With revenue from phone calls decreasing, telecoms in Europe are getting together to develop a mobile phone search engine that could compete with and challenge Yahoo! (YHOO) and Google (GOOG), the U.S.-based behemoths.
Those known to be getting together for high-level secret talks at the upcoming annual trade center show in Barcelona are Hutchison Whampoa, Vodafone, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia and even American network, Cingular (T).
According to the Telegraph, "Mobile internet will be given a further boost at Barcelona when Far Eastern manufacturer LG Electronics is announced as the winner of a competition to produce an affordable, mass-market handset capable of accessing the web."
With a dozen of the leading mobile operators spread across six continents and representing over 620 million subscibers agreeing to sell the third generation phone to their customers, it would bring down the price far below the exising 3G handsets.
It would also launch LG into prominence among the existing four huge handset makers: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens and Motorola, and make them a worldwide player in the industry.
Some in the business believe that mobile search will become more lucrative than desktop search because the results can be made more geographically relevant. That way advertising can be targeted based upon searches that are related to entertainment, weather conditions and travel, among other things.
This is really a premptive move that is coming about because of how Google was able to dominate the desktop search market. The telecoms are hoping that mobile gets huge as their core revenue base has been eroding for quite a long time, and they're desparate to find new avenues of revenue within their expertise.
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