In this interview, Art Dogtiev, Head of Branded Content at ComboApp, is talking with Quixey VP Marketing, Brent Harrison. We are discussing what really matters for people when it comes to mobile app search, how Quixey responds to this challenge and more!
Today we are talking about mobile app search. We would like to ask our listeners how they search for apps. I think the answer will be “whenever I need a new application or I want to replace the old one, I pull up the App Store on my iPhone, iPad or on my Android and search for apps. When they began searching for the first time, I think their approach was to go with the same path they used in Google search, which is a natural language. Quickly they may have realized that did not work. They may have just used a simple 1-2 keywords search queries to look for apps. We know from different sources that about 75% of downloads for most apps on the biggest app stores are getting from search. There are two ways people can search for apps, in the categories/TOP charts and in search. We know that search is a very important component because it works in the long run for apps. Before we jump into a specific topic, I would like to spend a few minutes talking about the history or your company and how you got started.
Good morning, Art. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I am thrilled to be able to talk here live. I work at Quixey, which is a company that was founded with a very basic mission that we will get into more deeply later on. Simply stated, we see a world, in the mobile world, where people want to find apps and you talked about a couple of ways that they do that today. Conversely, we also know that apps, and more importantly developers of apps, want to find people and while that mission is simply stated, it is actually quite complicated in the world that we find ourselves in to be able to connect those two in a relevant way and in a meaningful way where both the people get the value that they’re looking for and the utility in the apps. At the same time, the app developers who had the innovation or who invested time and effort have an equivalent opportunity to find the people. Quixey was founded with that basis. The name does not have any inherent meaning. It is one of those names that was just made up. Our founder is a very interesting guy. He had written, some number of years ago, a screenplay that was intended to be a TV series or movie in which the fictional company was named Quixey and so years later when he founded Quixey to become this search platform and search engine company in the mobile search world, they were thinking about names and he realized that he had the name and so that was the history behind the company name. It was intended to be in a movie or TV show at one time.
That’s great. Very interesting story because when I was reading your company name I don’t think I could imagine the story behind it. I thought it was the result of just a brainstorm session within the company as it was established. I have been following your company for a few years and I do remember that you used to be a multi platform. You were supporting both Google Play and iOS App Store, but now you have completely switched to Android only. What was the reason behind this switch?
Well actually that is kind of a two part answer so first we will get into the product a little bit. Our first generation technology, which you can still see today, really is an app search engine and so similar to what you might find in the App Store and Google Play, one of the things that we found was flawed in the model and still remains less than optimal is that it is very difficult to use natural language to find exactly what you’re doing. Both major stores that we see, certainly in the US and many international countries, is quite different. I will focus on US for a moment, those are the two dominant sources.
The state of the art, until very recently, was that you really had to have a simple keyword or an app brand name which really does a couple things 1. it puts a lot of emphasis on the user to know exactly what they’re looking for and also it tips the balance towards the larger more prominent brands that have name recognition and puts the long tail of developers somewhat a disadvantage. Quixey’s first generation technology was an app search engine that took signals, not only from the major app stores, but also signals outside.
We talk earlier about content marketing and social marketing, so taking signals like that as well as bringing in natural language processing. So now rather than having to look for a very simple keyword I can do something very specific like “find me the best day hikes in the SF Bay area”. I would get a very different return than if I simply put in “hiking apps” for example. So that’s one thing I just wanted to set a baseline of the first generation technology and then we will also talk about the next generation technology that we are working on, deep search, in a moment.
To your specific question though, the multi-platform is a two part answer. In our core search engine and in our app search engine, we are multi-platform. We do have iOS apps, we do have Android apps, we do have Blackberry apps, we have Amazon, Microsoft – the major players. What you ask is kind of a subtle point. For that main platform, we actually power the search results for a number of major internet properties both in the US and China. If you were to go on a site such as Ask.com and do a query that triggered an app intent, you actually could see results across all of those platforms. It is important to note that we still are committed to multi-platform.
