The proliferation of 160,000 iPhone apps has created the well-documented problem of app discovery for consumers and app marketing for developers. Getting attention as an iPhone app has become increasingly difficult as the iTunes app store has mushroomed.

Enter Chomp, co-founded by mobile entrepreneur and former Aardvark advisor Ben Keighran.

Keighran told me that in just over eight weeks since launch Chomp has 300,000 users who are actively engaged in writing reviews on the app and now the recently launched site. Rather than describe Chomp as a search engine per se, Keighran uses the analogy “Yelp for the app store.”

The site makes 5 percent affiliate revenue off paid app referrals it drives to Apple. That represents real money as the community grows, considering that app sales is already a billion dollar business. Otherwise there is no advertising or sponsorships on the site. It’s purely about the community and their reviews.

Keighran told me that Chomp is making money already because it’s become so viral so quickly. And iPhone app developers have become aware that Chomp can be an effective way to “market” their apps. Keighran cited the popular mobile-location game MyTown’s use of Chomp as a success story.

Because of developer demand, Chomp has launched a developer marketing tool it calls Chomp Connect:

It allows developers to add a Chomp button or review form to direct users to the Chomp site/app to review their apps — kind of like a tweet or Facebook button for viral exposure. However Chomp reviews only show up on the Chomp site, not in iTunes. The flaw in the existing iTunes review system is that users are only prompted to review apps when they’re uninstalling them, which creates a “negative bias” according to Keighran.

Chomp Connect gives developers more control and enables them to target users who are favorably disposed toward their apps.

I asked Keighran if developers had approached him about paying for sponsorships or advertising on Chomp otherwise. He said yes but his primary focus on the site or app is on the consumer experience. But Keighran said they were considering a sponsored search model as a possibility at some point in the future.

Beyond the utility of enabling consumers to discover apps and providing developers with alternative ways to expose their apps — there are a number of third party app discovery tools and sites — the thing that’s striking to me is the alignment of interests here. Often online businesses that appeal to consumers struggle to find a viable business model or one that scales or sometimes there’s tension between the consumer and advertiser experiences. (Yelp is a high profile example of the latter.)

However Chomp gets paid on an affiliate basis only when a user pays for and downloads a paid app. That only happens when a consumer is convinced by unbiased reviews that the app is interesting and worth buying. Meanwhile developers have an interest in promoting the site generally to gain positive reviews and more exposure for their apps.

Chomp has hit upon a service and a model that appears to work for everyone.

Like it main site, Collecta mobile includes real-time news, photos, and status updates from more than 10 million content sources — from Twitter to Flickr and CNN and blogs. The mobile site is available on the iPhone, Droid, Palm and Nokia Maemo. As you can see from the screenshots (below) that Collecta provided, the company is hoping to take advantage of the interest in real-time news and information surrounding the upcoming SXSW conference.

It shows Google with a lead comparable, almost exactly, to its market share on the PC in the US. Yahoo enjoys a larger share of mobile search than it now does on the PC, according to Opera. And Bing is virtually non-existent.

The caveat to all this is that Opera only captures usage on the Opera browser, which is not available on the iPhone (yet). It is for Android and RIM. But the data below generally do not reflect the full range of user behavior on smartphones. We can reasonably extrapolate from Opera’s findings, however, that Google enjoys a comparable dominance in mobile across platforms. For example it’s more dominant on the iPhone than the numbers below reflect.

There have been mobile search data released in the past via surveys and by Nielsen showing comparable share trends.

Compare US comScore search share data for January:

• Google: 65.4 percent
• Yahoo: 17 percent
• Bing: 11.3 percent
• Ask: 3.8 percent
• AOL: 2.5 percent

Siri is not a search engine technically and it’s not intended to be a replacement for Google. It’s intended to enable you to do more with your voice and your phone in fewer clicks or moves. Rather than showing you information or lists of choices it’s intended to be “transactional,” to help accomplish things. Siri “helps you get things done when you’re on the go” says the demo below.

