Ocasta

Last night Google held an open house at their London offices and what a great party it was. I haven't seen so much good and free food and drink since the dot com days. Ah, it takes me back. There was a raffle and I won a bluetooth headset. Thanks Google!

The real purpose behind the open house was to celebrate the opening of Googles glitzy new central London office and to push the fact that Google are hiring a (a or the still isn't clear to me) mobile development team to be based out of London. There were three presentations. Google Europe (Nikesh Arora), Google Technology (Alan Eusatce) and Google Mobile (Shannon Maher). The first two of these were standard fair. Nothing revolutionary or new. Google is big, Google makes oodles of money and Google does tech in a different way - because the problem is big it has to; because the data volumes are huge it can.

The mobile section however was disappointing. Where we should have been overwhelmed with a vision for a Google enriched Mobile world we got the Internet on your phone - advertising, search and more advertising. I though we'd been there and realised that that wasn't what people wanted. Local search is an answer, but to the wrong question. The question is not how do people find the local pizza restaurant but how do they book a table; not how do I post to my blog but how do I make blogging and photo sharing so simple and easy on the phone that the general public use the stuff without even thinking.

I came away with the impression that Google don't get mobile, that they don't understand how it changes the game. They are ahead of some US companies in that they understand that they need to be doing something but didn't convey that they knew what it was that Google can bring to mobile in a way that makes money. Maybe there was some psychology going on and the presentation was a clever way of saying "Help!".

Don't take this as all negative Google, I really did enjoy the party!

Comments (1)

One of the presentations was from Dennis Hettema from Shotcode. While such tags are technically fascinating I just don't see the business appeal. It's a vision shared by at least two other companies - semacode and gavitec - so I must be missing something.

The pitch is that using a program on their phone a user can scan one of these squiggles and with a single click connect to the web page or other resource on their camera phone. Isn't it simpler and quicker to ask the user to send an SMS with a shortcode?

Most of the target customer base understands shortcodes and knows how to text. Alternatively they can download and run a Java program that might or might not work on a given handset. On first use I imagine most folks would give up before even getting the midlet on their phone. On subsequent use I bet an SMS is still quicker to send.

There aren't even many adverts that use shortcodes so I can't imagine how small the potential market for these tags is.

If the functionality was built into the phone and camera software then maybe it would work, but until then give me shortcodes.

Comments (2)