I watched Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose last night -  very interesting.  Nearly all the talk was about the importance of Mobile in Google's strategy.  Eric explained how Mobile was taking over from the PC in Internet access and as he said he saw another billion phones being sold in he next 3.5 years.  In fact this statistic struck a chord with me as I have a site called phonecount.com which tracks the mobile phone growth and predicts 2.5 billion extra phones by mid 2012 (I wonder if he took account that the population of the earth will also increase by a billion in the same period).  Now I am sure my approach to calculating this increase is flawed as I just do a linear projection on current increases and I assume lots of people will have more than 1 phone too, but I do think whereas my estimate is perhaps over optimistic Eric is under-estimating hugely.  Does anyone reading this have better figures so I can make my numbers better?

Meanwhile I was also impressed by Eric's description of the need for content being implicitly personalised for users.  By this he meant that the Internet server should know what content each user is interested in and exclude what they have already looked at and push that content to them.  Again this struck a chord with me because this is precisely what we are trying to achieve in my own company - so perhaps we have our own strategy right :-).

Another interesting fact he mentioned was because of Moore's law our phone's storage....

" in 15 years, it’s a thousand times cheaper and faster. So unless something changes in 15 years, I have a grandson, he’ll be 18 in 15 years. He will have all of the world’s information, every video, every movie and so forth on a single hard drive. If he started watching it, he cannot finish watching it in 85 years. He’ll always be frustrated." 

This is a fascinating fact.  Could this mean that in 15 years time our phones will have the world's information resident on the phone.  Then all we need the Internet for it how that information is changing.  This offline/online approach to using data requires a re-think to how we use the Internet and the software on the phones themselves.  I can see a few new businesses being created based on these new concepts :-)