Boopsie has been flying under the radar, but today it announced a deal with ARTISTdirect that should put it squarely in sight.

Boopsie offers a mobile phone search application that is designed to solve some of the problems inherent in T9 solutions, and it gets end-users to their desired mobile content faster than if they were to use Google online.

With ARTISTdirect, Boopsie is taking a vast amount of content that the information service offers and creating channels so people can get to their music and entertainment content. Boopsie was behind the MyCTIA application that show attendees used to find show information at the last CTIA show.

ARTISTdirect already had a vast amount of its content optimized for the mobile phone, so getting the Boopsie deal set up didn’t require a lot of time, according to Dimitri Villard, interim CEO at ARTISTdirect.

Boopsie provides a downloadable client that manages the searches. “It’s a very simple process for content publishers to take vast amounts of data and put them into our system,” said Greg Carpenter, CEO of Boopsie. “What we do is provide the high-speed access to get to the data.”

The system uses a smart prefix search, so if you were to type “Bl,” space, then “Oy,” in the ARTISTdirect Artist category, the app will take you to Blue Oyster Cult. Carpenter said it takes five keystrokes on average on the phone to find a band.

Boopsie supports BlackBerry, J2ME, Palm OS, Symbian Series 60, Windows Mobile and the iPhone.