Mobile Giants Plot Secret Rival To Google

... reads the headline on this article at the online site of the London Telegraph newspaper.

A 'secret rival' - hmm... they won't get many users if they keep it secret... ;-)

Europe's biggest telecoms groups are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge Yahoo! and Google, the US giants.

Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and one American network, Cingular, are among the companies that will come together for secret, high-level talks at the mobile industry's biggest annual trade show in Barcelona next week.

It seems to me the article is somewhat speculative.. claiming the operators are 'faced with declining revenues' when the same newspaper only a few days earlier reported Vodafone growth hits 6pc in quarter.

Mobile phone operators make their money from, er, operating the network. The more you use the phone, the more traffic, the more you pay. They dream about so called 'killer applications' that become super-popular, driving usage and revenues through the roof. Some placed their bets with video; but so far technology, services and handsets have still to catch up with the promise of 3G in this arena.

Has there been a 'killer application' in the past? Perhaps, called SMS - Short Messaging Service - that little technological afterthought that found it's way into the GSM specifications - certainly fulfills the killer app criteria.

But wait, SMS is a 'thin' application - not a lot of bandwidth is needed to deliver the value to the customer. SMS is much much thinner than Voice. In the same way, Search is much thinner than Video. And looking at the usage stats of search, we for sure know that people value - and will use - mobile search. A killer app can be a massively used application - not necessaily a high-bandwidth one.

Mobile operators are not in the business of competing with the applications that drive network traffic. They may want a team huddle to work out how to maximise revenues from the clear opportunity presented by mobile search, but that is a different thing. These guys need Google and Yahoo and MSN.

A prediction for another killer application? True MMORPG on mobile handsets; this one will need some bandwidth.

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