Source: John Koetsier

The actual, real, live fire pole.

Like a full regulation fire pole that people can actually use to drop down a floor. Or an officially certified slide to get down to the lobby after a long day. Perhaps a cushioned and enclosed chill room.

Or even, believe it or not, a cattle walkway.

On a recent trip through Ontario, I toured Google’s first office in Canada — and talked to the engineer who leads Google Canada, a former startup guy in Silicon Valley and native Canuck, Steve Woods. If you use mobile Gmail, a Chromebook, Google Maps, Google Calendar, or Google Fiber, there’s a good chance you’ve touched something built at Google’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario.

And if you ever get the opportunity, those offices are definitely something to touch as well.

“Startups are great, because you start from scratch,” Woods says. “Startups are awful, because you start from scratch. At Google, you can literally launch a project that affects a billion people.”

That’s one reason he decided to accept Google’s offer to leave the Valley, return home, and “figure out what we should do in Canada and do it.”

In 2008, when Google opened the office, Waterloo and London were the company’s two centers of mobile excellence — likely due to Waterloo’s proximity to then-leading smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry. So Waterloo and London pioneered the mobile version of virtually every service Google offers: Maps, Gmail, Calendar, mobile search, and more. Waterloo, which now boasts about 200 engineers, also hosts the team that built Google Fiber’s user interface and critical software for the Chrome Pixel, Google’s answer to Apple’s retina display, with full touch integration.

The office is located in a formerly industrial building that once housed a tannery, believe it or not (hence the cattle walkway). Google shares it with a number of accelerators, startups, and coworking spaces that together make up Communitech, a startup mecca with strong connections to Waterloo University, angel investors, and venture capitalists.

Source: John Koetsier

The Googlers who work here. After a year, their drawing gets colored in.

Woods, whose recruiting strategy is to get ex-patriate Canadians to move back as well as to draw new talent from the nearby Waterloo University, says that it’s an attractive place for Googlers for a variety of reasons — not just the fire pole or massage room.

“There’s fewer bosses here, or at least they can’t find you,” he jokes. “At least a third of the people here have moved back from California.”

Source: John Koetsier

The actual cattle walkway

Woods says that Google’s most internally unpopular and controversial product ever was built in Waterloo as well: Conversion Optimizer. That’s a piece of software for advertising buyers that Google calls the “just trust us and push the button button,” which essentially hands your advertising campaign over to Google to optimize for the cheapest and most effective ads.

“It was extremely unpopular in Google,” Woods told me. “People were wondering: How much money will we lose? They were worried that advertisers would optimize their ad spend early in the month, hit their caps, and stop buying.”

Google’s known for taking risks, however, and the company ultimately decided to go ahead despite the chance it might actually lose money. Now, the product is one of Google’s most popular for advertisers, and it manages “many, many billions of dollars.”

“It took a Nobel prize-winning economist to prove that was untrue,” Woods said. “It’s great for Google, great for advertisers, and great for surfers.”

And another product Waterloo build that Woods is particularly proud of is what he calls “the largest project Google has ever done.”

It’s the first mobile search transcoder, which was an infrastructure that rendered web pages on Google’s own internal servers, decided which bits were most important for mobile phone web users, and sent only those bits. It sounds like something for the presmartphone days of historical antiquity, but not so.

“It’s still a very fast-growing project,” Woods told me. “The volume is staggering … billions of pages per day in countries in the third world, and even in the U.S., it’s still growing.”

So … why in Waterloo, Ontario?

Source: John Koetsier

Communitech, the community in the building that includes Google.

“Something interesting is happening here,” Woods says. “The university produces an amazing kind of talent … and people that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well.”

Worldwide, he says, Waterloo has been one of Google’ top three or four recruiting centers for some years now. And, he adds, not everyone who wants to work for Google wants to live in California.

“This area has a very high proportion of startups to population,” he adds. “Google loves startups, and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Oh, and the slide?

The office has a plastic red slide down from the second-floor Google reception area to the first-floor entrance. It has a prominent sign, “For Googlers Only,” which a PR rep told me was placed there because Ontario’s provincial slide inspector (yes, they have one, apparently) raised some concerns about safety.

I was bad, however, as I frequently am, and went down the slide anyways. The PR rep forgave me, as you can see in the video below:

Image credits: John Koetsier

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile monetization platform StartApp announced that it has been downloaded a staggering 500 million times today, and that it completes more searches on the Android platform than any service other than Google.

