The fact is, cell phone quality has never been great, but a lot of people, CEOs and executives included, now seem to use them almost exclusively, so the poor quality is more noticeable–and annoying. And while enterprise-quality IP phone systems seem fine, home versions like your cable company’s or Google Voice that more people are using still don’t match landlines.

Perhaps it’s just a transitional phase, before we get the unlimited bandwidth we’ve been promised for so long. But it seems like a long transitional phase.

And it’s not just phones. CDs still don’t sound as good as vinyl, and MP3 files are even worse. Do I even need to mention Internet video? Most people probably don’t notice that the average digital camera image can’t match the best film images, but film images taken with a good camera still have better resolution (or at least the grain looks better than pixels).

Of course, digital has its advantages. No skipping records, for instance. (Well, not actually true–my car CD player doesn’t like it when I hit a bump.) No snarled tape. Digital phones and music players are much more convenient to use, and do a whole lot more than just make calls. Videos taken with most digital cameras look a lot better than anything we used to take with tape-based camcorders.

I don’t mean to sound like an old crank, even if I might be. But I wish in the rush to digitize everything, we could remember that quality matters, and make that as important as convenience.

So much talk about evil these days. Google is evil for promoting results from its Google+ social network on search results pages, and even for changing its privacy policy to make clear its services share data. Apple is evil for not coming down hard enough on harsh working conditions at its Chinese suppliers’ factories.

Well, maybe. But if they’re going to be honest, the many pundits piling on to today’s titans of tech need to look up from the screen and into the mirror. Google’s and even Apple’s businesses, warts and all, don’t exist without our explicit participation. As Pogo famously said, albeit in a different context: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Now, I’m still not so sure Google’s actions on either score rise to the level of evil by any reasonable meaning of the term. (In fact, the furor over Search plus Your World  makes me think of Pogo creator Walt Kelly’s second most famous line: ”Don’t take life so serious, son. It ain’t nohow permanent.”) But it sure looks like Google’s at least edging closer to the evil line than its hifalutin ideals ever seemed to suggest.

For its part, Apple has taken considerable effort improve the factories that produce the gleaming iPhones and iPads we love. But if today’s New York Times story is correct, it’s clearly culpable in its seeming ambivalence about coming down hard on its suppliers exploiting workers.

Fact is, though, these companies get away with things we don’t like only because we let them. As powerful as Apple and Google seem, they both answer to customers and users. That would be us. And unlike politicians, they must answer to us every day–if we insist they do.

But we can’t do that just by bitching about them on blogs. You want Google to back off on personalized search and data-sharing? Opt for the plain results (click the Hide Personal Search button up there on the right), sign out of your Google account, or even delete it entirely. Or try Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Easier than blogging about it! And if enough of you do it, rest assured that Google’s data crunchers will notice, and if they’re as smart as they like to think, they’ll figure out how to change things.

You want Apple to fix its factory conditions? Don’t buy that next iPhone or iPad, and tell Apple why. If enough of you just say no, Apple will notice, and maybe start to use some of those unbelievable profits to change things.

Everything else is just talk. And there’s been quite enough of that already.

Facebook goes public, but won’t start an IPO landslide: Facebook will make the signature stock offering of the decade, one that reportedly will value the social network at up to $100 billion. But it won’t launch a thousand IPOs as a gazillion venture capitalists and angel investors hope.

Of course, the first part of that prediction is a gimme. But I can’t go without mentioning it because the Facebook IPO will be one of the biggest stories of 2012. Assuming Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley don’t stumble in pricing and selling the offering, Facebook’s IPO will be every bit as important as Google’s in 2004. It will be a sign that Facebook is a real, sustainable company (if there was any doubt left by now), but also a sign that social networking is getting woven into the fabric of our entire online experience.

The second part of the prediction depends less on how the Facebook IPO goes than on how (or whether) the economy recovers. If the recover remains slow to nonexistent and the stock market reflects that, IPOs will be sparse. If we get the slow but growing economic improvement we seem to be seeing now, more companies will go public but not a gusher. But the point is that Facebook is such a singular success that it’s not going to set the tone for lesser (often far lesser) Internet companies.

Facebook’s ad business booms–but not at Google’s expense: Facebook’s social advertising looks promising, but won’t come close to challenging Google’s huge success in search ads this year–maybe ever.

Obviously, Facebook is having no problem raking in the bucks from advertisers eager to reach its 800 million-plus audience–or more specifically, the millions of people in whatever target markets they choose. EMarketer reckons the company will gross nearly $6 billion in ad revenues this year, up from $4 billion in 2011. And that’s before we know anything about Facebook’s likely plans for mobile ads or an ad network a la Google’s AdSense that would spread its ads around the Web.