From just a numbers perspective, the Android ecosystem followed by the iOS ecosystem are the big two, the others don’t have the same number of apps or marketing share though we do return results for them. In terms of our own product, our own application if you will, we decided earlier this year to focus on Android and it was really done for two pragmatic decisions. One is when we looked at international markets like China and India and Latin America and parts of Europe, the story between Android vis-a-vis iOS gets very different. In the US, in Japan, in parts of Western Europe you see a fairly equivalent marketing share and in the rest of the world Android is very dominant. That was one reason, there was just a pragmatic “hey, if you’re going to start somewhere, let’s start on where we believe the growth is occurring and where we’re actually growing more rapidly which are in places like China and India and the US.” That is point.
Point two is really until we figure out the next generation technology in the product world, does the preverbal product marketing fit? I really made the choice and drove the company towards being focused and until we had built a product on top of our platform, so an app on top of our search platform, that was engaging and that retained users and grew users organically, I felt like the multi-platform strategy for the short-run was defocusing us as a company. While there is no commitment in terms of dates around it, it has already been our expectation that at the application level we will get back to having multiple products on multi-platforms, but it was really a focusing effort. So again, the platform is still multi-platform, you can see that with many of our partners who were fueling app intent results for. In terms of what a consumer can do on our website, you can download the Quixey app on Android only today.
Now I see the logic, the technical business logic behind your decision. I just never realized how it worked. Personally, I use iOS devices, this is why this wasn’t clear to me. So, you work with Microsoft as your partner as well?
We do.
So you do use certain signals and certain information from Windows marketplace?
Yes, basically we ingest all of the apps on Windows marketplace into our search engine.
Great. There is one interesting feature that I found on your website which says that it is possible to do search insider Android apps. How does it work?
This is a great question, Art. It is something we’re very excited about and have been working on it for quite some time. I mentioned to think of app search as first generation, which is really around app store optimization and helping people find apps. The next wave in mobile search, we believe, is something we call “deep search”. That is the ability, through a simple query, to be able to find not only apps but relevant results inside of apps and across multiple apps simultaneously.
For example, if you and I were interested in going to have lunch together, and you were visiting me in Mountain View, California, we are fortunate we have a lot of restaurants nearby, we could say, well Art what kind of food do you like? You’re in California, we have good Mexican food here. We could type in a simple query like “Mexican” and see results simultaneously across multiple apps. We could see results across Yelp, OpenTable, UrbanSpoon, YP, TripAdvisor and even Groupon. What gets interesting there for me is not being able to compare multiple review sites, I only care about one site. It’s not that I can compare cross multiple menu sites, I may only care about one menu app. What is interesting is that within that simple query, we can see a multitude of restaurant options, but moreover with a site like OpenTable, I can see what restaurants have availability for us within the next 30 minutes.
With the deal apps such as Groupon or Living Social, we could also see if there is a highly targeted deal, for example, at this one Mexican restaurant they have a 2-for-1 appetizer for us. I think this is a very simple use case but starts to show the power of what’s possible when apps are understandable and readable and with technology that we’ve developed, they can be surfaced. I can put forward that people don’t really care about apps, per say, what they really care about is the content or the functions or the actions that they can take which are contained within the apps. We broadly call that “deep search”. If you’re interested in seeing some of the world’s first working prototypes, we actually have two apps in the Google Play store, under our lab’s name, Q-labs. Both are on Android, so you will have to find yourself an Android device. One is called Chow by Q-labs. This is a prototype app that we put in the Google Play store a couple of months ago and it actually demonstrates, live with working product, exactly the use case I described. The other one we have released more recently is an app called Sift and that, too, is a deep search app that focuses more on device search. So similar to what spotlight search does quite well on an iOS, Sift is an emergent answer for the Android ecosystem where again a single query can find installed apps, people conversations, text conversations, phone calls, calendar entries and so on with individuals on my phone. As far as we know, those are two of the deep search applications ever developed and they are kind of in Beta mode but I would love for you and your listeners to take a look and provide us some feedback.
That is actually really great. I am sure that many of our listeners will not have any problem downloading an app on Android. I will also find a way to take a look at those apps. I think in a nutshell I can summarize the strategy and the approach behind Quixey is that people’s intention goes first and apps go second.
Yes! I like how you characterize that. I think that’s right. Sometimes as human beings we understand what our intents are explicitly and sometimes we’re going to have to be good as product people and technologists to understand what’s implied by user’s context or behavior.
It is kind of like when you are looking for a specific show on TV, you really don’t care about the channel, you just want to watch a movie.
