These are paraphrased quotes by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in his recent interview on Charlie Rose:
Social networks will discover a business model, because there is too much time being spent on them for advertisers to ignore and not come up with *some* form of entertainment, advertising, etc that works. To think otherwise is to deny the fundamental progress of innovation.
The next generation will be infinitely more social and less private.
The future will see an explosion of narrative-style advertising (esp. immersive video), and the next few years will have ad agencies ramping up and innovating to provide this.
There is a total market size of monetizeable user-generated-content (e.g. most of YouTube isn't monetizable). In the future, if the content has a 2bn audience, show ads. If the content has 2-20m audience, require micropayments (1 cent, 2 cents, etc). For highly niche content, require traditional subscriptions.
Google is first and foremost a search engine, and we like to think of a specific search query as a person, revealing their demographics thru phrasing, and we can already personalize results based on that if users let us. With a mobile device we can then provide a personalized narrative stream of information as you move about your environment as if you were doing searches on everything around you. Same with Google Calendar and who you are meeting with.
1bn new mobile phone users in next 3 yrs; that is, people who have never been online before; totally new voices speaking to Google. More internet users in China than USA, and hundreds of millions to go.
Learning today is highly group based and collaborative, using searching and images and tools like Google Sites. What changes if you have all the world's information instantly available? You shouldn't be taught to memorize the 50 capitols, you should be taught how to search. Then learning is proactive and creative.
One of the most important developments in education are these collaborative community sites (like Google Sites) around specific topics by the leading teachers in the country, like lesson plans, but really as a compendium of information, that will serve as source material for the next revision of textbooks, and the next revision of teacher certification.
One VC, Bill Joy, doesn't hear deals in his office; he searches for ideas (ex: thermodynamics), and finds the papers to find out who is authoritative, and calls the people to find out what's new, what's innovative. So rather than starting with a textbook, he starts with a search on an idea. The combo of Wikipedia and Google means that you can "get it all" if you are motivated enough. But I still believe that reading a book is the best way to learn something.
According to Moore's Law, technology will improve (cheaper or faster) by 10x in 5 years, 100x in 10 years, and 1000x in 15 years (beyond that we must first beat the speed of light). Which means my grandson will have all the worlds content on a single hard drive in every language.
Google's new health records platform is designed to help surface the same aggregate intelligence as Google's flu tracking application, which spots flu outbreaks 6 months sooner than normal by tracking anonymized searches for flu related terms on Google.
All the world's problems have been (and will be) overcome thru technology and innovation.
We needed the stimulus package b/c we needed the 20bn for science and technology, b/c we need high paying jobs to attract the smartest minds, b/c that is how real wealth is created (not thru financial engineering), which is what America is all about.
We have to learn as a society what it means to be constantly connected to each other, to be connected to every crisis. We have to learn that we can't worry about every crisis, that they are not all equally important, and we have to learn where the "off" button is.
Innovation will continue to be America's strength in the future because, as it turns out, the American higher education system is very hard to replicate, although many countries are trying; it requires 50 years to replicate and maybe a different culture. So we are by far still the top choice for higher education in the world. We should give credit to the federal and state governments which provide 1/3 of the funding required.
Comments