What is Google’s strategy in the mobile marketplace?

Let’s start with the following premise: since Google is ubiquitous in the online world, marginal increases in the usage of the web improve Google’s advertising business.

That’s one reason why Google chooses to invest so much in projects that seem tangential to their core advertising business. Even if these projects do not seem to create immediate business value for Google, if they serve to improve or increase the use of the web in general they often eventually benefit Google advertising business.

The mobile web is the perfect next medium on which to sell Google’s digital advertising products. If Google can create strategies for leveraging and expanding the use of the mobile web, presumably they’ll grow their business. But the mobile web is problematic.

Mobile development is hard

Those of us who have spent significant amounts of time making websites render well in the main desktop browsers and operating systems know how painful that can be. With the mobile web the problem is magnified. There are more browsers, a broader variety of screen resolutions, and a relatively poor support for standards.

Writing mobile applications is equally problematic. Mobile handsets have a wide variety of operating systems and the available features for each operating system may be tightly controlled by the mobile carrier or the handset manufacturer.

So as a developer for mobile devices, it is difficult for me to write a single mobile application or WAP application and have it run well for a broad mobile audience.

Enter Google Android

On November 5, 2007 Google unveiled the Android platform in conjunction with the Open Handset Alliance. This alliance of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies is Google’s attempt to shift the mobile marketplace towards greater standards compliance and openness.

Android is an open source Linux-based mobile phone platform. I downloaded the platform when it first came out. Android uses the java language and contains a set of simple ui components. As a java developer, I was able to quickly write a couple of small applications for the phone in the first couple days.

One of the more interesting standard features of the os is its location based service. If your mobile device does not contain a GPS system, this service can determine your location based on your proximity to cell phone towers. Another interesting feature is the peer to peer messaging service, called XMPP, which can create communications between phones more rapidly than SMS (text messaging) and is also free of standard SMS charges.

An OpenGL graphics package, speech recognition, Google maps integrations and an embedded database were some of the other interesting standard features of Android.

To kickstart development and innovation on Android, Google is sponsoring $10 million in prizes to programmers who create the most interesting or useful Android applications.

But Steve Jobs and Apple aren’t just sitting back and waiting for Google to define tomorrow’s mobile marketplace.

Coming up next — Apple Strikes Back.

Dan Fox, Technology