Google Phone & Local Search

I am in the Minneapolis airport in between connecting flights and couldn’t resist adding my $0.02 to the Google Phone announcement and how it relates to local search. Here’s the (extremely uninformed) deal:

1. For the near future (1-2 years) the # of people doing commercial Web-like local searches via a mobile device in any one given area is still going to be pretty small compared to other media.

1. If you have the resources it probably isn’t a bad idea to invest some of them to get out in front of this trend.

2. If you are a small business I would not spend too much time worrying about this (unless you sell ringtones). If you feel your business needs a mobile strategy the best place to start is probably the free 411 services like 1-800-Free-411 or one of the pay per call networks like Ingenio.