For SMBs without much of a budget who want to increase visibility, I would agree with your point that building their own mobile app is unlikely to be worth the investment. (http://bit.ly/5g3Wv9) A great thing about the mobile channel is that there are many free or cheap ways to help customers find your business. Much has already been made of mobile businesses using Twitter to broadcast changes in location, daily specials, or even fresh-baked items to followers. (Examples: http://bit.ly/4TuFnQ and http://bit.ly/5JbABm) Existing services like Yelp might be a free or cheap way to reach customers, especially with their augmented reality tool that takes advantage of knowing the customer’s location.

Some industries have targeted services. In the case of restaurants, being visible on OpenTable’s mobile app might drive incremental reservations. (They recently launched v2.0 of their iPhone app: http://bit.ly/7kgCbh.) Also leaning toward restaurants and bars, Foursquare (http://bit.ly/7r6ETu) turns local commerce into a fun game where customers vie to become “mayor” through frequent visits and some businesses offering perks to their mayor.

If the SMB has a need of allowing convenient payment options, I’m intrigued by the new startup Square (http://bit.ly/5yWRIn) that is piloting card payment acceptance through a card swipe attachment to the iPhone. I especially like the loyalty component of their product as it enables SMBs to track and reward repeat customers. Thinking of your example of the broken hot water heater, wouldn’t both parties be better off if the repairman she could accept card payment rather than leaving the customer to search for cash or a paper check?

Other thoughts?
-Jay Badenhope (Wells Fargo)

Done well, it can take back the territory from national brands’ and online middlemen’s long and spammy tentacles. The problem I sense looming in this polemic is the all in the concept “search.” It’s a carry-over from the web, and its baggage is crawling with pests: bidding for rank, interpretative and presumptive results, irrelevent junk and the company of tag-along offers that travel with each and every search. And that’s not the worst of the negatives. After all, one defense of search, and a sad testiment, is that audience has become skilled in pulling coins out of the internet trash.

The fundamental failing of local search, especially mobile search, is failing to recognize the power of mobile technology. That is, we’re standing in our own way, everytime we resort to the search box, every time we ask a search engine to figure out what is actually local.

Mobile technology gives us independently a true way to determine location, and network technology lets us connect directly to places that have actual physical addresses, geo-coordinates. And put them together with database interst matching, you now are letting machines do the job of keeping track of where you are, what mode you’re in, and if any place nearby has a match for any of the limitless things or people or places that meet our needs, interests or desires.

All of this is not only possible, but practical, and in effect. We do this with our service comprehensively in the US, and others do portions or special themed slices. None of it will work to its potential, however, and we all won’t see the boom, as long as we maintain the tedious component of search-box keyed entry and allow manual search to choke traffic.

Couldn’t agree with you more. Fanminder is 100% focused on helping local small businesses go mobile – and I mean VERY local, very small, not the chains. We do it with humble SMS and not smartphone applications yet because SMS is very effective at getting their message read and it’s easy to implement. Any way just wanted to write and say I appreciated your point of view.
Paul