“We’re seeing a billion pageviews per month,” CEO Gil Dudkiewicz told me on the phone this afternoon.

That staggering number of downloads — minus churn due to deletions — has resulted in StartApp’s search app appearing on one out of every five Android devices globally, and StartApp itself coming from almost literally nowhere to being what it calls “the largest independent search distribution network in the Western world.”

The search service is part of a mobile monetization platform that StartApp runs for developers.

When developers agree to StartApp’s terms, they bundle a search portal with their app and get a cut of advertising revenue generated by that search portal. Fifteen thousand apps currently bundle StartApp, up sharply from just 3,500 in July 2012.

Users have the option to install the search icon or refuse it, but enough agree to keep the icon — and actually use it — that StartApp has become a global force in search in less than two years.

“The vast majority of apps don’t make money via downloads,” Dudkiewicz says. “The reason for it is that the paid model doesn’t really work for most of them … and ads don’t really resonate well with most users.”

[Indeed, mobile monetization is one of the areas of focus of our VentureBeat Mobile Summit on April 1&2, where we've invited the top 180 executives in mobile -- from brands, to ad networks, to manufacturers, and more -- to network and discuss ways to push the mobile economy forward].

So StartApp is announcing a new monetization model today in addition to its search portal: Exit Ads. This model, StartApp VP Itay Rokni says, distinguishes between the use of the app and ads, enabling users to use the app as much as they wish unencumbered by marketing and then giving them options to view and download other apps on exit.

That’s an interesting take on the app distribution ecosystem, which already has companies like AppGratis and other free app-of-the-day apps.

“We’re competing with anyone offering any kind of monetization for developers,” Dudkiewicz says.

The company was coy when I asked who its search partners are for the search portal that has been its main claim to fame so far, simply saying that they are “most of the big ones” and that the company was could not be more specific.

photo credit: Express Monorail via photopin cc

On that earnings call, CEO Larry Page said he was “very, very optimistic” that Google’s mobile revenues would be going up, that Google was “working to simplify our ad system,” and that, although he didn’t have anything to announce immediately, the company was making “rapid progress in that area.”

Now we know at least part of what he was talking about.

Source: WordStream

The old way of adding mobile devices, all of which is going away

Today Google very quietly announced new AdWords API features supporting “enhanced campaigns.” By ‘enhanced,’ Google means mobile. And despite the quiet launch, it’s the biggest change to AdWords in the last five years, according to one key member of the online advertising ecosystem.

“This is a huge simplification to how advertisers manage and track mobile advertising campaigns,” Larry Kim, CEO of search marketing firm WordStream, told me today.

The problem in the past was that AdWords was desktop-centric. Building a successful mobile marketing in the past essentially forced advertisers to create multiple campaigns if they wanted to target different cities and devices effectively, massively increasing complexity to the point that only about 5 percent of AdWords users were actually using the services’ advanced features.

The key difference today is that mobile is now baked in by default.

With the update, Google is adding the ability to simply and quickly set up geo-targeted advertising campaigns via new bid adjustment features: spend more close to your locations, spend increasingly less in farther and farther locations. In addition, mobile devices can be easily be managed in the same campaign that targets desktop searchers, with an option that very simply and easily increments or decrements your standard ad price.

“They’ve re-thought the whole way of setting up campaigns,” Kim says. “Now, you just have one campaign, and in that campaign you can bid differently depending on whether the person is on mobile or desktop. You can use the ‘mobile bid multiplier’ to, for example, bid 50 percent of your desktop bid, or 125 percent of your desktop bid.”

To turn off mobile, advertisers will have to turn the bid multiplier for mobile devices to -100 percent … effectively shutting it down. On the positive side, the multiplier can be turned up to 300 percent of your desktop bid for high-value keywords in the right location at the right time.

Google says it’s done this because now “instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions … [advertisers] can easily manage all of this in one single place.”

The new features, Kim says, address the two biggest stumbling blocks that small businesses and startups have with AdWords: it has not been easy to create successful campaigns, and the conversion and reporting tools have not made it super-easy to see return on investment.

“I think they’re the two biggest hurdles in mobile advertising adoption, and this means a lot more advertisers will adopt Google AdWords,” Kim told me. “Now you don’t have to be a full-time search marketer to do this anymore … and you’ll see more ROI from mobile searches.”