Yes, exactly. I think we’ll also see, probably in the next year or so, some changes to even the notion of downloading apps. Websites didn’t ask us to download software in order to access information and content. So why is it that apps ask us to do the same where as most consumers really don’t care about software, they care about actions or content or the intent of what I am trying to accomplish.
I see. Maybe it’s about a combination of a previous platform for the iPhone’s, which brought the web apps and then iOS apps on the app store followed. It probably will morph again into some sort of combination of the first and second idea. A mix between web apps and standalone apps developed on the specific SDK.
Absolutely. I think you’re exactly right. We have spent a lot of time thinking about this and while HTML5 held so much promises being that the universal language that would be multi-platform, the problem is that the native experiences are so rich and of course when you have companies like Google and Apple who are very successful and well funded. What we see now is from 80 to even 90 percent of consumer’s time spent on their mobile devices are actually in native experiences. It’s clear that HTML5 hasn’t been successful in winning the overall market, but I do believe based on this dynamic where people really want access inside of apps and there aren’t great solutions today to travel app to app. I can open an app, search or navigate within it and then I have to find the next step to do the next thing – it is much less fluid than it was on the web. We believe that there is probably some sort of hybrid eventually that will win and our focus is helping those walls around the apps and allow people to navigate from app to app in a more natural fashion.
I see. Moving along, let’s talk a little bit about what Quixey has to offer for web developers and advertisers.
Oh yes, great question. This is an area we are really excited about. Let’s start with developers, which I said from our companies mission being front and center with the ultimate user. When we talk to developers really worldwide, we tend to hear two or three dominant themes. It kind of depends on where they are in their own life cycle and their own journey with whatever product or technology they’ve developed. One that we hear is, how can you help us find users?
There is some disconnects in the ecosystem today where distribution tends to be highly concentrated in a handful of players. In fact, some recent data that I looked at from Neilson indicated that upwards of 90% of all downloads on the leading app stores come from the TOP 25 ranking. So if there is over a million apps in both the Android Play Store and the Apple App Store, each, I think it is 1.5 and 1.3 million respectively. There is literally hundreds of thousands of apps who are struggling to get discovered. There is a distribution challenge for developers.
The second challenge is, even if we’re successful as an app developer in getting found, getting downloaded or installed and maybe getting used, many of the developers we talked to have either an engagement or a re-engagement issue. Some other data that I think is relevant is that most users can only use or only will use anywhere from 8-12 apps on a given day. So if you’re an app that maybe has a utility, but isn’t used on a daily basis, even if you’re on the phone you’re easily forgotten. I may be an extreme example, but at any given time I have over 200 apps on my phone and there is no way that I can remember at any point in time exactly what apps I have and exactly what those apps do because there is so much content and functionality inside those apps.
There is a distribution challenge, there is an engagement or re-engagement challenge and the last piece is that we believe developers, wherever they reside, that if they have an app that is successful and can find an audience and engage consumers, that they deserve to be paid for that. We are also working on monetization solutions for developers. Those are the three things that we offer developers. Distribution, the opportunity for engagement or re-engagement and monetization. We can get into the monetization in a minute, but you also asked about advertisers and that’s probably a nice bridge to advertisers. Advertisers, in some cases, actually are developers. Sometimes it’s the app developers who are willing to pay some money to have their product distributed or to engage users.
There is really two things that we offer advertisers. One is a fairly basic promoted app product that was built in our first generation of app search. Basically if you’re an advertiser and you want your app promoted, similar to what you might see in a Google search result page where there is a promoted link, we have a product for promoted apps. A developer and an advertiser can come in and pay dollars basically to be surfaced at the top of an organic app search result page. Two, what we’re working on is a new mobile advertising solution around deep views. So basically what this does is allows an advertiser to have a much richer unit and then we get their ad units out on third party publishers.
The publishers of course are looking to increase revenue stream by matching their content to functions in others. So the idea is that the developer will help create a number of deep view ad links. These tend to be very visual and fairly interactive. What they do is they allow a user to link from a publisher page directly into an app. An example would be, let’s say you’re reading about the latest movies and you’re on an entertainment content site, well if you’re reading about the movie “Girl” we can introduce on that page a contextually relevant ad unit that doesn’t just take you to a movie site to download and buy tickets, but it’ll take you directly to the page that shows the movie times, the movies around you and the next show times and the ability to purchase a movie. Or with that same example, we could introduce an ad unit from a company like Spotify that takes you directly to the Pharell Williams song on Spotify and allows you to start playing it immediately. So in both cases, I believe what we’re trying to do here is eliminate steps and make the app to app world much more like the way the web world worked.
