What is Google Mobile up to?

Rating: deafening silence

By Bena Roberts

Only two months ago I was writing intelligence stating, “another day, another mobile operator signs up with Google”. But all of this has come to a sudden end. Google is not just muted, it’s silent.

A few weeks ago, DJ Collins gave an interview talking about mobile barcodes. Oh dear. If mobile barcodes are the most exciting thing that Google Mobile has to talk about, the silence is probably a necessity.

In the past few months Yahoo! has shifted into third gear with its stance on mobile and its Yahoo! Go application is not bad, which is a key point.

Yahoo! Go might be the hottest new application on the market at the moment and it might have had more than 400 downloads, but it’s still not that good. It’s OK. It uses the best of the Opera browser to showcase Yahoo! Services, but that is it.

So, is Google being quiet because it is working on its own application? Or is Vodafone pressing Google? It’s over a year now since the two agreed to push a new Google/Vodafone branded mobile portal and an advertising-triggered search engine. It hasn’t happened.

In fact, desperate Vodafone is now jumping into bed with every Tom, Dick and Harry (YouTube, MySpace and eBay) in increasingly undignified and desperate attempts to appeal to mobile yoof and gain street cred. While Vodafone puts its hoodie up, Google needs to be getting an anti-social behaviour label for its silence.

There are two scenarios.
1. Google is being quiet because something big is coming.

2. Google is in trouble in mobile – it can’t deliver what was promised because mobile is not the web and Google is not a mobile king.

We trust it’s the first and not the second, but right now, looking at some major buys by Google in the past year, we are thinking that perhaps there is too little up Google’s sleeve.

Looking at those purchases and particularly the big YouTube buy, we can try to predict Google’s next moves. It could:

1. Offer an (on device portal) ODP YouTube portal to mobile operators.

2. Fend off Yahoo! with a Google application bigger than just gmail mobile which encompasses all of the Google’s mobile propositions.

3. The purchase of dMarc Publishing might be something to look out for. This is a way of triggering mobile adverts into audio. This could be ideal to monetise mobile podcasting – which is looming large in the future right now.

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