From reading a lot of articles, you’d think Facebook is stealing all that money directly from Google. That’s not mainly the case, given Google’s own considerable growth in display advertising, though Facebook’s success may well blunt that growth in the future. Instead, Facebook currently is eating Yahoo’s and AOL’s lunches, and those of many ad networks that, until Facebook ramped up its ad business, were the main alternative for advertisers looking to target sizable audiences.

What would make Facebook a huge Google-scale company is the theft of an entirely different meal: television advertising. After all, Facebook shows much more promise as a brand advertising medium than a direct-marketing medium like Google. It needs only to draw a small fraction of the $60 billion or so spent on television advertising, the biggest brand medium, to be enormously successful. But even then, it’s not mainly a Facebook vs. Google contest.

Facebook still needs to answer a big question, however. That’s whether its “social ads,” which incorporate people’s friends in ads in a 21st century version of word-of-mouth marketing, will have nearly the effectiveness in driving attention and ultimately sales as search ads, which appear in direct response to related queries, often involving products people are looking to buy. The potential is intriguing, and there are some nice examples of how well social advertising can work.

But despite Facebook’s considerable work in providing new kinds of metrics on marketing and advertising impact on its users, marketers and agencies aren’t yet universally convinced they need to spend a lot of money on Facebook ads. After all, they can get a lot of mileage out of their free Facebook Pages and Like buttons around the Web. (Not to mention, it remains to be seen whether these ultra-personal ads will cross what blogger Robert Scoble calls the Facebook freaky line.)

Bottom line: If Facebook is to be the Google of the this decade, its advertising has to at least approach the engagement of search ads, especially as Google itself moves to become more of a brand advertising platform with YouTube and continues its push into display ads. While Facebook is building what seems likely to become a great business on anew vision of advertising that could change many decades of tradition,2012 won’t be the year it closes that deal.

Image ads finally find a home on the Web: In 2012, marketers will start to find ways to do on the Web the kind of image and brand advertising that works so well on television. Not in the same way, at all, but brand advertising nonetheless.

Even as Facebook woos brand advertising dollars from television, the bigger near-term shift in brand spending will be from fading portalsYahoo, MSN, and AOL to emerging brand-safe venues such as Facebook, YouTube, Zynga, and perhaps networks of prime Web sites run by Glam Media, Federated Media Publishing, and others. One big reason for this: a concerted push by advertisers and at least some publishers such as Facebook, along with industrywide initiatives such as Making Measurement Make Sense, to use well-known metrics like television’sGross Rating Points with online ads so that marketers can measure impact more or less equally across media.

YouTube, with 800 million users (Facebook-sized!), could be especially interesting, and not just because of the brand appeal of video. With a redesigned site focused on brand-safe “channels,” including a content identification system that helps segment material safe for kids, teens, and adults, YouTube is making a big push for brand advertisers this year. And it’s not aiming simply to repurpose 30-second TV ads, says Lucas Watson, a former Procter & Gamble executive who joined YouTube last May as vice president of sales and marketing. He hopes YouTube will be able to offer personalized ads, measured not just by whether they appeared onscreen but whether they were actually viewed.

Glam Media, which is expected to go public later this year, offers an example of how brands such as Nike and Limited can find audiences they want on thousands of sites without necessarily buying placements on portals or a bunch of individual sites. Portals such as Yahoo and sites such as NYTimes.com have defined so-called the premium advertising space that commands higher ad rates than run-of-the-mill sites. But Glam may be showing the way to buy premium audiences across the Web. And it seems likely that these newer Web natives like Glam will find better ways than just traditional display ads to get the attention of those audiences.

Data-driven advertising accelerates: Data-driven advertising will continue to grow rapidly thanks to ad exchanges such as Google’s and Yahoo’s that offer real-time bidding for audiences across thousands of Web sites as an alternative to buying space on individual sites presumed to serve the target audience.

For a long time, there has been a divide–a deep chasm, actually–between ad scientists and myriad ad tech companies in and around Silicon Valley and the “creatives” at Madison Avenue agencies. The former believe only measurability, mainly by clicks, can produce meaningful results in online advertising, while the latter quite reasonably still believe in the power of compelling ads to change brand affinity and buying intentions, often months down the road.

What’s changing, and what will accelerate this year, is that both sides are starting to understand that they aren’t actually on opposite sides. They each need each other. So while there’s still plenty of argument over the impact of various kinds of ads, even the creative types realize they can help their clients by using the power of Internet ad technologies to conduct more targeted or more personalized pitches to large audiences in real time. And at least some of the ad tech folks are finding ways to quantify brand affinity and purchase intention in more precise ways.

But it’s uncertain how many of the hundreds or even thousands of little ad tech companies with arcane acronyms like DSP, DMP, and the like will benefit. Most of these companies offer features that advertisers would like to see rolled up into more cohesive ad offerings by established players like Google, Yahoo, or ad agencies. Many of them will get bought by the big guys, but many more will likely fade away, unable to articulate to marketers what the heck they actually do. That, however, probably will happen later, given the money still flowing into ad tech this year.

