Caveat: My boyfriend is the CEO and I am an investor in Aardvark.  Having said that, I have frustrated him to no end with my (hopefully constructive) criticism from the beginning ;).

There are a total of 3.5+B mobile and 1.6B Internet users worldwide.  These two numbers used to get us very excited about mobile opportunities at Google, especially in the Asia Pacific and Latin America team where I did strategy for two years.

But the fact of the matter is the vast majority of mobile phones are not Internet-enabled, so we were always scratching our heads asking what the killer SMS app was going to be.  Google Search’s model is to link you to the right information, where you then go and find it, which works when you’re connected to the Internet.  Unfortunately this is limited on SMS.  Google SMS is great for simple things like stock quotes, sports scores, local address and phone numbers, etc.  If you want to know something more complicated or context specific, most likely you’re out of luck.

Enter Aardvark.  Aardvark is a fast-growing San Francisco based start-up that offers social search: Q&A to your extended network over IM, email, and SMS.  They put it best: “A real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can provide much better information than a web page. After all, there's much more knowledge and experience in people's heads than there is written on web pages.”  The real value is that it connects to your second and third degree networks, which since we can all do the math, we know is vastly larger than your immediate connections.  Aardvark was recently featured in Business Week, you can find the article here.

For highly penetrated markets like the US, Aardvark is best for subjective questions, such as “What’s the best sushi restaurant in New York?”  I’m sure many of you have gone to Yelp to answer that question, and had to read through a lot of reviews from a lot of restaurants to triangulate to find the answer for you.  Aardvark just shoots back a message (or five) from people you are connected to and it works surprisingly well.

I was thinking more about Aardvark in emerging markets the other day and I started to get really, really excited about the opportunity.  Why?  It doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential here.  It could be the communication and efficiency benefits of the mobile phone on steroids, since users could tap into the knowledge of their extended network.  It could be even greater benefits than the Internet without waiting for Internet enabled phones, since so much more information is in people’s heads than it is on web pages.  It’s utility would be for both objective and subjective queries, since Google search wouldn’t be an option.

If Aardvark adoption takes off, this could be big.  Very very big. 

Ping me @developingjen on twitter if you’d like to try it out.