The technology already exists to make this happen, he says; the problem will be in making it simple enough for ordinary people to get the most out of the product.

The device, which he has dubbed the Freedom Box, will be a combination data storage device, wireless Internet router and communications platform–all of it encrypted, so that only its owner and authorized recipients could read the data it contained or transmitted. Users will typically plug it into a simple wall socket, but it could also run on two double-A sized batteries, meaning it could be used even during a blackout.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“Computers are really here to make us happier,” Schmidt said, promising these devices will give people more time with friends and family, not less.

Schmidt, who gave up the CEO role last month, said that nearly all devices will get more interesting when they connect to the Internet. A music player that doesn’t connect to the network isn’t very interesting, he said, perhaps opening the door to the announcement of a long-talked-about, cloud-based Google music service.

The talk is just geting started. Mobilized got a really good seat in the front row, just two seats over from Andy Rubin, and has live updates below.

5:59 pm: Schmidt talking about things phones should be able to do, such as figure out better traffic routes and bridge language barriers. “You really can do magic,” he says, pointing to Google Translate, which lets you speak one language and have a language you don’t speak returned. “That’s done in a twentieth of a second or what have you,” he says.

6:01 pm: Brings out colleague to show an application on “an interesting new device.”

6:03 pm: The device is the Motorola Xoom tablet and the program is “Movie Studio,” an app built from the ground up for creating and editing movies on tablets.

He has a few images and videos from around Barcelona.

He creates a movie onstage and shows how it can easily be shared on YouTube. (This looks like iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker so far–both of which also let you edit movies and share directly to YouTube.)

6:07 pm: Upload goes slowly, though, as Schmidt notes it is the problem of doing a demo at a mobile network convention where everyone is hammering the networks.

6:09 pm: The goal of many of Google’s products, Schmidt says, is to do tasks quickly so that people can get back to being human. “We ultimately believe that speed matters,” Schmidt says. Google Instant, he says, can save two to five seconds per search.

Search is also becoming more personal. With permission, users can get more information. Next up, he says, is autonomous search as information comes up as one walks or drives, and is driven by location.

“That’s just the beginning of a large number of new apps that use that infrastructure to make a big difference,” Schmidt says.

Schmidt says how much info to share will be up to the user, but those that opt in can get much richer results.

There’s also a trend, he says, to returning more structured data, such as travel.

6:12 pm: Stat time: 120 million people using Chrome, up three times from a year ago.

YouTube revenue doubled in 2010. Now just being able to monetize professional content at a rate that starts to make sense for content partners.

6:18 pm: Computer science can help all kinds of things, Schmidt says. With phones and tablets, “You never forget everything” which is precisely what phones are good at.

If you choose, you can remember the hotels you stayed in and the people you met, etc., “Humans forget,” he says.

Computers are also preventing people from ever getting lost. When I was a boy growing up in Europe “I was always lost,” Schmidt says.

Translation may not prevent war, but should at a minimum increase dialogue, Schmidt says.

6:18 pm: “Even better you are never lonely,” he sats, because computers can point you to nearby friends or connect you to distant ones.

You are never bored, Schmidt says. You are never out of ideas because we can always suggest what you can do next.

Other changes, include the self-driving cars that Google has been working on.

“It’s obvious that cars should drive (themselves),” he says, adding that there will be a “kill switch” in case there are bugs. And it will take time, he says.

“This is coming. It will be decades, I suspect–not a year.”

He also says these innovations will scale to the masses.

“It’s a future for the masses, not the elites,” he says.

6:21 pm: With that, on to Q&A.

6:23 pm: Talking about targeted broadcast quality ads as next frontier.

“Who wants to see an ad that is not relavent to them,” Schmidt says. And that leads to revenue, which Schmidt points out is the whole point of advertising in the first place.

6:24 pm: Question on Android fragmentation saying there is frustration among phone makers and developers.

“We hear some of this,” Schmidt says. “You’ve stated the problem more strongly than I would have, but I will take that as feedback.”

6:26 pm: Question about role of Google in financial services.

Schmidt quips that Larry Page and Sergey Brin periodically suggest that Google issue Google Bucks as its own currency, but Schmidt says he always points out the regulatory issues.

On a serious front, he talks about the power of near-field communications as a means to turn real-world transactions into electronic ones.

“In that are very large businesses,” he says.

(Google built NFC into its Nexus S device.)

6:29 pm: Are you interested in Twitter?

“We love Twitter and I like to tweet,” Schmidt says, eliciting laughter from the crowd.

6:31 pm: Why so many operating systems?

Sometimes these things occur because the teams move so quickly, Schmidt says.

People have been asking when Gingerbread and Honeycomb will come together. Schmidt: You can imagine the follow-on release will start with an “I” and be named after a desert and will combine the best of both, Schmidt says.

These releases occur on roughly a six-month cycle, Schmidt says.

6:33 pm: On Chrome OS, Schmidt says there will be an opportunity to merge that with Android over time, but better to wait for the operating systems to mature and a natural time than to push them together too soon.

6:34 pm: On HTML5, Schmidt imagines that some number of years from now, most apps–mobile and desktop–will be running on HTML5.

6:39 pm: Question on Google’s role in health care.

Phone should be able to, at a minimum, carry medical info. Several percent of queries on Google are health-related.

6:42 pm: Is Facebook with its “Like” button a main competitor?

