Google Envisions Free Cell Phones For All

Salvance writes "Google's CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a day when all cell phones are free if the user agrees to watch targeted ads. While he provides no specific plans for Google to give away phones, the implication is that he expects such moves in the future given Google's current pilot successes with delivering text ads on phones." From the article: "Schmidt also said his company was working on how to allow users to maintain basic control of their personal data. Currently, Google stores consumer data on hundreds of thousands of its own computers in order to provide additional services to individual users. The company is looking to allow consumers to export their Web search history or e-mail archives and move them to other sites, if they so choose."

Comments

When your only tool is a hammer

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Everything looks like a nail.

When your only revenue is advertisments, everything looks like sticky eyeballs.

Re:When your only tool is a hammer

[arun_s]

That's okay. It'll probably take less than a week after release before the adblockers come around. Its survival of the fittest from there. The gaudy flash advertisers will be first to go, and I probably wouldn't mind the less intrusive ones if I was getting a phone for free.

Ads on phones?

[LokiSnake]

For a (smart)phone used for web communications, I can understand how they'll target ads, but for a phone that is only used for voice communications, how can targeted ads be implemented? There has been a trend of Google venturing into print, TV, and radio ads, and those can be done successfully through advertisers bidding for related spots on each medium, since newspapers/periodicals have separate sections, and TV and radio have set programming, but what about voice communications? Will they target ads by looking at your contact information? Or perhaps capture keywords in your spoken words? I doubt that, since they will never do any evil, but how else would this work (without text to analyze)?

Re:Ads on phones?

[supersat]

Three words: location, location, location.

Carriers can already determine your phone's location (thanks to the Wireless E911 mandate), and third-party companies like Navizon are already beginning to do the same thing independently of carriers.

Now, imagine you're Google, and you own the service. You notice that it's lunch time and the user hasn't stopped for lunch, but they're near a fast food advertiser. You could send an SMS with a coupon to the user.

Now, I don't know that they'll necessarily follow this model, but there's plenty of things to analyze and target without being much more invasive than current carriers.

Advertising Madness

[ajs318]

The business world seems to have gone advertising crazy!

People don't want adverts. People do not want adverts on TV; that is why we used to have VCRs, before the advent of DVD+RW and Sky Plus. Anything worth watching got recorded, and the advertisements got the fast-forward button. With Sky Plus you can start recording, wait ten minutes or so (the total amount of advert breaks in the programme minus the anticipated amount of time spending re-watching good bits), start watching from the beginning, and fast-forward through the breaks.

People do not want adverts on the radio, which is why it's so good that Radio Two is the first station up from the bottom of the dial.

People don't want adverts in magazines and newspapers, and will turn the page and miss a good story rather than see an advertisement.

People don't want adverts on the internet. Hence the popularity of various advert-blocking and flash-blocking Firefox extensions, the use of "block images from this server" and {for the full-on geek} Squid. Even people without advert-blocking software will navigate away from a site which tries to bombard them with images.

I don't think I'm alone in saying that I would much rather pay cash up front for the phone calls I am going to make, than watch advertisements.