Gemini Round Table - Robert Swerling from Google

Yesterday we hosted another round table event at Gemini. We have done these round tables in the past (Few examples include: Cloud Computing, Future of the Internet, and many many others).

Our main guest today was Robert Swerling, New business development principal at Google. I never met Rob before, but it turned out he is a great guy, with a great sense of humor. He has also been an entrepreneur in the past, so he related to the crowd, which mostly consisted of current Internet entrepreneurs (Or in other words, young and very energetic).

Overall we had a great turnout, with almost 40 people joining us. Robert prepared a nice framework to discuss the current trends and prediction in the web world. I can’t say that what he presented was really new, but it did create an interesting discussion (even debate). The 3 key topics that Robert discussed were, in order of appearance:

1. Mobile Internet, with a key focus on the interoperability of various devices, and the idea that we still did not reveal the true potential of the mobile internet. The discussion was interesting, and some people had interesting ideas on how the handset fragmentation will stop (and reverse it’s trend). Check out @yanivg on Twitter regarding this.
2. e-Commerce, which was the most interesting part of the presentation. Robert spent the past 2 years focusing on e-commerce at Google, so he had a critical view on this industry. To summarize his view, he thinks that e-Commerce is way behind the offline retail. I would tend to agree (Check out the difference between Apple Store offline and online). In any case, we are looking at companies that are innovating in e–commerce
3. Privacy. Robert ignited a very interesting debate regarding the future of privacy. Many people talked about the privacy “paradigm shift”. After all, so much of the information on the younger generation is in the public domain. Still, I am not sure there is a real shift here. It will be interesting to see how the perception of privacy changes over time, especially when these kids grow older.