I think mobile search is in its ice age. The current solution of slapping a search box on smart phones is like shooting a movie in a theater room from a stationary camera (that’s how initial movies were made).
This requires looking at the porblem differently. Cha Cha is one company that is trying something new. Techcrunch reports that Cha Cha closed a $30M series C round. The fact that they are able to raise that much money in this downturn tells me the investors see the opportunity that I laid out. Whether or not Cha Cha’s approach is the answer remains to be seen. But this opportunity needs out of the box thinking, and I hope we see several different approaches being tried out. We need new innovations in search. I feel the field got stagnant after google’s breakthrough.