It’s another major step away from the much derided “10 blue links.”

Siri provides a voice-enabled, “conversational” interface (using speech recognition from Nuance) and taps into a range of APIs, from companies such as Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo, Taxi Magic, WeatherBug, Rotten Tomatoes, Google Maps, Eventful and Allmenus.com among others. These are launch partners but others will be added. Eventually, you’ll be able to specify preferred sites (I like Kayak rather than Orbitz for example).

The Siri magic — the technology comes out of SRI with funding from DARPA — exists “in the middle,” between the speech recognition and the back end, tied to the third party APIs. There’s a very sophisticated “engine” and algorithm there that enables the service to understand queries and commands such as:

• “What’s going on for kids this weekend?”
• “Get tickets for 2 to Avatar in 3D IMAX  tonight”
• “Remember to contact Jay tomorrow about coffee”
• “I need a cab”

Siri understands these requests and commands and offers up “actionable” options such as buying a movie ticket or making an OpenTable reservation. So rather than navigating to OpenTable or using the OpenTable app and then finding the restaurant and an available time, one can simply make a verbal request and be taken to the page where the reservation may be executed in a single click or acceptance.

As the examples indicate, one can speak to Siri in a more natural way. Rather than speaking like a robot and saying “Open Table” to minimize error,  you can say something more elaborate and “conversational” such as, “I’d like a reservation tonight around 7:30 at Le Cheval.”

Siri describes what it does in lay terms as follows:

A virtual assistant gives different answers depending on individual preferences and personal context (place, time, history), and if you give it permission, learns more about you so that it can shorten your time-to-task.. Information you teach Siri in one domain (e.g. movies) is applied automatically to opportunities rising from other domains. Any personal information you provide Siri is stored in a highly secure, PCI-compliant co-location center, and used only with your explicit permission to accelerate your task completion.

It integrates with the phone very deeply and becomes more personalized over time. The company makes money (right now) from affiliate referrals to the various partners; there isn’t a plan for any conventional advertising (to my knowledge). The company not long ago raised $24 million in funding from a number of VC firms.

The speech recognition and functioning of the service are impressive if imperfect.

Stepping back, there are a number of “voice search” tools and services for mobile, including Google’s for the iPhone and Android, Bing for the iPhone and Windows Mobile, Vlingo, Nuance Dragon Search and others. This is something that at first blush resembles them but turns out to be quite different. It’s not a voice front end on top of SERPs; it goes much further.

On mobile devices, voice interfaces, location awareness and the camera (as a search and input tool) have begun to dramatically expand as well as differentiate “search” on smartphones from traditional PC search. With Siri we now have something that in one way seems like “mobile search” but ultimately feels different — like an advancement.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See related:

Does Marissa Mayer’s “Perfect Search Engine” Already Exist In Siri?

Not counting the map listings, depending on the query and the user’s PC screen size, there may be only one or two slots available for SEO in a local context. See, for example, the result for “dentist, Los Angeles“:

There’s another challenge for local consumer destinations, especially startups and smaller publishers: selling advertising to small businesses. Without digressing too much, take my word that it’s very difficult to sell ads to small businesses at scale unless you own a large sales force. Self service advertising for this segment has always been more of a dream than a realistic proposition — although ironically Google may find success with some of its new, simplified ad products.

Thus, monetization of local sites has been quite difficult, even for a successful local player such as Yelp. There has always been AdSense but only a few sites with significant traffic have been able to “make a living” off of it; MerchantCircle is one example.

Enter Citysearch’s new local ad exchange/marketplace called CityGrid. This has been in the works for almost three years and it launched at the end of last week. Basically Citysearch is making any and all of its content and advertisers available to third parties (and specifically smaller publishers and mobile developers) via an API. In addition, Internet yellow pages publishers also distribute advertisers through the network.

