What Has Google Been up to Lately? - Google on the Move
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Browsing the Internet via mobile phone hasn’t exactly taken off. The relatively miniscule size of the screens in comparison to desktop and laptop computers poses a real obstacle. There are ways to deliver content that is matched to the capabilities of the device; a recent Google beta takes advantage of this.
Dubbed Google Mobile Web Search, the service looks for sites that use XHTML to deliver content to mobile phones. XHTML combines HTML, the common markup language of Web pages, with extensible markup language (XML). Used together, they allow a Web server to deliver content formatted in a way that the accessing device can handle.
This service will probably take a while to catch on in the U.S. and Europe; in those areas of the world, less Internet content has been formatted for mobile phones than in, say, Asia. Google’s director of products, Deep Nishar, seems to believe there is real potential for growth. “In general, we believe mobile devices are a very important interface for our user base to access content,” TechWeb has quoted him as saying. As with most Google services, though, this one is free.
A deal Google made in late June with T-Mobile might provide more potential revenue. Up until recently, T-Mobile handpicked websites that users of its mobile service could visit. Thanks to partnering with Google, T-Mobile users now have Google as their home page and can surf the entire Internet from their cell phones. According to T-Mobile board member Ulli Gritzuhn, “With the Google homepage we want to tell our customers from the first moment that they are carrying with them the Internet they know from home.”
The new service is dubbed “web’n’walk,” and will be available on four different cell phone models. It was launched initially in Germany and Austria, with plans to reach Britain, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic later this year. T-Mobile expects hundreds of thousands of subscribers to use the service by the end of next year, and plans to generate about $12 per user per month of additional revenue through the service, according to a report from CNNMoney. It was unclear, however, whether Google would be receiving any share of this new income.
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