Google and DoCoMo: The Marriage of Mobile Technology and the Internet

Last January 24, Internet giant Google Inc. and Tokyo-based mobile provider NTT DoCoMo announced a revolutionary partnership where the former would provide web services to the latter’s handsets.

In a joint statement, Google’s search engine results, AdWords advertising platform, along with other search and advertising services, will be available via DoCoMo’s i-mode handsets. This will hopefully aid in the quest for user-friendliness of i-mode handsets.

The Agreement

With Google’s mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” and i-mode being the pioneering mobile Internet service provided by DoCoMo, the companies agreed on collaborating to increase accessibility, user-friendliness, and usefulness of mobile Internet services to the Japanese.

Although i-mode already has its own search service, Google search services and keyword-based, search-related advertisements (via AdWords) will be available to the handset’s users within the first half of 2008. As planned, the search box will be placed on the top of the I-mode portal page for ease of access. Further talks between the companies include planning on having a default pre-loading of Google Maps application on upcoming DoCoMo handsets. Other than that, services like Gmail (e-mail), YouTube (video streaming), and Picasa (photo management) are also taken into consideration. Even later, all upcoming DoCoMo handsets capable of full browsing technology will have Google as the default web page.

Along with innovative marketing services, the study on Android (a revolutionary platform for mobile phones) will also be furthered by the two companies. Sooner or later, Japanese will be seeing Android-capable handsets in their market, all because of the fusion of Google and DoCoMo.

The two companies are both in a win-win situation. With DoCoMo having 51 million subscribers in Japan (apparently amounting to more than half of Japan’s mobile phone subscribers), Google can easily fulfill its mission within the Land of the Rising Sun. It’s simply because 48 million of DoCoMo’s customers are attuned to and utilizing their mobile phone’s Internet capabilities.

On the other hand, DoCoMo will benefit from the vast global experience of Google, that receiving help from the Internet giant can simply mean an edge against DoCoMo’s major rivals. On the down side of things, Google is actually behind Yahoo! Japan with 65 per cent of the search engine market, in terms of the search engine war in the country.

Loki + on January 31, 2008 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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2 comments on “Google and DoCoMo: The Marriage of Mobile Technology and the Internet”

Arun on February 1, 2008 at 2:43 am said:

Google is taking the search challenge global indeed. Also to mention is the information that Baidu, the immensely successful chinese search engine is also expanding into Japan. So there is some competition for Google on its core turf.

Also, it would be worth watching the outcome of the spectrum auctions and the proliferation of Android. Those are some heady bets by Google and I have a hunch will make or break the firm this year.
Loki on February 1, 2008 at 2:56 am said:

Yeah, Google is really putting up a challenge. However, the Android thing is a bit off, specially when it has deals with a lot of mobile companies, and yet it’s trying to create a separate one running on its own with Linux as OS.

Google do pose threats to both the mobile industry and the web search engine ones.