Baidu Readying Mobile App

All sorts of corporations and individuals have agreed that the mobile market is key in China; many more people can afford Internet-enabled phones than PCs.  Baidu may be onto something, then, as it intends to have an app loaded onto phones before they're made available for sale.

If Baidu can get a solid mobile app in front of a lot of people right from the start, it'll decrease the odds of them ever turning to Google.  Given how Baidu's doing so well in terms of desktop market share, it might even win converts.

And Baidu Palm, as the application's known, should be plenty useful.  Owen Fletcher reported that, even in beta, it "hooks users into its search, message board and question-and-answer online services.  It also has a new quick-upload feature for pictures taken with a phone."

Another point in Baidu's favor: things are looking pretty good on the distribution side.  Although no deals have been announced, Baidu's already known to have relationships with a number of communications companies, including China Telecom and China Unicom.

It seems that we'll soon see another big salvo in the Google-Baidu war, then.  Don't count on Google taking too long to respond.

Have You Read This?

> Google's Music Service In China Attracting Advertisers

> Google Search By Voice Learns Chinese (In Limited Fashion)

> Baidu Pummeled Following Low Forecast

Google Acquires CAPTCHA Company

Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web.

Perhaps you're thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.

No, it appears that Google has something else in mind, and it involves the reading and archiving of printed materials. Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager explain:

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.

Well, they didn't exactly rule the ad thing out, but it does appear that the acquisition is more in line with Google's conquest to organize the world's information. Google did not reveal financial terms of the acquisition.