Eric Schmidt

“With your permisson”

Eric Schmidt started his talk with the announcement, that Google will add more than 1000 employees in Europe this year. Than he began a long praise about the achievements and benefits of digital technology. He mentioned crowdsourcing as a way to find out what is really going on in the world, or the use of real time monitoring of health and bio-functions on mobile phones to make it better accessible for patients.

Within two years, smartphone sales will surpass PC sales, and that the mobile web grows eight times faster than the desktop web in an equivalent moment in the development. “Whatever you do, do mobile first”, he advised.

Another field of innovation is cloud computing, where Schmidt sees big potential. He was talking about a voice translation product, that allows to speak into the phone in your language and it comes out translated into any other language on the other side, which is possible due to the combined power of the mobile phone and the supercomputers in the backend.

“The internet replaced the economy of scarcity with the economy of abundance.”

He than started talking about the possibility of accessing personalized information at all time at any place. There he stressed the phrase “with your permission” a lot, ironically referring to the ongoing privacy debate in connection with Google in Germany. He said, that he believed that it was just the beginning of something and that the Internet is the greatest disruptor in history, but that for the first time in history, information isn’t kept to elites, but this vision of “information at your fingertips” will be available for all people.