This is why I don't have an iPhone (I love my iPod Touch, though) and why I'm not impressed by any of the new phones currently on the market here in the UK
Showing posts with label google mobile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google mobile. Show all posts
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Android Demo
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Google's problems with wi-fi hotspots in the UK
There are three main providers of wi-fi hotspots in the UK;
- BT Openzone
- T-Mobile
- The Cloud
Here's the catch. T-Mobile is a German company. The servers that support the wi-fi clearly have an IP address that Google associates with Germany.
If you look at the iPhone / iPod Touch's unique Google Mobile screen there's no easy way to change country either. I use my iPod Touch a lot on wi-fi and frequently have to struggle to de-German my results.
There are some other twists too. National Express is a very large travel company over here in the UK; they run thousands of buses and coaches (think Greyhound) and many important train services too. In fact, National Express recently won the franchise for the important East Coast line (that hooks London into the east coast of the United Kindgom) and brought free wi-fi to all their passengers.
Free wi-fi on long train journeys is great news! Google results in... Swedish are less hot. Google currently associates National Express' wi-fi with Sweden.
It isn't just Google's search results which are effected. Google does a lot of content changes that are aligned with geo-detection. For example, I made a post to this Blogger account yesterday from a National Express train and had a lovely Swedish GUI to content with.
Google's struggles with correctly identifying the location of the searcher/ap user seem particularly noticable right now. This is a problem is only going to increase as more and more people access the web over mobile products. My ideal scenario would allow me to pop out of our office in Munich or Paris, saunder down to the local cafe, pull out my iPod Touch, connect to the wi-fi and get to English language content despite the fact I'm somewhere in mainland Europe.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
New Google Mobile Product Pages
If you head over to Google Mobile Products you'll be able to access a list of countries where Google supports mobile products. This is a fairly new area of the search engine.
I suspect coders will be interested in the doctype Google uses for these mobile pages.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Mobile Marketing figures that you might not know
I'm just back from the Internet Advertising Bureau (UK)'s Engage conference. I thought I would share some stats. These come from Matthew Kirk, Orange's Director of Portals. The fine print of his slides may have cited additional third party sources but his name will do for now and, if you're a member, you should be able to download the original from the IAB.
Much to the audience's dismay - Display will be bigger than Search in mobile marketing in 2010. Nevertheless, the figures here are all huge. Skip to the end and look at the in-game figure. Sure, that's the smallest (there are smaller still but I didn't scribble them down) but it's worth noting that Microsoft where plugging their Massive in-game advertising solution to us today. Massive is, of course, the in-game advertising company they bought to rival Google's purchase of AdScape.
Here are the exact figures for mobile marketing in 2010;
Display - £88,000,000
Search - £51,000,000
TV Broadcast - £23,000,000
SMS - £7,000,000
VoD - £7,000,000
In Game - £4,000,000
What about a breakdown by age? Glad you asked. 
The figure for that graph;
Under 24 - 29%
25-34 - 30%
35-44 - 22%
45-54 - 11%
54+ - 8%
Twice as many men as women use mobile internet. That's not surprising. I found Orange's frankness surprising, though. Kirk was upfront in saying that mobile growth had slowed to only 5% (49m out of the UK's population of 60m have mobiles) and so the networks need mobile marketing as a revenue stream.
P.S. I may make a series of posts like this and if I do I'll tag them all Engage 07.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Like Dodgeball - but better?
Philipp Lenssen's just posted to say that Google's bought Jaiku.
Jaiku talk a lot about "presence sharing" and Philipp succinctly translates that as "your friends know where you are & what you’re up to by looking at their cell phone using Jaiku’s service". This is very much the same arena that dodgeball played in - before the founders quit Google.
So what are Google up to here? There are no mobile community leaders yet. There's no mobile gathering site that's similar to what YouTube did for video or what LiveJournal did for early blogging. Google is betting there will be a mobile community market leader. Google is betting that we'll all become addicted and that we'll all spend hours each week on our mobile keeping up to date with the mobile community. Google want to make it as easy as possible for that community to happen and they want to place appropriate adverts in the community to help fund it.
