Google CEO Eric Schmidt put mobile at the heart of the Internet giant’s future in a special keynote at Congress late this afternoon.

Schmidt outlined how Google’s top programmers were now concentrating on mobile as their primary focus; he also pointed to recent acquisitions in the mobile space, notably AdMob.

Unveiling a new Google mantra – ‘Mobile First’ – Schmidt proclaimed that three unique areas had now converged on the mobile device: computing power, interconnectivity and the cloud: “The phone is where these three all interconnect  and you need to get these three waves right if you want to win.” He highlighted Internet phenomenons such as Spotify, Facebook – and Google itself – as leading the cloud concept across both fixed and mobile. “If you don’t use the power of the cloud you will fail,” he said.

He added that in places such as Indonesia and South Africa Google was now seeing more searches on mobile than via the desktop.

Google programmers joining Schmidt on stage demonstrated the firm’s latest developments, including efforts to merge its speech and image recognition technology; the firm impressed with a preview of an optical character recognition (OCR) tool that was able to recognise and translate a picture of a German menu into English. Google announced that German has now been added to its speech system as its fourth language.

Schmidt also provided an update on Google’s Android platform, which he said was now running across 26 different devices. He said that Android handset vendors were selling  more than 60,000 per day, a figure that has doubled over the last quarter. During an Android demonstration, Google’s Eric Tseng announced that the platform now supports Flash – the full Flash version (10.1) rather than Flash Lite – allowing gaming and movies over handsets. The announcement will give Android devices an advantage over Apple’s iPhone, which does not support the technology.

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/google-embraces-mobile

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Some 19% of Americans will use their mobile devices for shopping this holiday season, according to a Deloitte survey. The number is twice as high for young consumers: 39% of those 18 to 29 say they’ll use their phones to find store locations, obtain coupons and sales information and research products and prices. One-quarter of all who plan to use their phones to shop say they will make purchases on the devices. Read More.

More shoppers use smartphones to study, find, buy – USATODAY.com.

itsmy.com just released what is probably the largest ever survey in the area of mobile social networks. More than 15,000 users took part from the US, UK, Spain, and Italy. Looking at consumer usage patterns, preferences, and statistics, this report really shows how deeply involved some consumers are with mobile social networks.

The worldwide survey was conducted on the mobile internet amongst 15,000 active itsmy.com users between September and November 2008. The age range was between 16 and 52 years. All had current mobile phone types and were from more than 30 different mobile operators.

Although you would expect this sort of sample would consist of people that are interested in mobile social networks, what I found interesting was that it shows how deep this involvement can be.

For example, here is a question about means of communicating with friends and family, and it’s clear that the mobile is the overwhelming choice for communications.

And this isn’t simply a question of people using mobile to access their PC based social network. In fact, across all 4 countries roughly 60% to 70% said that the PC and mobile “have completely different stuff on them.”

Read More  http://www.mobilopen.org/index.php/2008/12/17/148-survey-reveals-intense-dedication-to-mobile-social-networks

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