14 DAY TRIAL // When talking about search engines on mobile phones, you will probably only be able to come up with two names, Google and Yahoo!.
Europe's biggest telecom groups seem to think there's need for a slight change and are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge the two US giants Google and Yahoo!.
The companies, including Vodafone, France Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Hutchinson Whampoa, Telefonica, Telecom Italia and US carrier Cingular, now known as AT&T will apparently be coming together for secret, high-level talks at the 3GSM event in Barcelona. In the UK, more than 20 percent of mobile phone users are expected to have access to mobile Internet at broadband speeds by the end of 2007, which also means that the use of mobile phone search engines will increase. Up until now, Google and Yahoo have partnered with several mobile operators and mobile phone manufacturers.
While calls become cheaper, network operators are starting to want to increase their revenue out of something, and the best solution at the moment would be mobile advertising. In order to be able to challenge the two US search giants, a joint approach is essential.
The group’s offer is designed for a combined customer base of approximately 600 million mobile phone users worldwide thus allowing advertisers a pretty large audience. We have yet to see whether the combined networks will decide to try to secure a majority slice of an existing search engine or create a white label service, with a single advertising sales house and technical team that the mobile networks could each apply their own brand on.
Other networks may decide to keep their deals with Google and Yahoo. Google has already signed up Vodafone, T-Mobile, 3 and China Mobile and also comes pre-loaded on Samsung handsets.