By Adam Popescu2013-05-14 00:29:51 UTCThe growth of the web, the developing world and digital-age career skills were all topics of discussion last Thursday night at a special fireside chat with tech heavyweights Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen at Google's Venice, Calif., headquarters.
The talk felt like an in-person abstract for the duo's new book, The New Digital Age, which was finished after the two traveled to more than 25 countries to forecast the global digital evolution.
"In the next five to ten years, another 5 billion people will join the Internet," said Schmidt, the company's chief executive and one of the world's richest men.
Most of those people will be in places like Asia, Africa and South America. And while newfound access to information will level the playing field to a degree, it will also set the table for the world's villains as much as the up-and-comers, noted Cohen, Google's director of ideas, who spent nearly half a decade at the State Department. This coming influx means we'll keep seeing repressive governments censoring and stifling information and Internet access. And terrorists and hacker groups will continue to battle law enforcement in a fight that seems never ending.
"Everyones' lives will get better [with technology]," said Cohen. But it's "different degrees of assistance."
For most of the planet, struggles over power, water, food, violence and censorship will persist, and technology is not the silver bullet to solve these societal flaws, Cohen continued.
Schmidt agreed, saying that although he grew up with the assumption that technology is the great leveler, that is "in fact not the case."
While the rest of the world struggles to get plugged in, not to mention feed themselves, here we are in the first world arguing about our need for faster fiber optic cables, Schmidt joked.
Still, it's not all bad. Cohen countered with an example of the web's growing power for underserved populations. In Pakistan, he noted, victims of acid attacks are ostracized from society, yet able to live engaging, secondary lives online. In Libya last year, school girls used Google maps to create guides to help them travel and avoid bombings, maps which Cohen says were used by NGOs.
When you hear stories like these, it becomes obvious that innovations for the more privileged, like Google Glass and automated cars are, for the moment, just toys. There are countless underserved regions and peoples still not benefiting from more basic innovations. As the rest of the planet continues to gain Internet access, things will improve, but for all the money Google is investing in the developing world, the company is not powerful enough to be the world's custodian, a point skirted by Schmidt during the audience Q&A when a grey-haired academic asked: Is access to technology actually making us stupider?
"We can't disagree over facts," Schmidt said, reasoning that access to those facts, being reproducible and proven, will help us all.
Facts are essential to a free and informed society, but when every answer is but a touch or click away, the cultural argument is, 'How could it not foster a generation and culture of laziness?' There's a back and forth debate in tech circles whether the Internet makes our lives easier, and the use of search engines like Google are at the heart of the question. So polarizing are views that people can't even agree on the state of innovation. Some say information overload is in fact complicating our lives, while others champion the wealth of knowledge online; though Cohen and Schmidt did not touch on such topics during their talk.
Still, the audience of about 100 seemed genuinely interested and didn't take the two to task for not fully answering the academic's question. The crowd was filled with familiar faces in L.A.'s tech scene, including Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, Nicholas Smoot of the geolocation app Here On Biz, and Hank Leber of the social share service GonnaBe. I sat next to Norman Lear, the writer and creator of the television hits All In the Family and Sanford and Son.
They all listened intently but the sporadic laughter at Schmidt's one-liners hinted at what seemed to be a general sense of a one-way dialogue.
The speakers ended the evening on a bit of career advice, saying that the U.S. desperately needs engineers. So desperate, said Schmidt, that it doesn't even matter if you're even a good one or not. Become an engineer and you will never have trouble finding a job, he said.
They even gave a bit of insight into Google's infamous hiring process: Sometimes they test applicants, said Schmidt, sometimes they threaten to test them and just scare them, and sometimes they test them so much they scare them.
The final question of the night was from a shy 17-year-old who nervously said he was a budding coder at an inner city program called Urban Txt. "I know HTML and Java," the teen declared, asking, how can I maintain my focus and trajectory?
You're already ahead of the game, Schmidt said, before adding, "You're going to be wealthy beyond your dreams."
Mashable composite of Cohen and Schmidt courtesy of Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images (left) and JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/GettyImages (right); event image by Adam Popescu
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By Matt Petronzio2013-05-11 17:41:18 UTC
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By Sam Laird2013-05-11 21:38:08 UTC
The Daily Muse 2013-05-14 02:59:21 UTC 
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Robert Z. Pearlman for Space.com 2013-05-11 16:25:41 UTC 
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By Amy-Mae Elliott2013-05-11 18:52:43 UTC
Google (and especially the Google+ team) are keeping very busy. While I/O 2013 may have wrapped up last week, the company's just unveiled a new update for its social network on Android devices. Packing some familiar new photo features (like auto-backup and auto-highlights), the refresh includes even more Snapseed filters and tools. Location sharing can now tap into your circle arrangements, and you'll be able to share geo-locations with specific sets of people. Related hashtags will now function within the app, like we've already seen on the web-based version, while (perhaps predictably) there's now one-tap access to Mountain View's Hangouts app too. Gotta keep 'em all connected, right? when.eng("eng.perm.init")
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By Brian Anthony Hernandez2013-05-13 18:27:00 UTC
The FCC may have spoiled the surprise, but Sony's now gone official with yet another smartphone and this one's for its native Japan. The Xperia UL appears to be a slightly thicker riff on the Xperia Z, matching the display of the company's early-2013 flagship, with a quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro (APQ8064) ticking behind the 5-inch 1080p screen. It's worth noting that it's a substantial resolution bump from the similar-looking 720p NTT DoCoMo Xperia A. Although it's not the Snapdragon 600 rumored, Qualcomm's S4 Pro flexes its muscle through Exmor RS 13-megapixel camera sensor, offering up the ability to capture 15 frames in a second. NFC, naturally, is already in attendance as well as the Felica wireless payment system. You'll also get the benefits of both a physical camera button and water (IPX5/8) and dust resistance (IP5X) -- two features in tandem that should help separate it from Sony's pair of existing 5-inch 1080p smartphones. The Xperia UL will launch on KDDI's au network in white, black and hot pink colors on May 25th. Check out the obligatory close-up ad after the break.Update: The Xperia UL runs on an S4 Pro processor, not the Snapdragon 600 initially stated.Sony Xperia UL press shots
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