Google made an impressive Mobile World Congress debut here in Barcelona last night, as CEO Eric Schmidt captivated a packed crowd in the auditorium of Hall 5 with a presentation that included live demos of Google voice and image search, and another that combined optical character recognition and translation. A German menu was scanned by an Android phones camera, and within seconds, an English translation of the meal in question appeared on the screen.
Schmidts presentation focused on the convergence of computing, connectivity and the cloud. He did a great job of explaining that the reason why Google voice search works so well, is not because of the power of the phone, but rather, because of the racks of servers in Googles data farms that analyze the voice instructions, compare the words and phrases to the most popular searches over the last few days, and then take a decision on what the mobile user was probably searching for before returning the results in two or three seconds. He spoke about creating magic and hinted that the day when someone could talk into a mobile phone in one language, and be heard by the person at the other end in their own language was not too far away. Were not there yet, but its coming, he said.
Schmidt was keen to get the mobile operators onside, praising them for “the awesome networks you have built”. He also introduced the theme of Mobile First, telling delegates that Googles top programmers want to work on mobile versions of Googles applications, because they are more personal, more human, more location-aware, more dynamic.
He ended his presentation by telling delegates: “The joint project of all of us is to make mobile the answer to pretty much everything.” 
Stirring stuff. No doubt many in the operator community are wary of Googles growing presence in the mobile market, but when you look at what it has achieved already and the growing traction of Android as a platform, its hard to argue that the mobile business wont be a better and a more interesting place to be with Google involved.
David Murphy
Editor