This is an area where, I suspect, the savvy mobile operators (the likes of Vodafone and t-mobile) will be unwilling to surrender to Google without a brawl.
We've even seen Nokia plan a future around this sort of mobile content community. The Register reckon Nokia is doomed to fail here. No one will be willing to pay for mobile content in the long term (which is why we're likely to see Google go on an ad funded model). The Register also predict that the operator networks will fight the phone makers in the pay-for-mobile-portal arena and charmingly use the phrase "two bald men fighting over a comb".
A good question for any Search Marketer to walk away with today is "Is content really king? Or is communication king?" ... if mobile takes off then it's likely to be on the strength of easy communication rather than strong content.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Gmail Mobile commits the ultimate email crime
I'm not best pleased with the mobile Gmail client on my blackberry.
Why not?
I successfully compose and send emails with it - but it only looks like that. In fact, I'm not successfully sending these emails and they're vanishing into the ether.
This is the biggest crime any email client could commit. I have no confidence in the application any more. I can't trust it to send my emails.
I do trust m.gmail.com to send my emails, though, so I'll use that. The main disadvantage of the mobile web page over the mobile application is that you can't mark emails as spam. I get a lot of spam. That said; I don't think the application was successfully marking email as spam either.
Oh well. At least the mobile Google Maps application is still my friend.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Feedburner and Google's Mobile RSS Reader
I was at Netimperative's search roundtable this afternoon where the topic was; "Do you believe the buzz about bid optimization - can it really get you bigger returns? How can you tell if you have the best?"
It was good to meet up with Jon Beeston from Efficient Frontier. He's one of those people who firmly believe the future is in portfolio management rather than bid management. As that's what Efficient Frontier offers, I'm not surprised!
It was a wide ranging discussion and we went badly off topic at times (Nabaztag's and World of Warcraft) but I must admit I did like the look of interest on some of the participants faces when I speculated about Feedburner and Google's Mobile RSS Reader.
We were talking about the future of mobile. Will it really take off this year?
After email, the function of my (beloved) BlackBerry (I'm with Vanessa on this one!) is Google's RSS Reader on mobile friendly. I'll skim through the RSS headlines, star, read or mark as read. It's the best way to keep up with the fast moving world of search.
I speculated that since Google knows all about the RSS I subscribe to and so many of them are powered by Feedburner they'd be easily able to insert mobile targeted RSS ads. They'd know I was on a mobile and could even point the ads to a BlackBerry friendly page. The ad itself would be short - but so's an AdWord creative.
I suppose if we want to get clever (and if BlackBerry get GPS) then we could even splice in local ads - but I'd rather have topic targeted ads.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
CYC – Claim Your Content
On Thursday I wrote about Cleaner Content. So did The Register.
On Friday Garret Rogers noticed Google claiming “Claim Your Content” domains and variants.
Today, Ionut Alex Chitu drew attention to a YouTube video where John Battelle interviews Eric Schmidt. Schmidt explicitly talks about CYC – Claim Your Content.
I think that’s it. Cleaner Content is Claim Your Content. This may well be an audio issue. The two sound the same!
In the video Eric Schmidt says that he believes Viacom are negotiating with Google. He points out that Google removed all the Viacom videos on request which complies with the DMCA.
Schmidt also says that the future is very much about mobile. Good. I’ve been saying this for a while so I’m glad to have some more “told you so” clout to point to!
Friday, January 26, 2007
M Google and W Google
Would Google ever drop the 'www' from their lead URLs?
They might.
We already have m.gmail.com for gmail on the mobile. However, for Google Reader there's www.google.com/reader/m. There's a little inconsistency there. (Google Reader, btw, uses labels rather than tags)
We should see Google moving over the m. sub-domain for mobile. Check out this jobs page from Google UK.
An interesting quirk is the w.google.co.uk/jobs address. On Google UK you can view the same page.
Over at Google US if you try swapping out the .co.uk with .com then you'll trigger a redirect.
