Google is acquiring the Frommer's travel brand from John Wiley & Sons, adding to Google's prior acquisition of Zagat. The deal seems to focus on Frommer's trove of local reviews of travel locations around the world, and should bolster Google's effort to grow its e-commerce and advertising opportunities, both for PC and smart phone forms of access.
Local mobile advertising likely will be a big beneficiary. Google also owns the ITA travel software business, so Google is building a critical mass of "real time" or "on the go" access to travel information and transactions.
Those acquisitions illustrate the changes happening in the entire Web and mobile content business. Our ways of describing "eras" of computing, or software, or communications, sometimes are too much affected by hype. But sometimes there is a huge kernel of truth to a taxonomy.
So one might say Web 1.0 was about web connectivity. Web 2.0 might be characterized as "social," says Jay Jamison, BlueRun Ventures partner.
Web 3.0 will be "mobile," says Jamison. Aside from the obvious notion of an era characterized by use of smart phones and other "smaller screens," the notion is that apps and services will be real-time, ubiquitous (always connected, always with you), location aware, able to integrate sensors and using high quality cameras and audios.
For some of us, that means the mobile web will b e highly organized around commerce, including advertising and promotion that drive commerce.
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