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

Over the past 14 years, Google has set the standard for online search. The ability to access expansive amounts of information on a global scale and deliver links full of information to our fingertips was, and is, revolutionary.

On an average day, Google crawls through 20 billion web pages, and serves 100 billion searches every month.  These numbers will only continue to increase, as data increases exponentially. It’s no secret that this data overload is causing a lot of problems.

One unexpected and dramatic impact of this influx of information is that it has exposed the weaknesses of the current design of search as we know it.

Today’s search is flawed

Today’s search function is mainly linking to mostly static content. It is not able to differentiate on an individual level which of the potentially relevant answers is the most accurate one for your particular search just by referencing popular keywords — it uses a popularity algorithm as a proxy to solve this. But, as we know, what’s popular isn’t always the answer to our specific question or search. Likewise, modern lifestyles have experienced the limitations of the mobile interface, making it difficult to research topics on the go.

These factors reveal a fundamental problem with search today: it’s not a dynamic and flexible process. Surely, in today’s world we need more than a search page with a list of blue URL links to sort through when we’re looking for recommendations, advice, diagnosis and other methods of finding and exploring information and products in the digital age.

The next frontier: mobile search 

Consumers are beginning to demand a better, more comprehensive search experience. People are already using highly specific apps on their smartphones, rather than traditional search engines to find information. According to Roger McNamee 1 out of a 100 Google searches are conducted on mobiles devices and the rest accounts for PC web searches. 

Yet, this doesn’t actually mean people aren’t searching on their mobile device, it only means they aren’t using Google to do so. In most cases today, a subject-specific app is more likely to generate the tailored content you are looking for.

For example, suppose you are shopping for an outfit for an upcoming holiday party and want to get a sense of what kinds of new styles are available in your favorite stores. Does your online search begin with Google or your favorite store’s website? Or, image you are in transit on your way to now buy the outfit from your favorite store and you want to double check your bank funds before purchasing. Do you type in your bank’s name to the Google search bar, or do you tap on your banking app to access your bank account?

Increasingly, the answers to these questions do not involve a traditional search engine. As our lives become a bundle of digital data — online and on our mobile devices — we’re approaching the next generation of access to information; a new form of search and discovery. This new phase is all about the Internet growing up and starting to provide the same kind of service we get when we’re offline. With data consumption and data creation growing by the minute, search and discovery must evolve to not only deliver specific keyword matches, but to offer a personalized experience based on the individual needs and wants of a user.

Consumers are beginning to require their search functionality to be more tailored to specific preferences and constraints, and hence, the app-centric world we live in today is beginning to take root. A recent Nielsen report shared that the average number of apps owned by a U.S. smartphone user is now at 41 — a rise of 28 percent on the 32 apps owned on average last year. To access our version of the information we’re looking for, we now tap on our shopping apps, our banking apps, our news apps, our entertainment apps, our social network apps.

The future of Artificial Intelligence and search (AI)

Artificial Intelligence will take this one important step further by providing the deep personalization and rich interactivity that the consumer is now craving by referencing a users’ usage, profile and behavior, and resulting in delivering information that’s much more relevant.

Additionally, AI can handle the complex task of optimizing recommendations and advice based on your contextual information (such as location and time) but also personal taste, needs wants and constraints. Therefore, a shopping app with AI integration could come in the form of a real estate app that’s able to alert you when your dream house comes up for sale after taking into your personal basic financial information, travel, school needs, entertainment and work preferences without you having to constantly spend hours poring over possible houses.

But how will AI help us in daily tasks versus just daily questions in tomorrow’s search? Both online and mobile users will become increasingly reliant on AI virtual assistants, or “smart” apps, in place of search engines, to procure relevant information. These assistants will have the ability to perform human-like reasoning and problem-solving, and better analyze and predict our digital content.

Many more providers of digital content will be offering their own virtual assistants and “smart” apps that will offer services that mirror how you would engage with a sales assistant that knows you very well and who would be able to recommend or advise you on products and services. It will be completely natural to outsource the search for news to a personalized magazine that knows what you want and need and bring it together for you on demand. You will have access to medical diagnosis that offer advice on your health, replacing the various searches you conduct online to find out specific or unusual aliments.

In this world the value of search moves from the central search engines to the individual companies and apps that provide the expertise or services you want, as the search of tomorrow requires more knowledge and expertise than a central search tool could ever handle.

