Has Telstra accidentally confirmed it’s getting the iPhone?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 14 March 2008 16:51

Your IT - Mobility

The Sensis ad at the AIMIA site says that Sensis wants a “Design BA for iPhone search application”.

The position would be under a “contract role”, with the length of the contract set to a rather surprisingly short 2 to 3 months.

Of course the news comes after Apple launched its iPhone SDK, or software development kit, meaning the Sensis search application is effectively guaranteed to be an actual third party program, as the ad itself suggests, rather than simply being a redesigned, iPhone friendly web front end to be searched through the iPhone Safari web browser.

The ad states: “Are you a business analyst with experience gathering and documenting requirements for interactive web or mobile products? We’re looking for a BA with a technical front-end UI background to help us design cutting-edge search applications for the iPhone.”

The ad continues that: “This isn’t boring old specification-heavy BA work. This is exciting and agile BA work to help us envision mobile search applications that work great and look beautiful. Let us know if you think you’ve got the right combination of creative flair, geekiness, and detail orientation to get the job done.”

In Australia, Sensis has a Yellow Pages search engine that has been the subject of some derision in the local press, effectively for being completely un-Google like in its search capabilities.

A couple of choice comments from the 9to5mac website follow, complete with typing errors, missing capitalisations and punctuation (etc) that we aren’t going to fix:

“Thank your lucky stars folks outside of Australia, that you haven't had the pleasure of using the Sensis search engine. It is without a doubt the worst search engine I have ever used. Try looking up a person/business on the Yellow Pages/White Pages section of the Sensis search engine and you'll quickly find yourself rumaging around for the hefty, environmentally noxious, weighty antique physical paper version of the Yellow Pages so as to achieve a better, easier and quicker result.”

Update: In a new article we have been able to get a response from Sensis over claims their search experience is below par.

Please read onto page 3 for another amusing and bemused comment, as well as a suggestion for Sensis on how they can redeploy the successful iPhone search programmer once the 2-3 month contract is up. Please read on.