The most circulated rumour of recent times gets fresh legs, thanks to an Information Week story that suggests Google will be getting into the telephony business with the much-rumoured gPhone, sooner than later.
The story suggests further that besides telephony, the search giant could be targeting video games, TV and mobile e-commerce in its expansion plans, with the gPhone as the device providing the thrust into these areas of business.
Information Week sources the story from Evalueserve, a consulting and research firm that has been reading tea leaves in the form of patents filed by the search giant and other companies.
Evalueserve points out that Google patents are not easily discoverable, since only 13 per cent of its total filings are at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The rest, Evalueserve says, are Patent Cooperation Applications that need to be mined from alternate sources - and what makes tracking the company's plans doubly difficult is the fact that many of the PCTs are not even filed in its own name, especially when it comes to Web 2.0 filings.
Thus, Evaluserve's trawl through patent applications that bear the Google signature, either directly or indirectly, throws up interesting findings: A February 2002 patent by a California-based inventor for a 'cellular telephone case'; a patent for a 'Baseband Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum Transceiver'; another for 'Application of a Pseudo-randomly Shuffled Hadamard Function in a Wireless CDMA System'; one for Overloaded Communication Session; for Image-based Contextual Advertisement Method and Branded Barcodes; Advertisements for Devices with Call Functionality Such as Mobile Phones; Image Base Inquiry System for Search Engines for Mobile Telephones with Integrated Cameras; and Customized Data Retrieval Applications for Mobile Devices Providing Interpretation of Markup Language Data.
Put them all together, suggests Evalueserve, and it spells Google -- and by extension, gPhone -- in letters a mile wide