Lars Hård has over 20 years of experience in running advanced AI development teams, both in Europe and North America. In 2006, Lars founded Expertmaker, an Artificial Intelligence platform solution based in Malmo, Sweden and San Francisco. 

Lars is also a guest lecturer at Lund University on the topics of theoretical ecology and genetics and is a frequent speaker at conferences on technology innovation and mobile evolution. 

Top Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As smartphone technology comes ever closer to equaling that of the personal computer, many of the tried and true marketing techniques of the Digital Era are transitioning to those miniature devices. Mobile search is the latest frontier to be pushed by app developers and web designers. Mobile search is expected to surpass desktop search by 2015, according to Marin Software’s March 2012 State of Mobile Search in the U.S. report.

Nearly half of all Americans own a smartphone, and most use them for more than calling and texting. With that in mind, marketers are finding great value in shifting dollars away from traditional Web marketing channels to mobile targeted initiatives, specifically to mobile pay-per-click ads.

As a relatively new technology, mobile PPC ads are starkly underpriced. Compared to desktop and tablet pay-per-click ads, smartphone PPC ads yield the highest click-through-rate (4.12 percent) and the lowest cost ($0.53). Mobile clicks continue to sell well below their actual value, while generating a higher conversion rate. As a result, more businesses are investing in mobile campaigns.

In 2011 alone, mobile paid search advertising spend more than doubled from 3.4 to 8.7 percent as a fraction of the pay-per-click industry. The State of Mobile Search report predicted that by the end of this year, mobile ads will account for 25 percent of all Google’s PPC clicks, a significant spike from 5 percent in January 2011. With this upward trend, one Cowen analyst expects Google to bring in $5.8 billion in mobile ad revenue in 2012, up three billion from last year.

The rapid adoption of smartphones is seen as the main driving force behind the growth in mobile PPC ads. Research shows that consumers are more likely to notice ads on their phones than on a desktop. Increased visibility means an increased likelihood of someone clicking the ad and interacting with it in some way, with 53 percent of consumers at least visiting the landing page after clicking a mobile ad, and 24 percent making a purchase.

At the very least, mobile pay-per-click advertising represents a substantial value buy; its growth is outpacing its pricing. Price corrections are no doubt on the way as third-party research is consistently showing more firms are adopting mobile PPC. At the moment, however, it may very well be the best value marketing play available in the digital space.

Anush Alexander is director of marketing for RW Lynch, a comprehensive marketing platform for personal injury attorneys, where she oversees company branding efforts, web, and internal product development and B2C marketing for the Injury HelpLine, a service that has connected over three million potential victims with lawyers in their area.

[Top image credit: SVLuma/Shutterstock]

FRX Polymers raises $26.7M for eco-friendly plastics

In the green-tech arena, FRX Polymers announced a $26.7 million second round of funding on Friday. The company has made an environmentally friendly plastic that is flame retardant for consumer electronics and other applications. DB Masdar Fund and BASF Venture Capital led the round.

Everything.me gets money for better mobile search

Mobile search app Everything.me raised $3.5 million in funding from Horizons Ventures. The company recently pivoted and offers an app that searches multiple places for information about a certain topic. For instance, if you search for country singer Taylor Swift, Everything.me would grab YouTube videos of her, her Wikipedia page, tweets, and IMDB information.

Learnzillion secures $2.4 million for video learning

Learnzillion announced a $2.4 million first round of funding on Friday. The company hosts short video lessons for students and teachers to improve math and literacy skills. DC Community Ventures led the round, with participation from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Learn Capital Venture Partners, NewSchools Venture Fund, Citybridge Foundation, ULU Ventures, and Calvert Social Investment Fund

Violin Memory grabs new funding for flash memory

Violin Memory has raised $50 million in a fourth round of funding at a market value of more than $800 million, the company said today. The company makes flash memory arrays that are used in enterprise data center servers. Toshiba, Juniper Networks, SAP Ventures, and Highland Capital all participated in the funding.

If you’ve got funding news to report, send it our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Plastic bottles image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Searching on mobile devices can be a tedious affair, especially if you’re plugging the same query into multiple apps. Do@ (pronounced do-at), a free iPhone app launching today, aims to solve that problem by letting you seamlessly search across multiple mobile web apps and services.

O- stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City today, Do@ co-founder Ami Ben-David demonstrated the app and discussed how it revolutionizes mobile web search.