I see. I see many similarities in the way websites and the web were developing in the late 90s and for the last 30 years. I wanted to make a point that when it comes to finding the ways for reaching out to your audience for an app developer, it is important to remember that there is a finite amount of time people have to devote to apps. Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict how much time an individual will have in their life. It is a huge problem for you to predict the direction between your app and its audience. I would like to ask you about your partnership with Alibaba group in China.
Absolutely. The relationship with Alibaba is two-fold. One, they were our lead investor in our series C round, which closed about a year ago, now. This was very exciting, in the last year they obviously have been in the news and have gone public. They are the largest e-commerce company in the world and they are in the largest consumer marketplace in the world. Having a relationship with a company like that is a wonderful thing for us. The second part of the relationship beyond the funding and strategic relationship is that we have a commercial relationship with them where we recently announced that we are basically fueling all of their app and deep search results for their products in China. That was an announcement that happened just last month.
At the same time we also announced the launching of our developer network, which goes back to some of the things we talked about early in this conversation about what were doing with developers. The first place we can point to is that we understand the Chinese marketplace, we have a wonderful partner that is bringing us into that market and therefore people that are working with us in our ecosystem, developers can also take advantage of the ability to distribute, engage and monetize globally, now, not just in the US but also in China and we’re working on other major markets next. The relationship with Alibaba is two-fold. One, they have been a strategic investor and partner and two, we’re now fueling their app and deep search results for their products and their properties in China.
Oh, my congratulations! Actually having a partner in any market in which you are going to, especially in China, is very essential. I remember the problems that Yahoo had when they went to the China market. They believed they had a brand there but it turns out that wasn’t the case. They had major problems with getting the same amount of traction as they had in States. They were forced to sell their business. To make my point, it is really essential to have a good partner, especially as large as the Alibaba group in China. I wish you luck to grow rapidly with Quixey in China. To wrap up the interview, I chose the bits of news which struck this Monday, Apple partners with 25 chosen app developers to raise funds globally to fight HIV. I believe for the next 2 weeks, all downloads and all purchases made in these 25 apps from popular apps will be donated to this fund. Whenever people download these apps, they will be helping to fight this tragic situation in Africa. What do you think about this?
I think that is great. I think it is awesome. I think that it says volumes about Apple as a company and the fact that they feel like they have a broader mandate beyond just producing technology that many of us use and love on a daily basis, but to think more broadly about humanity. I think it is wonderful whenever people have some amount of power and influence to channel that in a positive way and it’s also pretty awesome for the app developers that they’ve stepped up and will also benefit as a result. I feel very good about it. We are a much smaller company at this point and these are the types of alleys that we hope to follow going forward. This is great news.
I think this initiative will make people think about their own problems and have a different perspective on their own lives and helping others.
I haven’t but with your prompting I will take a look at some of these apps. It appears that many, if not all of them, have some level of special “RED” integration where you’re actually getting access to new levels or resources within the apps themselves on the basis of this initiative, which is great too.
I hope this is not the last initiative but the first one in this expansion of the “RED” program Apple has had for the last 8 years. On this note I would like to say thank you for coming to our show and before I let you go would you please tell the listeners where they can read more about what the company does and about you personally. Do you have a twitter account?
Absolutely. There is three places you can follow us. One is our website, Quixey.com. In the upcoming weeks we will have more information about some of things I talked about today. The developer program is there, we will have more information on the advertiser programs in about 2 weeks. Again, you will be able to find that at Quixey.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @Quixey. The last place I would like to point you to is our blog and community site which is called App360. We really set that up last year to be more of a content site that explored the world of apps. Many of the topics that you’re passionate about and that we covered in our conversation today as a place where people can come and read and contribute and have a more socially based conversation around the app and the mobile ecosystem.
This is an interview from the Marketing TidBits with ComboApp podcast produced by ComboApp Group, a full-cycle communications and marketing solutions provider for a global mobile marketplace. Listen to this podcast episode or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.
The post ComboApp Talks Mobile App Search with Quixey appeared first on Business of Apps.