Citysearch's Spin on SMS

Citysearch has launched a new feature that enables site visitors to save information about restaurants to their cell phone. The text message returns Citysearch branding, the name of the restaurant, the phone number, the address, intersection, rating, and something that looks like a "Visa Signature" ad -- but it's hard to tell.

In the early days of the Web, pages would rarely print in a convenient manner. The logic was, all the information is on the screen...why not just let people print out whatever they want?

As it turned out, lots of people wanted printer-friendly pages, especially if they were doing online research on a place they planned on visiting in the real world.

I suspect that as more research is done on the way people use their mobile phones, we'll find that this "send 2 phone" addresses two key pain points: (1) calling 411 and not remembering the darn phone number, and (2) staying organized while on the road.

Or to look at the opportunity a bit differently, what is the advertiser value of being inserted into a consumer's personal phone directory?