search and ad serving technology to compete with Google and Yahoo in mobile.
Read the rest of the post at Search Engine Land.
