Google "Smartads" on Mobiles?

Last week, Nokia announced that they were acquiring the multimedia sharing website Twango. Twango is a website where you may share all the pictures, videos, audios from your cellphones or digital cameras with your family and friends through a blog, website or a discussion forum. This was probably for the first time that a Mobile handset maker had laid hands on a Web 2.0 company. In fact, Nokia had supposedly had a look at 70 probably candidates before rounding upon Twango. Well, this is just the flavor of the season as many big companies have started expanding their customer reach by taking to 3G for the next level of revenue growth.

Now, the news is just coming out from WSJ that Google is courting Mobile handset makers for a GPhone. This handset will help Google push mobile users to use Google apps on their phones and also set a platform for serving more and more ads to mobile users.

Smartads for Mobile phones?

Yahoo introduced the patent-pending Smartads as the way to provide the most personalized ads to a customer. This was based on his activities on the different microsites of Yahoo. Now, with GPhone, Google can really be taking the alternative route for personalization. This is because Google has already patented a technology that provides local search on mobile phones based on GPS-based technology.

With internet on mobile becoming more pervasive, Google’s marketing strategy would revolve around pushing the customer to use mobile technology for localized searches (say the restaurants, beauty parlor, etc) and the web for more globalized searches. This would really give Google an upper hand against Yahoo and the other traditional rivals.

So, is Google moving out of web to counter Yahoo? No. Google is still the leader when it comes to search on the web. It might not be very long before Google introduces a technology to counter the Smartads. But, with mobile phones still being a largely untapped market, the future leadership might just be on the side of the company that makes early inroads here.