Today our main competitor is Microsoft. Microsoft has a good product in Bing, he says.

“There’s a couple cases where it might be too good. We discussed that in a blog post.”

They have the cash, the scale and the reach to do good and amazing things.

6:44 pm: On Nokia-Microsoft partnership:

“We would have loved it had they chosen Android,” Schmidt says. “That offer remains open.”

Android would have been a good choice for Nokia, he says.

‘We certainly tried” to get them, he says.

6:46 pm: How do you approach the fact that Android going higher and lower in the market?

Schmidt says that the company tries to show the best in its Nexus line, while putting minimum specifications out there to set the bar for what developers can expect.

6:47 pm: Question on why Google is not more broadly used in the education market?

Schmidt says the company has funded a number of YouTube professors. “We’ve not yet come up with the killer [education] app,” he says.

6:49 pm: Asked about Google’s interest in the PC operating system market, Schmidt says that Google’s answer is Chrome OS. Sometime in the spring you will see a series of PC makers come out with Chrome OS devices. However, he adds they won’t run current PC apps, such as Windows apps.

“It does not run any of your current PC applications so you might think about it,” Schmidt said. That said, he adds there are, in most cases, cloud-based options that are roughly equivalent.

6:52 pm: With that, Schmidt wraps up.

I ask this because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or  remote anything-removal, for that matter–altogether.

Which means the e-commerce giant can do it again.

On Friday, Amazon told me that it yanked the George Orwell novels from customers’ e-book readers because they were “illegal”–bootlegged copies it never should have sold in the first place. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” the company said in a statement.

See the problem? It’s the, big, gaping “in these circumstances” loophole.

I’m still holding out a tiny bit of hope that Amazon (AMZN) is never going to delete a book, or anything it sells its customers, ever again. And that its oddly worded nonpromise is just an oddly worded nonpromise.

But I’ve repeatedly asked Amazon PR folks to mollify me, or at least spell out the circumstances in which they would delete a book again, and I haven’t gotten any response. So I’m fearing the worst: Amazon reserves the right to yank books out of your Kindle, but won’t tell you why or when until it happens.

If you want to play devil’s advocate, you can note that other e-commerce companies have similar abilities. Apple (AAPL) has disclosed that it has a “kill switch” that allows it to remotely wipe out apps from iPhones, ostensibly for security reasons.

And theoretically, the ability to wipe out a rogue iFart app should be as disconcerting as the ability to make a book disappear–intellectual property is intellectual property. But it just doesn’t rankle in the same way.

What to do? Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo wants new legislation to tackle the problem. But even if you like that approach, it’s not going to happen anytime soon–our lawmakers have full plates these days. My suggestion: Demand that Amazon, Apple or whoever else has remote access to your gadgets spell out exactly when, if ever, they will forcibly take back what they sold you. Or don’t buy from them at all.

In the ensuing weeks, the App Store earned its share of detractors–many of them software developers whose products were pulled from the store without warning, most notably the “I Am Rich” app, which sold (briefly) for $999.99. Last week an independent programmer discovered a line in the iPhone OS that looked suspiciously like a “kill switch” Apple (AAPL) could use to cripple programs remotely. Jobs confirmed the “kill switch” in a story by Nick Wingfield earlier today in The Wall Street Journal, and explained that it serves as a last line of defense against malicious applications.

Jobs goes on to happily announce to Wingfield that in 30 days, users have downloaded more than 60 million programs. Though most are free, sales averaged $1 million a day, totaling about $30 million for the month.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” Jobs said. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time,” he told Wingfield. If sales continue to grow, that is. But Apple keeps only 30 percent of the proceeds for the stuff that isn’t free. This covers costs for now, but isn’t a long-term revenue strategy.

Certainly the company aims to use the software to sell more iPhones and iPod Touch devices, in much the same way iTunes fuels sales to all of Apple’s iPod-related devices.

It’s not clear where the whole game lies yet. Platform-driven phones are a new market. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software,” says Jobs. If there’s a way to make the software pay on an ongoing basis, and at a better rate than 30 percent, the App Store could definitely become a $1 billion marketplace.

In the ensuing weeks, the App Store earned its share of detractors–many of them software developers whose products were pulled from the store without warning, most notably the “I Am Rich” app, which sold (briefly) for $999.99. Last week an independent programmer discovered a line in the iPhone OS that looked suspiciously like a “kill switch” Apple (AAPL) could use to cripple programs remotely. Jobs confirmed the “kill switch” in a story by Nick Wingfield earlier today in The Wall Street Journal, and explained that it serves as a last line of defense against malicious applications.

Jobs goes on to happily announce to Wingfield that in 30 days, users have downloaded more than 60 million programs. Though most are free, sales averaged $1 million a day, totaling about $30 million for the month.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” Jobs said. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time,” he told Wingfield. If sales continue to grow, that is. But Apple keeps only 30 percent of the proceeds for the stuff that isn’t free. This covers costs for now, but isn’t a long-term revenue strategy.

Certainly the company aims to use the software to sell more iPhones and iPod Touch devices, in much the same way iTunes fuels sales to all of Apple’s iPod-related devices.

It’s not clear where the whole game lies yet. Platform-driven phones are a new market. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software,” says Jobs. If there’s a way to make the software pay on an ongoing basis, and at a better rate than 30 percent, the App Store could definitely become a $1 billion marketplace.