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Thanks to Drew from Google for sending in this tip. Google is opening their Waterloo office on May 10 for anyone from the community who wants to stop by. They’ll be streaming events from GoogleIO in California as well says Drew “We will also be having local Googlers speak about mobile development and how we developed Chrome to be ultra secure from the ground up. This is a free all day developer training event with food as well.” We at WirelessNorth have always enjoyed visiting our local googleplex, recommended.

Sounds really cool. Click here to sign up while there are still some spots.

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)}

you sure wouldn’t mistake it’s looks for something Apple would have come up with. Still it’s the most coveted handset to come out since, well the bold or the iPhone 3G.

You might even get excited about snagging an G1 on eBay. The good news is you can get them unlocked, and the T-mobile version uses the same AWS 3G spectrum band as Canada. The bad news is, you’ll be stuck on EDGE until AWS towers/equipment actually get rolled out (say mid to late next year?), by which point surely other g-phone models will be out. Who knows, maybe even a Canadian carrier will get their hands on one?

^{Photo credit: Romainguy}

Google made a nifty announcement yesterday that they were launching mobile image ads. Googles says image ads have a few advantages, they are specially sized for mobile, they link only to mobile-readable sites, they are stronger for brand-building and earn higher click-thrus. These ads are available in “Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the US” – no Canada. Not worth the investment apparently.

A source at Google Canada let us know that mobile text ads are available in Canada however offered no ETA for the availability for images.

A lot of people ask us this question, how will I monetize my content in the mobile world? And the answer is that advertising ultimately has to play big role in the mobile value chain. The trick is mobile content and and mobile advertising are a chicken and egg problem. They’ll both need to grow together.

A few industry speakers at ICE08 in Toronto referenced the statistic that mobile ads were fetching CPMs (cost per mille or thousand impressions) upwards of $80 (compared to a few cents to a few dollars for online ads). However no one seemed to remember exactly who’s deal that was (if you do let us know).

They say that advertisers are hungry for mobile inventory. Which make makes some sense if you ask me, the $80 may say more about a scarcity of M’s than a preponderance of C’s.

There’s no doubt that Canada’s history of high data rates and an epidemic of mid to low-end phones with weak browsers have slowed the market in Canada.

It’s not that big a deal to be shut out by one particular mobile ad platform. However, just once, WirelessNorth.ca would like to see Canada counted as a first world country in the new mobile economy.

And dear CRTC if you are out there listening, these market realities are just another little tidbit of evidence why an under-competitive telecom industry in Canada holds back Canadian content creators and holds back Canadian culture from having a voice in the future of media.

Google made waves yesterday by announcing a new app for the iPhone bundling a whole bunch of google application goodness into a single iPhone application interface. With the google package you get search, gmail, rss reader and more. hmm, one more reason to import a grey market iPhone?

Why else is this interesting? Because this Google application is not really an application at all. It’s Web-app running on AJAX. [Ajax is the set scripting tools that make modern web applications run a lot more smoothly and dynamically than old-school web sites which used to have to refresh the whole page to change any information on the screen - most mobile WAP sites are still very much stuck in this world.] Traditionally, the trouble has been that AJAX is too complicated and computationally intensive to bundle with a mobile browser – but not any longer, with more powerful computer-in-diguise devices like the iPhone.

Through combinations of better browsers, mobile AJAX and Flash, we’re going to see a lot more mobile web that give Java apps (and even their desktop web equivalents) a run for their money in terms of interface quality. In theory, rich web-apps should make it a lot easier for developers to cost effective to roll out better mobile software without having to wrestle with the fragmented mess that is mobile java implementations.

One day, all phones out there will have web browsers at least as awesome.

For the moment though, this particular Google application only runs on one device… the Apple iPhone. Fragmentation problem, not so solved.