Google's Schmidt: Digital devices are the future of news

Digital devices represent the future of news media according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, anticipating a publishing model built around customized, local information. Speaking at the Activate 2010 conference in London, Schmidt said the news consumption experience of the future will be "delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also color, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalized."

Schmidt contended that media organizations must formulate businesses strategies around the Internet, with an emphasis on the mobile web. "The corollary of 'Internet first' is 'mobile first'," he said. "The Internet is the most disruptive technology in history, even more than something like electricity, because it replaces scarcity with abundance, so that any business built on scarcity is completely upturned as it arrives there. You have to plan your corporate strategy around what the Internet does."

From there Schmidt continued singing the praises of the mobile platform, calling it "the hottest area of computer technology... The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them."

Schmidt declined to address rumors Google is developing a new social networking platform to challenge social media kingpin Facebook, offering the following non-denial: "That would be a product announcement, and I won't say." Rumors about the so-called Google Me project first surfaced over the weekend, when Digg founder Kevin Rose posted a now-deleted Twitter message reading "Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon 'Google Me,' very credible source." Early Facebook exec Adam D'Angelo--co-founder of Q&A search solution Quora--later corroborated Rose's tweet, explaining Google "realized that Buzz wasn't enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook... This is a high-priority project within Google. They had assumed that Facebook's growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn't be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn't stop, and now they are really scared."

For more on Schmidt's comments:
- read this Guardian article

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