Mobile gets live(lier)

Telecom players push mobile Internet to stay abreast with times, and push up their revenue ratings.

Indian carriers saw an addition of 6.7 million new users in the month of October. With 136.22 million users, the mobile subscriber base is six times the number of people in India who have a desktop computer. Clearly, anything to do with mobiles is a killer application.

Indian telecom players are fast realising the need to push mobile Internet to salvage their ARPUs (average revenue per users).

Early this month, domestic telecom player, Hutch, joined hands with MSN to enable mobile search, and now Bharti Airtel and Google have come together to empower mobile search for its subscribers.

Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel, is confident of this new partnership, "In the next few years, the first computing experience of any Indian would be through his mobile. So we better be prepared for the same."

Google's search service on the Airtel Live portal will search "on Net" (content on Airtel Live) and "off Net" (Internet on mobile).

Asim Ghosh, managing director, Hutchison Essar (which has also launched MSN Messenger and Hotmail for mobile phones) reckons that MSN search engine would give the necessary push to Hutch subscribers to get on to the Internet.

The players are readying themselves for mobile search, an area that is fast moving for imminent take-off in the next year-and-a-half. "We want to make sure that we are there well in advance. So, when our clients start asking, 'What can you do for us on mobile?' we want to make sure that we are there with our partners and aggregators," says Kohli.

SMS-based search has also been tested to satisfy searchers who lack the patience to grapple with a WAP browser and slow connection speeds. Google does have an SMS-based search offering, and so do about a half dozen newcomers. But it is the web-based search that is catching the carrier's fancy.

"Mobile search is a different experience from web search," explains Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, vice president, (APAC and Latin America, operations), Google, "because the screen is smaller and users do not want to go through a million answers."

Most likely, they are trying to find something specific, like wallpapers, ringtones or train schedules.

Google is also launching mobile advertisements (as a part of its search service), a kind that would trigger a phone call instead of rendering to a new web page when clicked. Google calls this "call-on-select functionality".

"This is sure to spin-off a new business model, a first for both consumers and businesses," says Cassidy.

Combining these click-to-call advertisements with mobile search makes sense since many people are likely to use their mobile phones to search for local or personal information for immediate consumption, "like finding the address and phone number of a nearby restaurant. Adding advertisements to the mobile search is bound to generate revenues for mobile operators and search companies offering the service," points Google.

Companies like Nokia and Motorola are already bundling Google services with their handsets. Last week, Yahoo said it would add advertising to its mobile search tool in the US and the UK, including the click-to-call advertisements.

Just as Google is the undisputed king of search (making the rest queen, prince, baron, duke and viscount...), it is not necessary that the same would translate into mobile.

Google, Yahoo and MSN will ultimately have to earn subscribers' loyalty through a capable user interface and not taking the usage for granted "" even though brand strength could make for a good head-start.