Google made the biggest management shake-up in a decade on Thursday, handing the reins of the company to one of its co-founders in an effort to rediscover its start-up roots, reports the New York Times. As it has grown into the dominant company in Silicon Valley, Google has lost some of its entrepreneurial culture and become a slower-moving bureaucracy, analysts and insiders say, in contrast to Facebook, Twitter and other younger, more agile competitors. To counter this, the company announced that Larry Page, its 38-year-old co-founder, would take over as chief executive from Eric E. Schmidt, a technology industry veteran who was brought in a decade ago to provide adult supervision, as Silicon Valley calls it…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
In Schmidt’s vision, Google will search before you even ask
In the not-so-distant future, you’ll be walking down the street and your phone will beep and offer you a few lunch suggestions just around the corner, or it might tell you that the museum across the street is having an exhibit of that artist you once Googled: That’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s vision of the future, Computerworld reports. In a keynote address at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Schmidt said that at some point in the future, Google’s search technology will be autonomous, meaning it will offer users search results even before they’ve looked for them. “While it sounds like science fiction to suggest that technology can help search for things you don’t even yet know you need, the opportunities to improve human discovery are very real in the future,” said Augie Ray, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Combining a person’s context — where they are, who they’re with — with their past opinions and actions, and the opinions and actions of others, can create tremendous value for people.” Autonomous search would take your past experiences, likes and dislikes and use them, along with geolocation information, to give you information about things that might interest you wherever you might be. Analysts say this kind of technology could be a reality within five years. However, it could be a big drain on the battery life of mobile devices.
But the bigger issue could be privacy. For this type of search technology to work, your phone and Google would need to know where you are all the time. And many people might have a big problem with that…