“I hope at some time in the future they will be [willing] to choose Android again,” Schmidt said in a roundtable discussion with a small group of reporters following his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Schmidt said that he and Android chief Andy Rubin had talked quite a bit with Nokia and that the company understood its operating system well, but declined to say how advanced the talks with his company had gotten. “We did talk to them,” he said. “I would rather not go into the details.”

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told Mobilized on Tuesday that Microsoft will pay billions of dollars for the right to have the company cast the “swing vote” in favor of Windows Phone 7.

Asked whether he agreed that the Nokia-Microsoft partnership makes the smartphone business a three-horse race, Schmidt said, “They’ll have to deliver.”

Separately, Schmidt said regarding near-field communications that Google intends to build a business, but won’t be getting into the credit card or terminal business, but is interested in delivering offers to NFC-equipped devices.

He also reiterated that the company isn’t looking to get into the media business.

“It’s important not to get into businesses you don’t understand,” Schmidt said.

Rubin did say that, having gotten into the business of selling apps, Google is also exploring what other kinds of digital goods it might sell, but had no comment on whether it would sell music or publications.

Asked by Mobilized whether the company needs to do more on the social front, Schmidt said that the company isn’t as interested in building products to compete with Facebook as it is to have the social signals it needs in its core products. However, he said that the Facebook “Like” button or something akin to it is important because what you and your friends like is a key to delivering personalized search results.

On the EU front, Schmidt said that company has had some conversations with regulators and looks forward to more in order to address any concerns.

A national poll released today by Common Sense Media asking how well social networks protect kids online produced an answer that should come as a shock to exactly no one:

Not very well, at least according to parents.

A full 75 percent of them gave social networking sites such as Facebook a negative rating for the task.

About 2,000 parents were polled by the nonprofit media organization, as well as 400 teens, who also gave thumbs down to social networks’ ability to police themselves.

There will be a big roundtable discussion on the topic in Washington, D.C., this morning, which will include Common Sense Media head Jim Steyer, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller.

Along with the poll results, San Francisco-based Common Sense Media said it will also announce the launch of the “Protect Our Privacy–Protect Our Kids” campaign to help parents protect kids’ reputations and personal information online.

I love the smell of impending privacy legislation in the morning!

Already from Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts: “As the House author of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, I remain intently interested in ensuring that children are not targeted online and their privacy is strictly protected. Twelve years after the bill was signed into law, entire new technologies and industries have emerged that could put children’s safety at risk, making a legislative update necessary. I look forward to introducing such legislation to bring COPPA into the 21st century.”

Thus, here is more for pols to chew on: The bulk of those surveyed are more concerned with online privacy than they were five year ago (another obvious one); parents do not believe Web sites, including search engines such as Google (GOOG), should share the location of kids (count me in on that one too!); and teens think their friends overshare (you think?).

But instead of me telling you, just read it all here in top-line results for adults and teens, as well as in the official press release:

Final CSM adults topline

Final CSM teen topline

Privacy Poll Results and Campaign Launch

The way Google (GOOG) handled the Buzz rollout was “irresponsible,” said Harbour. “Google constantly tells the public to ‘just trust us,’” she said. “But based on my observations, I do not believe consumer privacy played any significant role in the release of Buzz….When Gmail users created their accounts, they signed up for e-mail services. Their expectations did not include social networking.”

Indeed, they did not, as evidenced by the breadth and volume of the outcry over the service. And while Google, to its credit, quickly adjusted Buzz to address privacy complaints, the fact that it had to do so at all is cause for concern. Publicly exposing user data first and addressing questions about the exposure later is poor form and sets a lousy precedent.

Said Harbour: “Technology companies are learning harmful lessons from each other’s attempts to stretch the privacy envelop. Even the most respected and popular online companies, those who say they respect privacy, insist on launching products where the guiding privacy policy seems to be, ‘Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.’”

Tough to argue with this given what we saw with Buzz, though I’m sure Google will try. I’ve asked the company for comment and will update here if I hear back.

UPDATE: Google spokesman Brian Richardson just called in with the following statement: “User choice and transparency are top of mind for us. When we realized that we had unintentionally made users unhappy, we worked quickly to make immediate changes.”

[Image credit: Asaf Hanuka, Tropical Toxic]

Here’s a whole lot of video from a panel discussion about the future of online video that BoomTown moderated last week in San Francisco.

