Knowledge@Wharton has an interview with McCue of Tellme on the convergence of the phone and the web:
Tellme is really geared around the phone and always has been. So the way that we think about this is going to be different than the way Google thinks about it. They think of it more as a web company and we think of it more from a phone perspective intuitively. We believe that speech recognition is critical, for example.
We’ve made it work really well with speech recognition, so that I can just say “pizza” and I don’t have to type it. I think that this is critical to making any kind of phone “form factor” work well, because my mom isn’t going to [enter text commands into a phone]. Kids will, but not when they are driving. Or at least they shouldn’t be. So we think that voice is a really critical part of building up the service for the phone.
The other thing is that the ad models will be radically different than what they are on the web. They’ll be more transaction oriented — [based on] a percentage of the transactions people actually close with small- to medium-sized businesses on the phone. So the web ad model that Google has done so well doesn’t really hold true as readily on the phone.
