Google at MWC

Simon Andrews, founder of mobile agency addictive!, on Google at the World Mobile Congress.

Eric Schmidt was talking in Barcelona last night and showcasing the new stuff on mobile.

One interesting thing he said was that in every project they now look at mobile first. He ended his speech saying “the new rule is mobile first”.

Demos focused on voice search and image search – and also looked at translation capabilities – with Eric suggesting that they’re not far from allowing someone to talk on the phone with someone speaking a foreign language and Google translating in real time.

One new feature in Google Goggles is the ability to look at German text and have the phone translate it to English – demonstrated with a German lunch menu.

Interestingly, a big part of the demo was showing how well Flash works on Android – not so subtly illustrating a big difference between them. (BTW, whilst Microsoft didn’t mention Flash yesterday, in the Q&A Steve Balmer said he wasn’t against it.)

Adobe Flash is what most web/app developers favour – the write once, run anywhere development platform – but until they sort a way of working with Apple they will struggle …

Earlier on in the day, the CEO of Vodafone made the point that many on the operators’ side believe – Google is too powerful. As CNet puts it:

“Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao warns fellow telecom executives that Google – and other companies that dominate parts of the mobile ecosystem – could be getting too powerful and suggests regulators need to get involved.”