According to the PR materials accompanying the launch, “In December 2009, CityGrid aggregated more than 500K paying advertisers, enhanced listings and content for 15M businesses, and reached more than 100M unique users across 100 web and mobile sites.” Independent local marketing provider ReachLocal and local-mobile search vendor V-Enable also operate local ad exchanges as well.

In terms of CityGrid, you can see how the same advertiser is presented across a number of participating, partner sites:

• Bing
• Yellowpages
• Merchantcircle
• Insiderpages.com
• Urbanspoon
• MySpace Local
• Centerd
• Judys Book

Other independent sales channels, such as Yodle, also operate networks of partner sites that expose their advertisers in a range of places beyond Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And for several years, the yellow pages publishers have done a more “restrained” version of sharing advertisers and traffic.

CityGrid and the other local networks, to varying degrees, begin to solve several problems:

• Getting qualified traffic and leads to local advertisers across a very fragmented local online segment
• Providing better monetization for local publishers and developers
• Providing traffic for publishers that don’t want to rely too heavily on a single source (read: Google)

Citysearch also told me that CityGrid participation doesn’t interfere with AdSense in any way. The ads are content so they’re in the center of the page.

In CityGrid and the other networks, you can see a local monetization “infrastructure” emerging that extends into mobile and helps publishers find qualified traffic for their advertisers, in addition to geotargeted SEM and local SEO, which is becoming much more challenging lately.

Here’s how the Forbes article says it would work potentially:

A user looking for a reliable moving company in Manhattan could simply poll his or her friends on the site. But since a more focused search will likely yield more useful recommendations, buzz.com will also be able to suggest experts for that particular topic based on user “favorites” and comments. On a mobile device buzz.com could further narrow the field based on a person’s location, using opt-in global positioning system data.

AT&T Interactive publishes Yellowpages.com and YP.com, among a couple other sites. AT&T of course publishes print yellow pages directories as well.

As Google’s own content (Map + 7) has come to dominate page one SERPs in local — Google says that 1 out of 13 SERPs shows a map — local SEO has become more difficult for third party publishers such as directory and yellow pages sites. They’re partly looking for alternative ways to drive low-cost, high quality traffic to their advertisers. Clearly, owning more distribution (as they did offline) is one important method.

Buzz.com also reflects how the Internet is evolving and how social media are figuring more prominently in almost everything being done. Buzz.com is a great URL; now will AT&T give us a great site?

I also wrote about the site in some addition detail on my personal blog Screenwerk.

Now Apple is reportedly buying another tier one mobile ad network, Quattro Wireless, for $275 million. That immediately raises the question: What will Yahoo and Microsoft Do?

Yahoo already is a top mobile ad network and so is Microsoft — in both traffic and estimated revenues. Both rank in the top five in terms of monthly uniques, according to various sources.

In 2007 Microsoft acquired Screen Tonic (mainly for technology) and, last year, committed an estimated $500-$600 million in revenue guarantees to be the search and display ads partner for US carrier Verizon (89 million subscribers). Microsoft’s mobile MSN has 25 million (or more) users.

While Yahoo probably should further expand its reach and buy a mobile display ad network there’s a strong possibility that it will not, perhaps believing that it has all the reach and mobile display assets it needs already. Alternatively, then, a technology or platform buy might be in order. The company  recently lost a dynamic display (PC + mobile) ads technology partner in Teracent, when Google bought that company too.

Another possibility for Yahoo might be Mobclix, which operates one of just a few of nascent mobile ad exchanges. It could become the mobile companion to the PC-based Yahoo RightMedia Exchange.

Microsoft, for its part, will probably buy one of the remaining tier one mobile ad networks in the near term. That probably means Millennial Media or JumpTap. But there are a number of other platform, tool providers and so on that might be candidates as well.

While it will take a few years for big mobile ad revenues to show up and justify these prices, rest assured that the mobile internet will only continue to gain adoption. With 70 million users in the US today, poised to pass 100 million at some point this year, this market is real — and red hot.

Postscript: Quattro confirms Apple acquisition.

