Monday, February 05, 2007

MOBILE DATA://Operators into search?

The Telegraph reports that Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Hutchison, Telecom Italia and AT&T plan a Google/Yahoo! rival for the mobile environment.

One may hope this isn't true. First, Google and Yahoo! have algorithms and advertiser networks that are hard to replicate. Second, mobile operators can demand a large slice of the pie, possibly 80-90%. Why such an expensive and non-core effort, just to get to the other 10%?

Possibly these efforts are aimed at something else, like standardisation, security and spam.

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