When it comes to looking to the future and trying to decide where to direct attention, I would be hard pressed to not include the opinions of Eric Schmidt CEO of Google for consideration.

On March 6, 2009, Schmidt appeared as a guest for a full hour on The Charlie Rose show.  Rose had been visiting with many of the dignitaries of Silicon Valley including Evan Williams of Twitter, Marissa Mayer also of Google, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Jeff Bezos of Amazon .. and a fascinating segment with Marc Andreesen entrepreneur of all sorts.

Rose started out with a brief background on Schmidt’s hiring at Google, and then launched into a complete dissecting of the business model as it exists, where it is going and what technology is doing to our culture.

There is always the push and pull tugging at the base of the brain that says “beware of Google’s power”, but at the same time, all indications point to the fact that Google does consider putting efforts towards projects for the greater good.  As you will see during his discussions about the Flu Trends project and Google Earth.

Schmidt’s term for the ability to mine all of the data that is being amassed is “collective intelligence”.

In reference to all of this information he predicted the ability to communicate globally will come about by the ability to translate all of this information on the fly.  Note the matter of fact nature of the comment where he foresees texting between two people who don’t speak the same language because the computing power will enable the message to be converted to the recipients native tongue.

Clearly, Schmidt sees the most influential technology changing the way we use the internet as mobile.  The number of mobile devices in use today are staggering, the capabilities from GPS, to cameras, to streaming content are going to personalize the experience to massive adoption levels.

To close it out, we talk about how the impact of all of this information at our fingertips has on our children.  We talked about this issue on the GeekDads@Home podcast .. in particular the conversation focused on the results that the author Don Tapscott uncovered in writing the books Growing Up Digital and Grown Up Digital.

View the Program and let us know what you think:

This week our topic is about the iPhone apps that we are using and how the device has changed our lives.  The instigation of our discussion was a tweet on Sunday evening from Cameron:

“I think I need an intervention. The iPhone App Store is my dealer and the apps are my crack. 9:22 PM Nov 9th from web”

These are the applications that we discuss:

ITalk – This application turns the iPhone into a recorder.  With one touch you can record at three different quality levels Good/Better/Best.  There is a free version that contains advertisements or for .99 cents you’ve got the ad free version.  The companion iTalk Sync allows you to drag and drop the recordings through Wifi to the desktop for archiving. The Mac Sync is available now, and the PC version is now in public beta.

Say Who Application, which is brought to you by the same people as Say Where, is a voice dialer where speaking into the phone will search your contact list and bring up the name that you are trying to call. It’s not entirely hands free because you still need to click to dial, but it’s better than scrolling through a list of contacts.

Twitterific – Currently the best way to communicate via Twitter on your iPhone.  Easy to read and respond to your tweets, and includes the user’s avatar so it’s easy to see who is making a post.  It’s free and includes advertising every 50 posts.

LaTwit – is an app that you pay for.  It’s $2.99 but provides you with the ability to post to Laconica based applications like Identi.ca and Twit Army.  For the smaller Laconica communities I generally view the public stream. Since they are not a voluminous as Twitter’s public stream they can give you a better sense of the conversation taking place. This app lets you set whether you want to open in the public or friends timeline, which is think is a nice option. Coming soon will be the ability to send private DM messages.

Flickup – is an application developed by Martin Gordon this is an easy way to get pictures from your iPhone to your Flickr account – Joe’s Flickr Stream & Cameron’s Flickr Stream. Of course, the limitation is that the camera on the iPhone is terrible, so we’re hoping for an upgrade in the future (video too?) .. But with a few easy steps you can upload the picture to Flickr as well as send a tweet with a link to the photo.  This is a great way to let your twitter friends know and see what you are up to!

Pandora – Rock and roll!! Wifi lets you listen to your Pandora stations on the phone.  If you are away from home but still have a jonesing for your perfectly tuned music genome project, here you go. Subscribe to our profiles Joe’s Pandora & Cameron’s Pandora.

New York Times – this app gives you access to the online version of the paper. It’s still a little bit buggy as there are many times when it will just shut down, forcing you to go back out to the menu to come back in.  It’s so graphics and content intensive it’s probably just a matter of bandwidth.  This free app is best if you have wifi access, but you can also use it in “Airplane” mode once you sync (open the app) all of the current content is on your phone.

ESPN Game called CameraMan this one is a brain teaser game for the phone that tests your memory and visual recognition.  Remember when you were young and had to look at two pictures and determine what was different? This is the sports fan version of the game.

Ringtones – we touch on ringtones in the podcast but both admit to not having anything but the standard tones that come with the phone. It’s ironic but we like our music too much to let it become and intrusive ring.

Google App .. gives you the ability to access all of your services such as Gmail, Gtalk, the calendar, etc. through the phone. Since we are very cloud computing based here at Fluid Media we can get to pretty much anything we need.  However, the best use of the applicationt that I find in particular is the RSS reader.

Finally, the really important element of our conversation comes at the very end when we discuss making purchase (or download) decisions based upon the ratings that other users have given a particular application.  Ultimately, any brand or company is interested in having some form of conversion take place and in this new social media world it is proven that the static corporate communications are less likely to convince a buyer than will peer group recommendation.

If you are not using some form of commenting or discussion functionality in your communications processes, then you are falling behind.  Word of Mouth (not an affliate link) marketing is where we are now.

Do you have a favorite iPhone app that we should get?  Let us know in the comments section.