The future is social, local, mobile, says Google’s Eric Schmidt. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says that all the “interesting applications” of the future are going to be a combination of social, local and mobile. “All the best engineering is going into mobile apps,” he said at the LeWeb conference in Paris. The fundamentals of social, mobile and local have been a fundamental truth for human beings for years and we’re now using technology, specifically internet-connected phones, to enhance that. The social part is what we do as human beings — we speak to our friends and network. The mobile part is we are always on the move and travelling. The local part is that we need information and objects from our immediate environment. An app on your mobile phone that can do these three things well is an app that will take over the world.
“It allows Google to be better,” says Schmidt. Schmidt emphasised that Google was not trying to take on Facebook and that Google+ was a differentiated product: “Facebook has done very well. “Chrome is doing exceptionally well. ‘Silicon Valley needs a competitor, get your act together’ – Eric Schmidt. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt threw down the gauntlet to the rest of the world, saying “Silicon Valley needs a competitor”.
“Competition is good. Get your act together,” he said at the LeWeb 2011 conference in Paris. Schmidt said that Silicon Valley had shown the world a “model of innovation” and that there are a number of cities in the world that could be a tech hub to rival that in San Francisco. There are developing tech hubs in Paris, London, Berlin and even a developing hub in Africa, dubbed “The Silicon Cape” in Cape Town. “Entrepreneurship comes from young people, who have less to lose and are risk-seeking, and don’t have families. These people prefer cities.” Schmidt said there was a huge race now to own identity, ecommerce and social on mobile platforms. “There is an opportunity to build the next Facebook, the next Google right in front of you.
He urged the governments of these cities to invest in fixed, wireless broadband if they care about creating jobs. Eric Schmidt: Google Is Buying One Company A Week. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt just took the stage at the Le Web conference to chat about Android, the search giant’s expansion and more. When he was asked about why the search engine hadn’t acquired any French companies, Schmidt jokingly commented on stage that Google was now buying around one company day.
That’s clearly a lot of companies to purchase even for a company with deep pockets like Google. So our intrepid reporter Alexia Tsotsis ran backstage to confirm this, where Schmidt told her on the record that Google was actually acquiring around one company per week. “But why do you never announce them?” She asked him. As revealed in October, this year Google has spent $1.4 billion on 57 acquisitions this year. All jokes aside, with $43 billion in cash, clearly the company has room to up the ante and start buying a company per day. Google’s Eric Schmidt: Google Is Not A Country. Despite the search engine’s aggressive growth and “manifest destiny”-type approach to its expansion, “Think of us a teenager,” Google Chairman Eric Schmidt replied, to an interesting question from audience member Jeremiah Owyang here at Le Web, “If Google were a country which country would it be?” “We’re not a country,”Schmidt said, bringing up the fact that Google did not have nuclear weapons, nor a police force and that it was subject to the laws of most actual countries, a fact made most obvious in Google’s dealings with China.
Despite not being a country, Google does have values, Schmidt emphasized, revolving around freedom of speech and transparency. When the Chinese government wanted to censor Google search results a couple years ago, Google management leaned on those values and eventually took its Chinese outpost to Hong Kong. “If we were to take our values to a country,” Schmidt said, “We’d value personal privacy and personal expression, but a lot of public debate and discussion.”
Path, le journal intime de l'ère Facebook. LeWeb 2011 Eric Schmidt.