There were not that many news at Web 2.0 Summit except for Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google, showing an “unannounced Android device from an unannounced manufacturer with Near-Field Communication” that will allow people to do all kinds of thing including paying with their phones. The technology has been used for a long time in Japan but always failed to take off in the US, we’ll see… Then he was proud to tell the audience that with the recently launched Google TV, his company “is guilty of taking a dumb TV and making it smart”… andit will bring more revenues to content owners, contrary to what they think.
At the end of the day, Neil Smit, President, Comcast Cable Communications, showed us a demo of the Xfinity TV App for iPad just announced in the morning. The user experience seems much better than the TV guide.
John Battelle lead an interesting conversation with Robin Li, Chairman &CEO, Baidu about Google retreat from China and the success of Baidu. According to Robin, Baidu succeeded because it was better adapted to the Chinese market than Google, despite a fierce local competition. He dismissed John’s suggestion that the Chinese government favorised his company over the search giant.
Wim Elfrink, Chief Globalisation Officer at CISCO performed a refreshing presentation about the “Network as The Platform For Transforming the World”. Basically, he believes that innovation in network technology based on open standards will lead to a more sustainable world with significant energy savings and decrease of water consumption (see picture)
On a more playful note, Mark Pincus, co-founder, Zynga, updated the audience about its company exponential growth. To date, Zynga counts 320 million users and can get over 3 million people playing at the same time. He promised to offer a “dog-activated” network to Zynga users…
We will live blog Day 2 as well, follow us on http://live.ubergizmo.com or you can follow Web 2.0 Summit Live Stream
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