Google's Eric Schmidt On Google's Future

Maria Bartiromo at CNBC has a detailed interview with Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. The full transcript is here and I've noted some items below in quotes.

As we've noted here before, monetizing video and social media is very difficult. Schmidt confirms that is an ongoing challenge at Google:

... the whole social networking space has been harder for us tomonetize--that
is, develop advertising businesses again--than some of theother--than some of
the other spaces that we're in. It has to do what peopleare doing. When you
think about it, you're in a social network, you'relooking at people's photos,
you're figuring out where your friends are.You're not as likely to be purchasing
a new car at the same time or purchasingclothes or purchasing a book or what
have--whatever business that you're in.So the development of the advertising
tools and techniques, literally theplatform, has been more difficult than we
have thought. But we're working onit, and we're hopeful.

Regarding the explosive Mobile market, which clearly is a major focus for Google:

.... most people in most developed countries have a roughly 100percent coverage of mobile phones. So it really is a tremendous phenomenon. Over the next three or four years, there'll be more than another billion or somobile phones added. Eventually our numbers indicate that there'll be five or so billion mobile phones in a world of six billion or so. People, this is aphenomenon. It's an unprecedented reach, even greater than, for example,television, or even electricity in some cases. So that's a platform that we can exploit. Our mobile phone, both search traffic as well as advertising is growing very rapidly, and we think people will do more and more interesting things in mobile phones. And, I mean, small phones, big phones, big screens, things that don't look like a phone, things which are mobile.