Friday Minimalism — Sort Of

Here’s a brief roundup of news:

Saul Hansell’s “day 2” NY Times article (reg. req’d) on Google earnings says the following re CEO Eric Schmidt’s conf. call remarks:

In a conference call with investors, Mr. Schmidt highlighted several areas for future growth. One was advertising from local businesses on the company’s main search service, as well on its local search and maps products. The delivery of such advertising is based on an inference of the user’s location from the search query or Internet protocol address.

“Locally targeted ads are an increasingly meaningful contributor to revenue, and much more is coming,” Mr. Schmidt told the investors.

Mr. Rashtchy, the Piper Jaffray analyst, estimated that 10 percent of Google’s advertising was local.

Mr. Schmidt also said the company saw great opportunity in developing services for mobile phones. It has developed a system called a transcoder that will reformat Web pages for display on the small screens of cellphones.

The company has started delivering advertising on its mobile service in Japan and it is negotiating with wireless carriers to put advertising on its services in other countries as well, Mr. Schmidt said in an interview.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Moible is also substantially Local Search — remember.

So Safa R. believes that 10% of Google revenue is from geotargeting. If accurate, that would mean (using 2005 FY revenues) about $600 million and in terms of the recent quarter, about $200 or so million.

Separately, the WSJ (sub. req’d.) is reporting (and so is everyone else) that:

EBay Inc. is talking to both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to determine whether one of them might be a worthy ally against a common threat: Google Inc. After years of working closely with the search giant, eBay last year became alarmed as Google started assaulting its turf in multiple ways. In one case, Google launched a classified-advertising service that competes directly with eBay’s online auctions and other listings.

(Here’s a longer story in BusinessWeek.)

Google just re-renamed “Local.” They’re calling it Maps (again). Why? This is apparently a name/concept that was more resonant with users. Google said in a briefing with me that it was something of a “non-story.” I think it’s more interesting than that. But more on that later.

YellowPages.com teams with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform for its new mapping product (that means “Birdseye” as well). Here’s the release. That makes YellowPages.com the second partner/licensee for the platform. Zillow was the first.

Finally Alltel, the fifth largest U.S. wireless phone carrier (10 million subs approx), announced a program called “My Circle,” which allows subscribers to make free calls to any 10 people they choose. The catch is the plan is only available to subscribers who pay $59.99 per month or more. It will be interesting to see if this nets the company any subscribers and how other carriers respond.

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More interesting comments from the Google earnings call from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management, about the importance of Local and local business retail inventory information:

As Eric mentioned, Local is definitely becoming increasingly important in terms of advertising revenue…I think in the very long run, the thing that’s going to fundamentally change here is when, in addition, you’re actually linking inventory availability into local systems, you are really going to see a significant increase there. But we are already seeing that it has become a material component of our business.