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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.
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