Big $, Little Screens: Google Honcho Says Innovations Coming

Some folks are never satisfied. Google is seeking to make money from people who are turning to their cell phones to find information. Google Inc. is looking beyond text ads as it seeks to make money from the increasing number of people who are turning to their cell phones to find information, an executive said on Friday.

The search and advertising giant, which Thursday announced a first quarter net profit of US$1 billion, launched its first mobile text ad service in Japan in April last year and the first year has been good, said Deep Nishar, product management director for Google's mobile offerings.

"It has done remarkably well for us," he said. Nishar was speaking at a mobile business conference at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, which was organized by several foreign embassies here.

"Having said that, there are probably other monetization means in mobile as well," said Nishar. "It's a very young business and we are not quite sure where this will go in the future. Mobile text ads is doing very well for us and we will continue to go down that path and there will be other monetization mechanisms in mobile that will come about and I would definitely watch this space closely because you will see more innovations from Google."

The mobile ads consist of two lines of text of about 18 characters long that appear when users perform a Google search on their cell phone. They can be used to link to the mobile or PC version of an advertiser's Web site.

Google has deals with Japan's top two mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo Inc. and KDDI Corp., through which it's search box appears on the screens of about 71 million cell phones in Japan. The two carriers account for 84 percent of the mobile Internet market. The remainder is taken up by Softbank Mobile Corp., which features a Yahoo search box as it's parent company is the largest shareholder in Yahoo Japan Corp.

It has also inked deals with a number of cell phone handset makers. In the last quarter it concluded deals with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG Electronics Inc.

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