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And other revalations from Google at MWC

Last week we had the pleasure to be in the audience of his googness^* Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. We found him there right in the very heart of darkness, the annual World Mobile Congress in rainy Barcelona. MWC itself was a fantastic clash of cultures between the stalwarts of each the PC and telcom worlds. Many of the latter you could see were distinctly concerned that the mobile industry is having less and less each year to do with this idea we used to call “telecom”. then into this heady environment walked Eric CEO of that great disruptor of worlds and flattener of industries, Google of Mountainview california. In the words of a red-colored Canadian wireless executive “google, love em, but we really can’t trust those guys”.

Here’s what Eric had to say:

The cloud + mobile is like having a million computers in your hand.

But all this potential of mobile means nothing without OPEN

This [the mobile industry, this conference] is the place to be for the PC industry, mobile web adoption is moving 8x faster than web adoption 10 years ago.

Indonesia, south Africa today have more mobile than web google searches. The rest of the world will be there soon.

Eric is here to thank the ecosystem the people who build the network. Your work is indispensable we can’t do anything without you. [But the tacit assumption google will now take all your base home with them].

Networks are now a way to instrument the world, what people are doing, what is going on .. if we want to and if users want us to. [being very careful to tread softly around previous privacy foot-in-mouth]

The cloud. The sim can now be used as an identifier for very sophisticated data in the cloud. With apps in cloud is all about sharing and replications. Not about local copies. A device that is not connected is lonely, it doesn’t do anything, it’s not interesting.

Why the phone? because it’s the high volume endpoint

New change at google is google-first. Not an intentional policy, but realizing that google is building the mobile apps first then making a web application. Mobile is google’s new default platform.

Cloud-based apps: An app that diagnoses your cough. Talking on phone to someone who doesn’t speak your language. Google googles snap a picture of museum, it identifies the museum tells you what’s in it and when it’s open.

[Your editor's epiphany: This is fully augmented reality! but not heads-up or heads down AR, this is "gopher AR" it's not about being immersed in the cloud all the time, it's about being immersed in the cloud any time. We don't need full time goggles, full time visual AR Layar-type experience, the killer apps may simply be those that let you "gopher" sticking your head up from the physical world to the cloud at any time]

Google is going to fight apple with flash. For google the killer app is flash games. Runs on hw acceleration
Taps in to existing flash games content. New adroids will run existing base (e.g. newgrounds) of flash games, giving google a games ecosystem right out of the box.

Google to carriers: we’re your friends honest! Want carriers to make money.

Google we need everyone to make money, we need the network, we are not going to provide infrastructure, we’re not optimized for that. Fixed gigabit project we announced is an rfp a test to share the learnings back with the industry [Now watch them turn voice and video into a universal free service outside the carrier, oops?]

^{*El Googerino? (maybe if you’re not in to the whole brevity thing)}