Google's mobile drive
Google is increasingly focused on the mobile internet. Speaking at the first ever Mobile World Congress live keynote last week, CEO Eric Schmidt spent little under an hour driving home the idea of “mobile first”.
Schmidt said that more and more of what he was seeing internally in terms of products was focused on the mobile internet first.
“Our programmers are doing work on mobile first,” he said. “We’ll still have a desktop version, but we’ll also have one on a high-performance mobile phone. The top programmers want to work on mobile apps.
His presentation’s opening video stated matter-of-factly that “phones can do more than PCs, end of story”.
Schmidt illustrated how we no longer call it a “mobile phone”, but a “phone”. This is a massive “win” he added.
“It’s the principle of mobile first… It’s like magic. All of a sudden there are things that you can do that didn’t really occur to you… because of this convergence point… That time is upon us – right now, right here, for this year and at least the next many years.”
Schmidt is excited about this intersection of computing power, connectivity and the cloud.
Services that we could realistically never run on a mobile device are being provided to us via high speed connections to data centres; things like integrated Gmail on your smartphone.
He terms the mobile phone “the high-volume end-point” to reach the mass market.
Already countries, such as “South Africa, Indonesia have more mobile internet connections than fixed”.
The growth in mobile internet usage is also astounding, said Schmidt: “mobile web adoption is eight times faster than the equivalent point in internet adoption ten years ago.”
Obviously, Google has a big interest in focusing heavily on mobile. The mobile internet, together with location-specific information, offers a much richer environment for advertising.
He expects traditional advertising to continue to migrate to the more efficient web and thereafter, he sees a continued move to mobile phones: “Mobile advertising should ultimately be much better [than PC advertising].”
Also, Google is playing in the space with its Android operating system, now running on dozens of devices from manufacturers including HTC, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson. Over 60 000 devices running the operating system are being shipped every day – that’s double the figure from the previous quarter.
Schmidt offers a glimpse of what’s next: “In the future my phone will not only know where I am, but where I’m going.”
“Phones are so much more personal and satisfying. The phone is no longer just a phone, it’s your alter ego – it’s fundamental to everything you do.”
Google’s mobile drive << Discussion
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