A Google phone. So why the fuss ?

Tracking tech companies these days is like tracking movie stars and other celebrity. Will she marry that handsome dude she has been seeing of late ? Does that mean she has fallen out with that gorgeous hunk she was seen with last week at the Ritz ? And by the way, any truth to reports that she had had a silicone implant ?

There is abundant speculation in the mainline newspapers, trade publications and blogs that Google may be bringing out a mobile phone. Surely Google Inc. is loving it, as did Apple Inc. when all that speculative frenzy built up around the iPhone. Folks save them a lot of advertising bucks by doing their work for them. We had pre-announced the iPhone based on crumbs Apple fed us, and we are now trying to pre-announce the Google phone – whether it is a real phone or only software.

If Google brings to market a phone, that is nice. It is also nice every time Nokia Corp. or Motorola Inc. bring out a phone with some new feature. But it is nothing to get into a paroxysm about.

Yes, the PC changed the world in many ways, but another mobile phone will not.

In fact the mobile service providers will ensure that the phone does not go very far. Mobile service providers want control, and they will want control over everything that goes into that phone. Apple wrested control from AT&T by offering it exclusivity, but, despite the popularity of the product, remember it runs on only one network in the US.

The only way Google can play this game to its advantage is to buy wireless spectrum, and allocate it to buddies who will invest in mobile communications companies. There are reports they are going to do just that. But getting into the service provider business to make sure its content and applications is on the phone, is akin to starting up a PC company that ships only Google apps. Google does not seem to know what to do with its cash just now.

I am more inclined to take the view that Google like Microsoft Corp. may emerge as a provider of software and reference design to mobile phone makers like Nokia and Motorola. Miguel Helft at the New York Times is one of a number who are coming around to this view.

Microsoft hasn’t been very successful in this market because cell phone makers have always been wary of large companies invading their turf. That is the reason Nokia has invested in Symbian, a developer of software for phones. Google too will be seen as an upstart by entrenched phone makers.

Besides, if folks like Nokia use the Google software, they will still be required to tweak it for the operator, who may decide he wants Yahoo’s application, rather than Google’s.

But all this hasn’t answered my question. Why is everyone going ga-ga over Google’s new phone/phone software ? Are we so starved for excitement ?

Bangalore: paying the price of economic boom ?

Bangalore, India’s software and call center outsourcing hub, is slowly emerging as a marketer's dream, with its whole lot of atomized and bored people. Offer them the malls and they rush there hoping for companionship and excitement that small communities once offered.

Why is the city becoming atomized ? Analysts in the city say that it has got to do with ever-shifting neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are changing - once upon a time they were stable communities of people who knew each other very well from birth through puberty through adulthood and old age. Neighbors once gossiped about one another, but they cared to gossip ! Conversation was possible because there was a common history, common issues, and everyone knew each other very well.

Now a neighbor can be a call center worker whose timings are not the same as yours. “If he disappears and the cops come asking, I can't say a lot about him...because all I got from him in the last six months was a sleepy "Hi", and yes he once told me was moving jobs to another city,” said Shankar, a long-standing resident of the city, about his neighbor.

The police are more likely to come asking about neighbors these days because the crime rate is going higher with muggings, rapes, suicides on the rise -- a by product of stressful lives, migratory populations, and resentment over a yawning economic divide, according to the pundits.

“The folks on the other side where I live are IT professionals,” said Shankar. “They have been around for one-year, and they are leaving for the US in the next six months. We have promised to write to each other.”

Just across from Shankar’s home are two gated apartments – a new phenomenon in Bangalore, patronized and affordable only by the very rich among the city’s software professionals and corporate executives. “I can only tell them from their lovely cars that zip in and out,” he said.

“I used to like to go and chat with some old friends over "chai" (tea), but we gave up because we couldn't make it because of different working hours, and some of them travel a lot,” said R. Ganesh, another second-generation resident of the city. When Ganesh had the time, he couldn't get parking even two kilometers from the teashop.

As Bangalore gets more affluent as a result of the boom in outsourcing to the city the number of cars, including expensive foreign cars, has gone up, even as the local government continues to neglect the roads and other infrastructure. A construction boom has also cut into public spaces.

“So now we use the technology wonder called "chat" on Instant Messenger. We :)) instead of actually smiling. I haven't figured out yet how one does a back-slap on IM, or a tight hug for a very good friend,” Ganesh said.

Enter the marketing guys who no longer offer only products, but whole experiences and a life style around them. “The new mantra is why are you being old-fashioned, clinging to that old tea shop which will get brought down anyways to give way to a sky rise building in glass, concrete, and steel ? Go instead for a wild-life safari, or join the golf club, or go to the swanky malls that have come up !,” said Ganesh.