Instead of just opening a bunch of web links, a search on Do@ pulls up several mobile web apps at once. For example, searching a movie title on the app pulls up results from Fandango, IMDB, and Netflix, all of which are fully interactive and with much of the functionality you’d expect. And best of all, you can swipe between the apps just as easily (and in a similar interface) as switching between open web pages in the iPhone’s web browser.

Do@ uses an HTML5 engine to pull the web apps together. It’s not actually giving you access to the native apps you can download from the App Store, but for most services web apps are good enough (and they’re only getting better). You can also favorite specific web apps — so if you’re a big IMDB addict, you can make sure that app always pops up first for movie searches.

The app is fast and intuitive, displaying an amount of polish that’s admirable for something that’s newly launched — when it works, at least. A few bugs still mar the experience, like random freezing and crashing. Those issues will likely be ironed out in upcoming updates.

Do@ is based in San Francisco and was founded last year. So far, it has raised a total of $8.6 million in funding, with $7 million of that announced today from an investment by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Finally, it looks like searching for apps on your smartphone will go from a terrible experience to a pretty good one.

Chomp, a website that recommends mobile applications, has just launched an app for the iPhone that offers a nifty sort of search engine — one that matches modern mobile browsing habits.

Google’s model of search breaks down in mobile, because Google relies on links to evaluate a Web page’s relevance and credibility. Chomp recognizes that mobile apps built for phones don’t get inbound links, and so throws out that page-ranking approach. Instead, Chomp lets you search for apps with more refined topic categories, and also gives you tips about who else among your friends have rated the apps favorably.

If you’re a typical smartphone user, you’ve probably been stymied when searching for application you want. I have. The experience is awful, because the App Store search engine really only lets you search by keyword. And with more than 250,000 applications to search from, it does a pretty bad job. Either that, or you search the Store by broad category, say “music.” If the app isn’t in the top 25, you’re unlikely to find it.

Or search for “car racing game.” See how Apple struggles with the results. It spits out app names with the word “car” in them. It has no idea you’re looking for a game.

That’s where Chomp comes in. Founder and chief executive Ben Keighran let me play around with the new Chomp app. Query Chomp’s search app for “car racing game,” and you’ll get games about car racing, and you’ll also get references to specific games that have been rated positively by your friends on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

More generally, if you type in “car,” it won’t spit out a random list of apps that have the word “car” in their names. Instead, it will ask you what sort of car app you’re looking for, prompting you with choices such as “navigation,” “mileage”  and other options. Swipe the menu bar to the left, and eventually you’ll actually get an option for “car racing game.”

Chomp launched its initial “recommendation engine” late last year, and has been generating reviews from users. Chomp has 400,000 active monthly users and 50 million recommendations, according to Keighran. It managed this, he says, by working hard to make reviews extremely easy to share: As soon as a user reviews an app, they can post it to Twitter or Facebook with a single button. This puts the review in the activity stream of your friends’ accounts, and so they see the recommendations even if they haven’t downloaded Chomp. (See the video below.) But until now, Chomp hadn’t released a separate search engine.

There’s no doubt Chomp improves on existing search. But the question is whether search is a big enough problem for users that massive numbers will feel compelled to download the app. Soon, Chomp will release an app for Android and other platforms, Keighran says.

One thing is for sure: Keirgan seems pretty determined to make Chomp relevant. This is his second startup and he says he’s spent a lot more time thinking through where the mobile Web is really headed. His previous company, Bluepulse, was an early player in mobile social networking, but it took too much venture capital and he couldn’t find a business model to match it. This time, he’s also found a credible cofounder for his mission in Cathy Edwards, who has an background in artificial intelligence, which is crucial for the semantic search elements Chomp is pushing.

The app searches for both native applications and HTML5 versions of mobile web sites.

The approach embraces what Keighran says is a sea change in the way people are surfing websites. Particularly on mobile phones, users have less patience for slower moving websites; they hesitate to click on links they fear will take several seconds to render. They prefer native phone apps, and they’re swiping with their fingers more, clicking on buttons and using tab bars to move from page to page. Moreover, these native apps tend to be centralized. Links tend to more often lead to other pages within the app itself, instead of linking off to a browser page.