Could we see m.google for all mobile content on Google and w.google for web content on Google? Maybe.
By the way, if you are interested in at job at Google UK then you'll be pleased to know that their Belgrave House offices are spacious and comfortable. They're just around the corner from Victoria Station and the tube. If you're keen on mobile search then Belgrave House is the place to be too.
Monday, January 08, 2007
2007 will be the year of mobile search
Paul Yiu of Yahoo! Search posted news of oneSearch on Yahoo's YSearchBlog a few hours ago. The beta sample is now full. That's partly a testament to the power of corporate blogging, the interest in mobile search and partly due to Yahoo only offering a small beta group.
oneSearch is an upgraded mobile search offering from Yahoo. The first person to try and coin the phrase Mobile Search 2.0 gets shot. What oneSearch does is optimise search results so that they fit mobile phone screens better, optimise search navigation so that there is less fiddly navigation to do and uses applications designed to work specifically on certain mobile models. My Nokia N80 can run oneSearch.
Let's watch Google for the lead on mobile search though. We have to watch Google for the lead on any search technology in 2007. What might we see? We'll see a big advertising push from Google on mobile search. Here in the UK that's a no brainer. We're a year ahead of the US on mobile usage (at least) and Google banners for mobile have been running already this year. Not only are there more phones in the UK than there are computers - there are more mobile phones in the UK than there are people.
I think we'll see official support for mobile maps and we may even see a mobile map which can track your location.
I look forward to getting access to oneSearch. Let's hope the beta goes better than Yahoo's WebRank display in their toolbar.
Update: Google Mobile deal with Samsung +4 hours after this post.
Friday, December 29, 2006
SearchEngineLand and the US Patent Office
I often growl at the US Patent & Trademark Office. It's just silly. Today I'm growling at them because their shopping basket is broken. I'm trying to buy Google's Mobile Search Patent and I can't. Grr.
It was SearchEngineLand's SearchCap which tipped me off to this. The email took me to the site and a post by Bill Slawski. It was a succient post which is good in ways. It linked straight through to Microsoft's patent application. It did not link through to Google's Patent Application. To get to that I had to click through to SEO by the Sea which is Bill Slawski's blog. I'm sure it is a very good blog. It's not a blog I happen to read. My SearchEngineLand experience would have been better had the original post linked me to Google's patent application.
I'm sure SearchEngineLand's writers write for free. Kudos to them for that. One of the carrots they get in return is a much a higher profile. Every post Bill writes on SearchEngineLand links back to his profile at SEO by the Sea anyway. If I was Danny (and after a check of my bank balance, I can confirm that I'm not) I would strongly encourage every writer to produce fully inclusive posts. Even if the writer's intent was not to use SearchEngineLand to drive traffic to their blog they shouldn't ever be in the position where people can debate whether that is happening.
Bill's done the very same thing on another Google Patent post - How Google Sitelinks May Work, From Patent Application. Some links to the US Patent Office and a nudge towards SEO by the Sea. Once again, though, thanks to Bill for the Patent heads up.
SearchEngineLand is in Google News too. I'm sure the weight of requests to Google News to include SearchEngineLand justifies this without further inspection. Further more (again from patent applications) we know that Google News is interested in the quality and quantity of the writing team and SearchEngineLand has some trusted and respected names on board.
A quick check of the stories on the home page this morning turns up one quirky figure though. The average word count of articles (body and header, no navigation or footer links) is only 114.5 words. There's not a story linked to from Google News's home page or the first page in news categories right now with less than 275 words.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Mobile but not moving
On their official blog Google have announced the launch of a personalised Google "home" for mobile phones.
Sadly, at the time of writing the supplied link for the mobile home page is dud. Nothing there dudes.
Should the home page work - and I'm sure it will in just a few hours - you'll have an interface suited to small screens and one that can tap into Gmail, headlines, weather, stock quotes and Atom or RSS feeds. I imagine we'll be looking only at US stock, weather and maybe even only US headlines too.
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