In becoming a hardware merchant, Google will exert greater influence over the emergence of a number of aspects of mobile technology. The ‘Nexus’ phone announcement represents an acceleration of an ongoing mobile strategy – a stepped up effort to prevail in a series of disruptive technology trends in mobile ads, voip, and graphics. Which connection method will be used to get rich media ads to the phone. What runtime display format will be used for displaying ads on the handset. What options will exist for VOIP and for back door calls made over IP and not made on the carriers native networks for switched calls. These are examples of the kinds of things Google wants to be able to influence.
The leading smartphone vendors each push differing standards for the graphics engine that will control the display of rich media ads on phones. Adobe is pushing flex-lite. Apple has its own approach and has been reluctant to adopt anything Flash-like on the iphone. Microsoft’s Silverlight will soon support mobile so that Windows ME and Silverlight will be their closed solution for display.
Google is pushing 2 open standards, svg and HTML 5 in a way that will support the delivery of plain old html with tags for rich media ads handled as SVG. Unlike Silverlight and Flash, SVG does not require another IDE and a compile step to produce the actual media files. Mobile phones would not need anything more than a browser for ad display. No Flex-light plugin or microsoft silverlight plugin. Ad inventory ( rich media ads ) distributed by the major ad networks is currently all Flash . However, Google’s recent AdMob acquisition should allow them to introduce and drive conversion to a new ad format not in wide use today – (Html 5 + SVG). Any handset with an HTML 5 browser will render rich media ads. Google has been working on JavaScript libraries that will fill out the web ecosystem around http, html and svg. Google’s intent may be to more strongly support an open solution for mobile rich media advertising by selling hardware that requires only a browser.
Google’s support for VOIP adoption and for open standards (IP for call connection protocols) is far more disruptive to existing carriers. Consumers will now have the option to buy and use an unlocked phone without a 2 year carrier commitment. This move may serve to turn cell towers into a commodity type of infrastructure rather than a critical part of carriers competitive strategy. If 2 friends each get unlocked phones loaded with the proper software , a carrier contract is not needed in order to make phone calls. VOIP, Skype, SIP client software support a number of different connection scenarios where voice calls occur without going thru the main internals of a carrier network. Some of the Google voice features allow carrier networks to be integrated in a way that may permit outside callers from traditional networks to call a google voice number and to reach the handset via SIP interfaces connecting the last mile of the call via IP protocol. Without a carrier contract, outbound calls to traditional networks can be handled by connecting first to Google voice on IP then bridging to the traditional carrier network. There would no longer be carrier subsidies of the handset purchase. There would no longer be a compelling need for a carrier. An IP connection alone would be sufficient. Gizmo5 offers IP based calling features like forwarding , message handling, SIP binding. With enhancements built on these features, it would be possible for friends to call one another using email addresses, URLs in place of traditional phone numbers. Anything that SIP could bind to the handset IP would be sufficient for making a connection to the phone.
