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Schmidt: a Mobile "Recreation of the Internet"

  • Reuters, Monday, January 28, 2008 11 AM

Google's Eric Schmidt thinks the arrival of a truly mobile Web will unleash a "huge revolution" in location-based advertising, the CEO told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Friday. "It's the recreation of the Internet, it's the recreation of the PC (story and it is before us -- and it is very likely it will happen in the next year," Schmidt said.

Mobile advertising, of course, is quite small, and many research groups predict it will remain so for the next few years. Forrester Research, for example, predicts that mobile spending will remain under $1 billion through 2012. Schmidt said the figure was far too low.

Google, meanwhile, is moving headlong into the mobile sector, having developed mobile operating system software called Android, participating in the FCC auction for radio spectrum-presumably with the intention of building its own wireless network that takes advantage of the remnant "white spaces" left between licensed spectrum channels. Some analysts worry about the high costs involved in these bold efforts, but Schmidt maintains that location-based advertising could be "a very, very good business."

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