Google's CEO Eric Schmidt recently spoke at the Economic Club in Chicago. VC Confidential has some interesting key points from his speech:
"People's attention is the most important asset for marketers. The key to getting people's attention is targetted advertising instead of untargetted. He asked how many people read the paper this morning or watched TV. Could they recall any ads they saw?"
"Study after study shows that groups collectively predicting/assessing dramatically outperform individual experts. How to tap? Some hedge funds trying to find ways to mine opinion from chat rooms about stocks. The trick is guaranteeing no gaming...one person, one vote."
"Google is working on auto-translation products. This will allow content, trapped within a language such as Japanese, to be freed for consumption world wide by all."