Yelp has raised a little over $30 million over several funding rounds. Revenues are heading toward $50 million according to several sources. If the price suggested by TechCrunch is correct, it would be about 10X estimated revenues.

There has been an imbalance between Yelp’s success as a consumer brand and destination and its ability to “monetize” among small business advertisers. However that $50 million in revenues, if correct, would be very respectable.

Buying Yelp would be a different sort of acquisition for Google — a major one — because it’s not really a technology platform so much as a local brand, community and sales channel. If Google does buy Yelp, what exactly does it get?

It gets a local-social network with roughly 26 million users across the US, Canada and the UK. Yelp reportedly has 8.5 million reviews. This is a huge amount of content that Google can’t generate itself and which it is already leaning on pretty heavily on its Place Pages as part of its increasing focus on local. But Google is also doing things on Place Pages that potentially threaten sites like Yelp longer term (e.g., sentiment analysis).

The Yelp brand is stronger than Google in the local market in many respects (see my post: Berkeley Salon: ‘80% of New Biz from Yelp’). And this would be the closest Google has gotten to buying a “sales force” with a meaningful “on the ground” presence in the form of local editorial people in market and telephone salespeople.

If this does happen many “Yelpers” (as they call themselves) will be unhappy, as many YouTube users were when Google acquired that site. It would also be a major (read: MAJOR) threat to many of Google’s local reseller publisher partners and others in the local space. The ad options for Google here are many, including:

• Distributing geotargeted display and text ads on Yelp
• Using Yelp as an “onramp” for Local Listing Ads, which will reappear next year

In some ways this would be as dramatic or more dramatic than the recent AdMob acquisition announcement. Google is increasingly serious about the local market — from both a content and advertiser/small business perspective (extending into mobile). Yelp helps fill in several gaps for Google on both sides.

If this does happen it will reverberate through the entire “local ecosystem” for many months to come. No, it would be an earthquake.

There was an iPhone-friendly mobile website that has been taken down to avoid the “why buy the cow when the milk is free” problem. We’ll see if the $19.99 price tag is still too high.

But if you’re inclined to jump at this lower price point . . . act now, supplies are limited. No rainchecks.

Mayer replied: “It would be a machine that could answer that question, really. It would be one that could understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world’s information, [find] different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.”

What Mayer may have unknowingly described is Siri, a “virtual personal assistant” that uses artificial intelligence to determine user intent and then match data or applications that can fulfill that intent. The company will launch its iPhone application soon and already has a deal with a “tier one” US mobile carrier. The NY Times offers background on Siri and some of the technology behind the system:

SRI International’s software venture, called Siri, is more ambitious, in that it allows users to speak or write natural-language requests into the device (“Find me a place to eat dinner tonight with Karen, reserve a table and put it on our calendars.”), which will complete the task independently and inform you when it is done.

In terms of long-term predictions, Siri is actually an easy bet. Dag Kittlaus, the company’s chief executive, said one of the four major carriers would introduce the service early next year, and he said it would also be available as an iPhone app. But over the next two years the technology should be able to complete a wider range of tasks.

I’ve seen Siri in action and found it impressive. The system is not perfect but it brings users closer to transactions and fulfillment of their objectives — at least in a range of use cases — than can Google on mobile devices today. It uses a voice interface to receive queries. You can use the keyboard if necessary but that’s entirely secondary to the experience. 

The way one interacts with it is “conversational” and “transactional” rather than providing a verbal version of a conventional search query. 

I moderated a panel at the recent Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco called “new directions in navigation and search.” The panel, among others, featured Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus. What became clear during the panel is that we’re going to see lots of innovation and change in mobile search and that the present version of the experience could well be regarded as Jurassic in only a few years as the unique attributes of the device (e.g., the camera) become input mechanisms and search tools. Augmented reality is also a part of this, although in its present form it’s fairly undeveloped and limited.

And, as another example of how far things could develop away from the current “query box and blue links” search paradigm,  look at the video demo below of “SixthSense” a “wearable gestural interface”:

Click here to view the embedded video.