Google — the premier online company in the traditional internet world — has for the past year been focusing its attention on the mobile market.
The company has steadily introduced new services designed specifically for the small screen. In January, it released Google Personalized Home, which lets people access Gmail, news, RSS feeds and other information from their personalised Google home page on mobile phones and PDAs. The service is free in the US and works with any phone that contains an XHTML-capable web browser.
This summer it launched a downloadable Java application for Google Maps, enabling mobile phone users to get information about local restaurants and cinemas, as well as live traffic information on the map.
And this month, it improved its mobile Gmail client to allow quicker access to the application. At the same time, Google has been busy developing partnerships with mobile operators, such as Sprint Nextel and Cingular Wireless. It's also been testing new business models, such as text-based mobile advertising, and more localised advertising.
With nearly three billion mobile-phone subscribers in the world expected by the end of 2007, Google sees great potential for extending its presence throughout the world using the mobile platform, said Deep Nishar, director of product management for Google.
Q: Google has been making a lot of mobile announcements lately. What exactly is the company's strategy when it comes to the mobile market?
A: Our strategy is predicated on three things. The first is that mobile devices are very personal. People carry them wherever they go. And unlike the home PC, people don't share their mobile phones. So it's very important to make the service very personalised.
That's why we've launched Google Personalized Home and mobile Gmail. So people can get this data on their mobile phones all in one place without going to a bunch of different sites.
The second big category we are focusing on is location-based services. People take their mobile phones with them everywhere, and they generally are looking for information in the context of a location. When you're on your mobile device and you type in the keyword "movie", you're likely to be searching for a cinema because you want to go and see a movie. But if you typed in "movie" on your desktop at home, you may be searching for more general information about movies. With Google Maps, we can show you the location of the nearest cinema, the times of the shows, and even let you purchase tickets from your phone.
But right now, users have to type in their location or a ZIP code [postcode], right?
Yes, but the next step is to interact with advanced mobile phone technology, such as Global Positioning Systems [GPS], so the device knows where you are. We're already doing that with Helio's new phones. The whole point is to make the user's life simpler.
What's the third piece of the strategy?
In mobile, a one-size-fits-all solution won't work. Given that our mission is to organise the world's information, it's important to make sure our applications work everywhere in the world. But you can't assume that products popular in one region will be popular everywhere.
SMS is a good example. It's very popular in Europe and is gaining popularity in the US. But people in Japan don't use SMS; they use mobile email. So it wouldn't make sense to launch an SMS-based search application there because people won't use it. So we need to make sure our services can be accessed globally, but the product execution is local.
So how does Google expect to make money from the new mobile applications it's developing?
We are already testing text-based mobile advertising in Japan and several other countries. And so far the testing is going quite well. So that's one avenue for us to make money. But I think that mobile is still a new medium. The number of people accessing data applications on phones is still relatively low. As usage increases, I am certain there will be other business models that emerge.
Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said earlier this month that he believes mobile advertising could make mobile phones free for consumers. How would that work exactly?
What Eric was alluding to is that it's in the best interests of mobile operators, content developers and application providers like us, to make sure that everyone who wants a mobile device has one. Unlike the traditional internet, the mobile market is based on a well-defined ecosystem. Mobile operators…