Held at the offices of CBS (CBS) Interactive, it was organized by Andy Plesser, the kingpin of Beet.TV, the online video news site. Plesser moderated the second half of the two-hour (!!!) session, and I did the first hour.

One tweet of the event noted: “The Beet.TV just started and @karaswisher is already terrorizing the panelists.”

I beg to differ! I was strafing the giant panel in order to tame it!

The group assembled included Gregg Colvin of News Corp. (NWS) digital unit Fox Interactive, Karin Gilford of Comcast (CMCSA), Revision3′s Jim Louderback, Anthony Soohoo of CBS Interactive, Adobe (ADBE) exec Jennifer Taylor, and many, many others.

Topics included advertising, creative, innovative business models and much more about the online video space.

Here’s the full video, as well as an interview with me about my bad video practices (yes, I look exhausted, but the panel did last forever).

And I added a third video, which is a part of the longer one, in which I asked what devices or companies the panelists thought were the most promising.

The answer, for the most part: Those from Apple (AAPL), including its iPhone, iPod and, even before launch, iPad. Not surprisingly, however, given the Flash feud, Adobe’s Taylor picked the Google (GOOG) Nexus One mobile phone.

Here are the videos:

At a roundtable event this morning at The Paley Center for Media, Sirius (SIRI) CEO Mel Karmazin was asked that very question. Does he worry about Stern leaving for an outfit–like Pandora–looking to avail itself of the same “Stern Effect” that spiked Sirius’s subscriber rolls?

Karmazin acknowledged that while it’s a possibility, he’s dubious. “I think it’s great to be content today,” he said. “In this world of fragmentation, great content prevails. Howard Stern is great content. Howard would be sought after by anyone. He’s a great talent. Having said that, we would like him to stay with us and we are optimistic that he will continue to do so.”

It’s worth noting that Karmazin, while he does view Internet radio as a competitor, doesn’t seem too worried by it. “There are a lot of choices for audio content,” he remarked. “And obviously, the Internet is one of them. But the question is who’s going to the the largest player? And I think that’s our spot to lose. I believe we will be the most profitable of audio content choices.”

Further Notes From the Event

On Amazon’s Kindle:
I am addicted to my Kindle. I saw Jeff Bezos in Sun Valley recently [and] I told him I have personally bought a dozen to give as gifts.

On Comcast/NBC Universal:
I dont’ see anything anticompetitive about what Comcast is doing–the review should take a few weeks. Either you accept the fact that there’s a lot of competition out there, or you don’t….But I do think this thing is going to drag out like it did for us. So far there are only two congressional hearings on Comcast/NBC. We had four–there were fewer for the Exxon Valdez.

On In-Car Internet and the Apple iPod:
I think the Internet will absolutely be in the car and we think it will be a good competitor. You know we’ve been competing with iPods for a long time. And we look at how sat radio performs in the vehicles where people have the ability to put an iPod jack in and we don’t see much of a difference. We believe them to be complementary.

It will take place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto from 8 a.m. to noon.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic (the company that makes the WordPress blogging software) will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions.

Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (“Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a panel of investors, moderated by VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, which features: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

Oh, it is sure to be a festival of Web 2.0 pondering.

Said Marshall in a post about the gathering:

One goal of this event is to provide context and advice for start-up CEOs and founders facing the recession. We’ve handpicked the speakers for their remarkable records and experiences in the previous downturn. …

While the Sequoia [Capital] ‘RIP Good Times’ presentation gave a broad overview of the economic problems facing the tech world, it provided mostly a macro analysis, and a general prescription for companies.

Now is the time to take the analysis one step further, and discuss the variety of situations we see among valley investors and their start-ups: How cleantech companies are different from Internet start-ups, and how under certain conditions, a profitable company may actually be poised for aggressive growth, hiring and M&A–and not necessarily ideal for cost cutting. We intend to explore all of this and more.

Given the fairly predictable ‘Silicon Valley is in circle-the-wagons mode’ story line we’ve been seeing so far in the media, this event is also the Valley’s opportunity to help dispel this myth and explain how the area’s start-ups are actually quite diverse and that there are a mix of strategies at play.”

The event is sold out, but it will be streamed live.

And, as usual, look for a shaky video report of the roundtable from me later!