From the transcript at SeekingAlpha.com … Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker used one of the first questions of the Google 1Q06 earnings call to ask CEO Eric Schmidt about Google’s mobile plans: Eric, you talked about your mobile transcoder, and this may be a strange question to have at the beginning of the call, but could you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape there? It seems like this provides you with a big competitive advantage in what could be a very, very large market. When you think about it at a high level, the way Google Search kind of transformed the way people use the Internet and sort of reignited growth in the Internet, do you think that the products and services that you are offering in the mobile market that will allow people to get content easily, more effectively, in the right format for the user interface that’s there could do something similar in the mobile market in the next 12 to 18 to 24 months?
Schmidt: Well, of course, this is why we did the transcoder. It makes a lot of sense to try to get all of that information that is out there automatically and, in fact, dynamically translated into a format that will work on your phone. There are multiple formats that are available on phones. There’s an older phone called WAP technology, and there is a newer technology called XHTML, and there are others coming. It is strategic to us to make sure that all the content is available on all the phones. Indeed, we have entered these partnerships. The notion of a transcoder is not a new one, we just think we have a better one than anybody else.
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