In Google’s first quarter earnings call today, Jeff Huber, Google’s senior vice president of engineering discussed a number of mobile specific tools his firm had rolled out over the past quarter.
“We believe in open platforms and encourage everyone else to push innovation too,” he said adding, “our efforts in mobile are a great example of this at work.”
Huber waxed lyrical about Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach, first revealed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, which entails taking advantage of the unique characteristics of mobile smartphones.
Discussing several features Google had specifically developed for mobile, Huber gave various examples.
“One of those is that your smartphone knows where you are, your location. Google took advantage of this by launching ‘Near Me Now’ which essentially turns your location into the search query.
“If you visit Google from a smartphone you see the ‘Near Me Now’ link underneath the search box, click on it to see restaurants, shops, cafes, gas stations, ATMs and other common things of interest that are close to you.”
Huber also gave special mention to Google’s stars and search feature which allows users to place a star next to something they’ve searched for and want to remember, enabling them to easily find it later by simply typing in the first few characters of the word.
Users can also place a star on Google mobile maps next to a search result so they can easily pull it up, find it later and get directions to it from their current location.
These features, explained Huber, while small, go a long way towards showing how smartphones can integrate into a person’s everyday life.
We certainly wouldn’t argue with him about that.
