Yes you have seen this idea before…

Shades of the nearly-forgotten barcode scanning CueCat, and Japanese business cards, add up to a old yet new strategy for Google. This latest AdWords initiative has to be a 20 percent project at Google.

We picture some techie cleaning out a closet at home, finding a card from a hostess bar in Osaka stuck under a CueCat in a box, and being suddenly struck by a bowling ball falling from an unbalanced shelf.

Tra-la-la! Wait, that’s Captain Underpants. Eureka! That’s more appropriate for California.

We’ll give credit to Joel On Software for making the CueCat connection too. Yes, play spot the oldies, kids, it’s easy and fun!

Google intends to drop square barcodes onto print ads.

With a camera phone and the right software, a person can scan the ad, and the phone’s onboard web browser will bring up additional information related to it.

“2D barcodes have been common in Japan for a number of years,” Google said in its barcode help page. “In fact, Japanese business cards often feature barcodes containing contact information.”

The first ads containing these barcodes appeared in newspapers, and connected to jewelry retailer Blue Nile.

Google promoted these, and other barcode ads, as a way to quickly deliver more information about an advertiser to a consumer.

It’s far too soon to guess at how successful barcoding may be, for Google or anyone else opting to use the technology.

We will make one guess: Google’s Android mobile software will include a barcode reader when it launches.

Google has released their AdSense for Mobile program for a couple of countries now after testing it for some while*. (more…)

The Federal Communications Commission has made its decision on the ground-rules for winning the 700MHZ wireless spectrum.

Remember, Google upped the ante by making a bid provided the FCC agreed to:

(more…)

We’ll put aside Yahoo’s CEO woes and turn our attention to their continued expansion of mobile services.

The company has already made many announcements over the past few weeks, and tomorrow they’ll officially make two new mobile announcements.

First up, Yahoo’s announcing new features for Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 including: (more…)

Zec points to an interesting item by Information Week on Google’s Mobile User Experience Strategy, which was the subject at a meeting of the New York City chapter of the Usability Professionals Association.

Google user experience designer Leland Rechis said, bluntly, that the mobile Web is Balkanized, “The Pangaea of the Web is gone.” And don’t expect this to change anytime soon, either. Thanks to carrier portals and off portal applications, there is no one mobile standard to develop for.

In the mobile world developers have to be prepared to optimize for different devices, browsers, languages, carriers, countries and cultures.

(more…)

CTIA Wireless 2007 - there’s no doubt about it, content is still king… however, simplicity and ease of use are indeed “the killer app”.

That was the message presented in sessions, demonstrations, panel discussions, and meetings at North America’s recent wireless industry convention.

Some of the key impressions I took away from the event include the following:

- mobile content is king and the industry (and users) are craving more mobile content - in particular entertainment.

- Application developers have plenty of opportunities, although the competition is brisk. Simple to use, intuitive applications are what people want. Make it functional, entertaining, useful, and simple.

- Location-based services and applications are hot and in demand. Think about it, there were more than 340 entries in this year’s North American LBS Challenge. Looking to get your LBS app on a device? Think social networking, community building, entertainment, and gaming… these appear to be the LBS services that are of greatest interest (to carriers and end users)

- GPS-enabled devices are coming on strong.

- Developing applications for a variety of handsets, operating systems, and languages is still a challenge. It’s still quite amazing to see many applications that have been created to run solely on one application or even one device.
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The One Web Principle, which is at the heart of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, is challenging at many levels.

The aim is to have a Web page that can deliver a satisfactory user experience whatever the device used, whether desktop PC or cell phone. Part of the suggested solution involves a device detection process, which can then modify what is delivered to the device. There are many technical challenges here but possibly they could all be solved.

Dwarfing the technical challenges are the challenges involved in getting all the stakeholders to work in concert with agreed standards. The consensus process involved in getting all to agree and work with the same standards takes time.

In a fast evolving world like the Mobile web, where large profits are to be made quickly, big players may choose to move pre-emptively to seize competitive advantage. Divergency rather than convergence would seem to be the natural outcome. (more…)