Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google – Yeah right…

Do you remember the Telegraph article a few weeks back saying that some of the EU’s biggest telecom companies aimed to create a giant mobile search engine to challenge Google?

Europe’s biggest telecoms groups are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge Yahoo! and Google, the US giants.

Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and one American network, Cingular, are among the companies that will come together for secret, high-level talks at the mobile industry’s biggest annual trade show in Barcelona next week.

They were supposed to meet at 3GSM and talk about it but no announcement about this has been made. Either it was a really secret talk, or it was just a big rumor, as Ajit from Open Gardens rightly thinks. My current colleagues who have been working with mobile operators for years were saying that these guys weren’t really good at creating consortiums, so this kind of project was (or is) not likely to happen.
Anyway, the battle for mobile search is on, let’s see who will win…