News comes across the wires today reporting that Microsoft has bought TellMe, the nation's largest provider of voice activated mobile search technology:

MICROSOFT FINALIZED A DEAL WEDNESDAY to purchase TellMe, a directory assistance provider and voice-activated mobile search firm, giving Redmond a possible edge in the race to develop a better mobile search tool.

Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Marketing Intelligence, said that despite the manual dexterity mobile search users are developing, using a tiny keyboard still offers a sub-par user experience.

"There's still usability problems that are pretty significant," he said. "Keying in search queries is awkward. This is really about improving usability, and driving consumer adoption."

Over at MediaPost's Mobile Insider Blog, reporter Steve Smith discusses some promising developments in mobile video--driven as he sees it by increasing localization and targeting of content:

In recent weeks, however, I am finding mobile video content that is good enough, sometime free enough, to merit attention. One quiet entrant in the race towards must-see mobile TV is Weathernews' LiveLocal service. This $4.99 a month application works because video is simply one piece of an excellent design that brings me all the local weather news I need in four screens. My default location pops up with an attractive image of the local weather cam, and I can flip through radar, forecast, alerts, and weather details in four clicks. But the best part of this service is that it also aggregates news stories from my local news stations. I get all the little newsy snippets from the morning, noon and evening telecasts, often within an hour of them airing. What makes this video work where so many others fail for me? Immediacy and relevance. The content is laser-targeted to my on-the-ground needs. There are too few applications right now that give us the local must-have info a mobile user needs in the car and on the street. There is a good reason why MapQuest is the most popular mobile app by a longshot. And LiveLocal has immediacy and on-demand choice. This information is very close to the surface of the deck, so I don't have to drill through menus and folders of the high-eyebrowed Katie Couric and bad Leno jokes to get what I want.

And on a lighter note, C|Net breaks down the history of the emoticon:

Author Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 New York Times interview that "there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."

Now, nearly four decades later, there is just such a typographical symbol-- :-), or :) for the minimalists, and it'd be tough to find a tech-savvy person who hasn't leaned on it. There's also a special typographical symbol for a frown-- :-( -- and one for a cool dude in sunglasses -- B-) -- and one for a wink -- ;-). There's even a typographical sign for wearing a baseball cap-- d=D.

These are emoticons (or emotive icons), the arrangements of letters and symbols that have been inserted into e-mails, message board posts, and instant messages since the fledgling days of the Internet. "Fledgling days," in this case, refers not to the mid-'90s when people were beginning to learn what AOL was, but to the early '80s, when accessing the Internet was largely limited to research universities and defense contractors.