By Mobile Marketer’s Dan Butcher
March 5, 2010
NEW YORK – A Google executive revealed the company’s mobile strategy, detailed case studies and discussed the market potential during the keynote address at Mobile Marketing Day, hosted by Mobile Marketer and the Direct Marketing Association, according to Mobile Marketer. Google has made tremendous strides in mobile, including mobile search and the development of the Android operating system powering phones such as the Motorola Droid and its own Nexus One. Google’s increasing presence in mobile is reshaping not just the mobile business but also marketing in general. “We look at mobile as a big part of our overall strategy—that’s an understatement,” said Alex Barza, New York-based mobile ad sales lead at Google. “We’re looking at mobile across the entire world as a global play.” 
Google Exec Alex Barza
Two-thirds of the world’s population has a mobile phone subscription—4 billion people—and there will be 5 billion wireless subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, according to some estimates. Mobile will create the ability to individually target more people than any other channel, according to Google. Google exec reveals mobile strategy, case studies, Alex Barza is mobile ads sales lead at Google “Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet,” Mr. Barza said. “Mobile is the access point to the Internet in the developing world. “Search has been our core business for many years now, and we actually receive many more searches on mobile than we do on desktops in developing markets,” he said.
Morgan Stanley recently predicted that more users will access the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years. Google connects consumers with businesses via clic Click-to-call an advertiser Market researcher IDC is even more bullish, predicting that this is going to happen sooner than that—by 2013. “What’s driving this mobile adoption? Computing, connectivity and the cloud,” Mr. Barza said. “What’s different about mobile today than even a couple of years ago is the computing power of these phones. “Here in the U.S. LTE will potentially be rolled out by the end of the year, and 4G is the equivalent of putting a broadband cable modem in the palm of your hand,” he said. “The cloud is basically the Internet, with more than 700 million servers around the globe, and with smartphones all of that information is in the palm of your hand. “That’s where we feel the future of mobile is going and where we’ve focused our energies—high-end Web-enabled mobile devices are the future of mobile.”
When Apple rolled out the first iPhone in 2007, it cost $600 and only ran on the Edge network, and was only sold via Apple and AT&T. Now iPhones are 20 times faster, the operating system is much better and you can buy 16GB iPhones at one-third of the price at Walmart or Best Buy Mobile. Consumers can now get an iPhone or Motorola Droid for $199 or so. “If you think about how far we’ve come as far as access to these Web-enabled devices, it’s pretty incredible,” Mr. Barza said.”Bigger screens, more connectivity and faster processors are enabling us to do a lot more.” As an example of convergence in action, Mr. Barza cited Google goggles. “Google goggles leverages the unique attributes of the mobile phone, which is much more personal than a desktop, much more interactive than the desktop Web experience,” Mr. Barza said. “It leverages sight through the camera, GPS makes it location aware, the cloud gives it access to vast amounts of data and you have connectivity within seconds. “I point my Nexus One out my hotel window in Chicago and within milliseconds there’s an augmented reality interaction telling me ‘You’re looking at the Chicago Watertower,’” he said. “There’s also optical character recognition, so when you’re reading a menu or document in a different language, it can translate that into 100-plus languages.”
One of the audience members commented that the mobile technology Google sees on the horizon is like something out of Star Trek. “If you’re texting in English, Google will translate it in real time, so you can have a dialogue with someone who doesn’t speak English, and we’ve applied that to a conversation, so if I’m speaking in English, the phone will pick that up and translate my voice and spit it back out in over 100 languages,” Mr. Barza said. “We’re not quite there yet, but we will be soon.”
New devices = new usage Google tracks mobile searches on Google.com within the shopping category. The three-year graph, from May 2007 when the original iPhone launched to January 2010 when Google’s HTC Nexus One debuted, showed tremendous growth in the shopping category. IDC forecasted that by 2013, there will be more than 1 billion mobile devices that can connect to the Internet. That does not just include phones, but also gaming consoles, netbooks, eBook readers, GPS systems and car navigation systems, iPads and tablets. Mobile commerce has arrived People are showing their willingness to buy goods and services via their handsets, and not just ringtones and wallpapers, but everything from books, movies and music to tickets, flatscreen TVs, fashion apparel and even cars. “I was blown away that someone bought an actual Corvette on eBay mobile for $75,000,” Mr. Barza said. “A lot of clients across the board are starting to experience sales from mobile devices and are seeing incremental growth of users accessing their Web site from mobile devices, which is leading to sales. “Consumers want this—they want the stuff that they want when they want it, and mobile enables them to buy it now,” he said. “Having a mobile-optimized site aids that process, because it provides better customer service, but there are some sales happening via mobile on non-optimized sites. “There will be Flash on all Android devices later this year, with pinch and zoom and fast connectivity.” Retailers are seeing more conversions at a lower cost using mobile channels.
To read the entire article check out Dan Butcher’s article at the Mobile Marketer: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/search/5568.html
Staff Reporter Dan Butcher covers ad networks, banking and payments, carrier networks, manufacturers, and software and technology. Reach him at dan@mobilemarketer.com.
