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Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress

NOTE: Please find an updated version of this video, which includes an introductory video that played before Eric’s speech, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkQA2Lb_iE

Eric Schmidt presents Google’s vision of the mobile future at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on Tuesday, February 16, 2010.
http://www.mobileworldcongress.com

Google Shopper

Shopper lets you find product information quickly by using your phone’s camera. It can recognize cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, along with most barcodes. You can also speak the name of the product you’re looking for. Use Shopper to make smart decisions about what to buy, what price to pay, and where to buy it. You can star items for later and share them with friends. Shopper also saves your history so you’ll always have the information at your fingertips, even when you don’t have a signal.

To learn more visit http://www.google.com/mobile/shopper

Google’s experimental fiber network

We’re planning to build experimental ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States to make the Internet better and faster. Check out this short video to learn more, or visit http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

Google Brussels TechTalk “Internet Privacy”

Ever wondered what data Google’s search engine collects and why we retain search logs for certain periods of time? Our first ever Brussels Tech Talk on 28 January 2010 was about this and other questions on online privacy, given that it was Data Protection Day.

Dr Alma Whitten, Google’s engineering lead for privacy, addressed a full room of policy makers and other interested stakeholders. Alma demonstrated how we harness the power of data to “learn from the good guys, fight the bad guys, and invent the future”.

While the technology is complicated, the explanation is simple: log data enable our engineers to refine algorithms for the benefit of all search users. If clicking on the top results occurs for any given query, it signals that we are doing something right. If people are hitting ‘next page’ or typing in another query, we learn something is wrong. Every time a user searches on the web, you benefit from what Google has learned from millions of previous searches. However, rather than a solved problem, the search science is still in its infancy. By launching hundreds of innovations in search just during the last year, we’re constantly trying to improve search so you’ll hopefully find among the first results the website that contains the answer you were looking for in midst of more than a trillion unique URLs.

We aim to always balance innovative product development with a serious respect for users’ privacy. For us, this process starts with providing transparency and allowing users control. Alma explained the ways we’re working to provide our users with more transparency and choice: things like the Ads Preferences Manager, Google Dashboard, and Data Liberation Front. And she referred to the challenges engineers face to achieve transparency and control with respect to different categories of data such as logged-in vs. unauthenticated data.

P.S. The video’s sound quality could be better – we’re arranging for superior recording equipment for the next Brussels TechTalk.

Google social search feature

The first step in an ongoing effort to make Google Search as social as the web itself, Google social search is an new feature that surfaces public web content from your friends and online contacts. It is currently available on google.com for all signed-in users.