- Dream Partnership Adds Google Services to i-mode Platform -

NTT DoCoMo and Google this January announced an exciting partnership to provide i-mode users with powerful search services, helpful sponsored advertisements and many convenient new applications, thereby enhancing the world's largest mobile Internet platform with the world's most powerful search-engine technologies.

On top of exciting new services, the partnership is a win-win-win for stakeholders, businesses and developers in the i-mode ecosphere, particularly advertising, according to Kiyoyuki Tsujimura, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of DoCoMo's Products and Services Division.

"Our customers are going to benefit from three major advances: robust searches, Google's range of famous applications and—further down the line—Android, Google's emerging open-source middleware for handsets," he said.

Enhancing the Search Experience

Google search services will be a significant upgrade for DoCoMo subscribers, says Tsujimura. At present, the company's 48 million subscribers can easily choose from a menu of 15 search engines to conduct keyword searches. Results are listed in order, first from the 12,000 sites registered in the i-mode portal, then approximately 100,000 other sites configured for i-mode and other mobile systems, and finally ordinary PC sites.

With the Google partnership, however, subscribers soon will be able to conveniently access the Google search box on the top page of the iMenu, removing the need to click any further to begin searching and accessing information from mobile and PC sites. What's more, searches eventually will be tailored to individual users on a very high level using intelligent search technology now under development.

Truly Intelligent Searches

Tsujimura explains that it's not easy to maintain the quality and relevance of results based on just a few keywords. "We are working very closely with Google to pinpoint search results. Unlike in the PC environment, i-mode users generally browse only the first two or three results, so we must ensure that the most useful results are returned first," he says.

DoCoMo and Google are collaborating on the development of intelligent search technology that will produce optimized results from just a few keywords by factoring in the subscriber's profile, location and past searches.

For example, if a user searches the name of an office, the system will examine the user's data to determine if he/she is likely searching for a location and phone number. If this is indeed the conclusion, the system would return a map and contact information as the first result.

"We can't do this right now, but intelligent search is an extremely exciting function with great benefit for mobile users. It's one of the most important objectives of our joint research," Tsujimura says. "Look for it in a few years."

Helpful Sponsored Ads

Another benefit of the partnership will be the bundling of helpful, non-intrusive advertising with the search results, which will give users a wider range of new information while providing advertisers with more opportunities to reach target customers. The key is to configure ads so that they enhance the browsing experience rather than interfere with it. The mobile screen size limits the amount of information that can fit on a screen, so sponsored ads will be limited in length and will appear between search results, with no more than a few ads per screen. This will come within 2008, Tsujimura reveals.

Intelligent searching technologies will further strengthen sponsored ad functions, particularly for niche advertising. The more highly the search engine is tuned, the more highly targeted the advertising can become, says Tsujimura.

Exciting New Applications

The Google-DoCoMo partnership also will enable subscribers to benefit from world-leading Google- brand services, including Google Maps, Picasa, Gmail and YouTube. "Thanks to flash technology, our users will enjoy a desktop-like experience watching YouTube,' says Tsujimura.

Meanwhile, the two partners are busy optimizing Google applications for the i-mode experience. For example, they are working to embed specific user information into Google Maps for highly tailored location services, which Tsujimura says should be available sometime over the next year. DoCoMo also is studying how to rearrange handset navigation functions for easier navigation and zooming with maps.

From improved user interfaces and convenient new applications in the short run to powerful mobile-information capabilities in the future, the DoCoMo-Google partnership is destined to be a winning combination that will reshape the mobile experience for years to come.

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