His belief is that people will consume apps just like they consume music. You might have your favorite bands, and so you’ll listen to the music of these bands regularly, but you’ll also typically hunt for new music on a regular basis. The same thing goes for discovering new apps. You’ll have your core applications that you use daily, but you’ll also want to discover new ones, and there’s currently no good way to do that. By mixing semantic search and personal recommendation from friends, Keighran says he thinks he’s found the answer.

Chomp has raised about $2.5 million in Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, David Lee, Auren Hoffman, Brian Pokorny, and BlueRun Ventures.

According to the website of TomorrowVentures, Schmidt’s personal venture-capital investment vehicle, he has invested in Trumpet Technologies, a Palo Alto-based startup developing Scoop.

Trumpet CEO Corey Reese wouldn’t comment directly on Schmidt’s investment, but he agreed to have the team behind Scoop talk to VentureBeat about their plans.

Scoop’s ambition, according to Nick Simmons and Michael Akilian, two college students Reese recruited to develop the product, is to help people discover ad hoc events on campus — the pickup basketball game, say, or impromptu fraternity party that spreads through word of mouth or text message today. And it hopes not just to list events but to recommend them based on information from its users’ social connections.

“Imagine having a campus-wide conversation about what’s going on,” said Simmons (pictured right recuperating from knee surgery). “That information is not all in one place today.”

The high rate of smartphone adoption on campus — as high as 50 percent, according to one survey Scoop conducted among Ivy League students — will help spread their product, the Scoop team believes. They plan to launch Scoop as an iPhone app, though Simmons says the choice of initial platform may change, at some point during the upcoming school year, at selected campuses. (They wouldn’t say where, but Simmons attends Princeton and Akilian attends the University of Texas at Austin; Trumpet itself is located near the Stanford campus.)

The goal is to roll out Scoop much as Facebook did its social network in its early days, when it launched first at Harvard, then at the rest of the Ivy League, then at additional colleges as it hit critical mass among students.

Facebook, Reese points out, no longer has the exclusive college vibe it did when he was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley. There’s an opportunity to recreate that, he believes — using Facebook’s own playbook of having students building a service for students.

And the Scoop team plans to use Facebook’s programming interfaces to build a service that integrates closely with it.

“The existence of Facebook and its penetration through these campuses will be a great aid to distribution,” said Akilian (pictured here, left).

Besides Schmidt, Trumpet is apparently backed by Alsop Louie Partners, where Reese previously worked as a venture associate. His biography there states that he “now leads one of our portfolio companies, one that is still in stealth mode, as CEO” — a description which only fits his role at Trumpet.

Trumpet hasn’t disclosed its larger plans beyond Scoop, but its website describes its mission as “mobile local search.” Reese notes that the company is hiring engineers and offers lunch and dinner six to seven days a week.

Reese also acts as the company’s barista-in-residence. Here’s a video of him fixing fresh Blue Bottle drip coffee:

[Photo of students: Max Braun via Scoop website; photos of Simmons and Akilian courtesy Trumpet Technologies]

Today, in addition to letting you search prices with voice — by calling 1-888-Dofrucall — it also launches price search via your mobile WAP browser and texting (SMS).

We tried it out at Starbucks the other day, and it worked great. We found an Italian espresso machine on the shelf, typed in the product’s barcode at www.Frucall.com/m on our Treo browser, and hit search. While Starbucks priced it at $19, Frucall took us to a page showing it priced at $17 — saving us $2. Frucall gave us a way to purchase the product, and also lists local merchants carrying it.

For people who like hunting for bargains, this is a useful service. There’s a bunch of other features. It lets you record a voice message about a product when you’re shopping, in case you want to retrieve it later. It also converts your voice messages into text.

It also lets advertisers bid to place ads on result pages for specific product barcodes, product categories, zip code, phone area codes. It gives advertisers an easy way to convert voice ads into text.

Google, by contrast, lets you text a barcode, and provides information only on products contained in Google Base (merchants are forced to submit their products there). Frucall’s coverage is broader, including products found at Google, Yahoo and eBay. Pricegrabber, meanwhile, does something similar via the Web, but doesn’t offer a voice service, or such a robust mobile offering.

You can search without registering. But more benefits come with registering, such as finding previous searches.

Frucall raised a first round of funding “in the millions” of dollars earlier this year, from PacGen Ventures, according to chief executive Behzad Nadji. He plans to keep that Series A round open, and to raise more by the middle of this year, he said. Nadji was previously at AT&T, as senior vice president of research and architecture. The company has 20 people.