Around the Net

Mobile Search, Ads Provider Raises $26 Million To Take On Google

Erick Schonfeld positions mobile search and ads provider JumpTap as a direct competitor to Google in the race to own the mobile search landscape. The company just completed a $26 million Series D round, led by Alliance Bernstein (and supplemented by companies like WPP, among others).

Of course, the JumpTap team believes that they have an edge over the search giant when it comes to mobile. According to CEO Dan Olschwang, the company's search algorithm is geared toward ranking actionable results higher than others--i.e. delivering the location of the nearest drugstore when a user enters "Tylenol," as opposed to the latest press release--as well as making sure that the results are tailored to the searcher's particular handset.

"Jumptap [is] going to need all the gunpowder it can get," Schonfeld says. "Mobile search is the next big frontier in search as more and more Web-capable phones hit the market. Going up against Google, even in a nascent market, is a tough proposition." But he argues that JumpTap has one more ace in its hole, as service carriers would likely be more apt to partner with the startup than with Google.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »

Next story loading loading..