Google SA unveils its plans
Currently more than 40m people in South Africa have cellphones, 70% of those do not have computers and over 75% of these will never own a computer. Therefore internet searching, although useful to the few who have computers, is useless to those without.
Google, which just recently became more vocal on the South African market, is planning to tap the cellphone market with a mobile search engine. "Searching on your mobile phone is not the same as searching on a computer," says Douglas Merrill, CIO & VP of Engineering at Google. Google is working on software that will enable the user to say something into their cellphone which then translates it and reacts.
Google is working on ways to advertise on a cellphone as it participates in the mobile shift. Google makes money from advertising only when the user clicks on the ad; to make money on a cellphone the ads must be different and easily accessible. The mobile channel is the fastest growing sector of Google.
Google advertising allows a business to measure the efficacy of its advertising and changes advertising from an undirected cost to a cost of sales. "You know, not just that you have spent some money, but I spent money to get that amount of revenue," says Merrill.
"South Africa has both a metro story and a rural story," says Stafford Masie, country manager of Google South Africa. The metro story deals with those in the urban areas who have access to the internet and a computer, the rural story with those who only have cellphones and no other way to access the internet.
Masie believes there is an enormous skills pool in South Africa with immense human capital potential. "If one of the 50% unemployed in Kwazulu-Natal just had a website, they could connect with other human beings and interact" says the country manager.
"We believe that social change arises from stable economic change which is a direct result of job creation and job creation is driven by small and medium size businesses able to try there ideas' says Merrill
The spread of mobile and bandwidth will enable these small and medium sized businesses to advertise ideas on the internet and give more people access to these ideas.
Google is very interested in South Africa and believes that transaction traffic is not where it should be in the country. "If the rest of the businesses (other than travel) get online they will have the ability to reach a wider audience," says Masie
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