Web-native ad formats will remain MIA: The search will continue for the Holy Grail of online advertising, but it won’t be found in 2012: a Web-native ad format that is as effective for brand marketers as search ads are for direct marketers such as retailers.

While display ads can work, even for branding, they don’t work really well because they’re made to hijack attention in a medium where, unlike TV, people are actively doing other things and don’t want to be distracted. By all accounts, a relatively small number of people account for a large portion of the clicks on ads, and it’s common knowledge that these clickers are less desirable audiences (meaning they like to click much more than they like to buy).

Video ads hold more appeal, because they’re a format proven on television, even if the Web isn’t really much like television. They’ll do fine online, but they don’t exploit the Internet’s unique qualities.

So what’s next? Potentially, social ads like Facebook’s, which cut through the noise with references to what people’s friends like or have bought. But among many uncertainties about social ads are how well they will scale up to audiences of millions, how well they will work for image advertising, or whether they’re useful to any publisher except a giant social network–meaning, for now, only Facebook. Or maybe Twitter’s ad experiments will blossom.

What else? Who knows? I haven’t yet heard the answer from the marketers and agencies who do all the ad spending. The nagging worry of Web publishers–at least it should be a worry–is that whatever new form of advertising or marketing that emerges is so efficient at gathering demand that it doesn’t cost as much and thus doesn’t produce the kind of revenues traditional ads do.

In any case, given how slowly marketers and agencies have gotten with the digital program, it seems unlikely whatever new ad format does appear will take off this year.

Twitter (almost) becomes a real business: Twitter has become the 21st century news service, reaching 100 million active users a month, and that nearly guarantees it will generate a significant ad business.

But to date,Twitter has done little more than experiment with a few advertising formats, such as Promoted Tweets. While some of the results are promising, 2012 will remain a year of development, especially as brands take time to try out its redesign. Twitter’s automated ad system, which is what would prove the company can serve ads at massive scale, is still in beta test mode.

What remains to be seen is what kind of advertising entity Twitter will become. Author and Searchblog writer and Federated Media Publishing Chairman John Battelle is betting it becomes the free radical of the Web, the one player like Google used to be that creates value for the entire ecosystem and thus is the one player every other ad player must deal with. He’s probably right, but I don’t yet grok what business form that identity will take.

Mobile ads finally get moving: Each of the last several years was supposed to be the Year of Mobile Ads. So far, that hasn’t happened. But it may well finally come true in 2012. That’s because smartphones have gone mainstream. In the U.S., 65% of mobile subscribers have them, while 35% have old-style feature phones that can’t easily surf the Web.

As a result, IDC predicts that mobile ad revenues will nearly double, to $4.1 billion, this year–finally enough to be noticeable. The big winner here may be Google, since IDC expects that marketers will use search ads the most on mobile devices. But even if Apple doesn’t manage to turn around its troubled iAd mobile ad program, its voice-driven assistant Siriholds the potential to change the game in mobile search unless Google scrambles to improve its own voice search.

Amazon.com becomes a major online advertising player: Amazon’s ad business will start to become significant this year, catching people by surprise.

As Amazon itself has noted, more and more display ads are showing up on the site, including individual product pages. Macquarie Equitiesrecently predicted that Amazon will start to build up its display ad business not only on its own site but on others as well. The potential is intriguing, since in addition to purchasing data for its millions of customers, Amazon uniquely among advertising venues also offers a direct and easy path to purchase.

Then there’s the new Kindle Fire and ad-supported Kindles. According to one report, the Kindle Fire is already is sparking a surge in mobile advertising.

I don’t yet know whether Amazon plans to make advertising a third horse to ride along with its retail and cloud computing businesses. But I’m betting we’ll find out this year.

App overload sets in: Apps will continue to be the rage, but this year will mark the beginning of the end.

OK, I’m going out on a rickety limb here, since my prediction last year that apps would start losing ground to an HTML5-powered Web was dead wrong. Not least, that’s because Apple’s App Store (and Google’s Android Market to some degree) give software and app developers a way to make money. And money has a way of making even an annoying situation continue.

One problem is that apps need to be continually updated. If you have several dozen on your iPhone or Android device (or several hundred!), you’re going to be updating all the time. Even if that happens in the background, the process can gum up the works.

There’s also a philosophical divide that’s widening. Apps are silos, as Dave Winer recently pointed out, and that’s antithetical to the openness of the Web:

It might feel very large on the inside, but nothing goes in or out that isn’t well-controlled by the people who created the app. That sucks! … The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point.

It still seems to me that HTML5 eventually will combine the interactivity of apps with the linking of the Web, thus making apps unnecessary from a technical point of view. I concede that there will continue to be advantages in discrete apps from an economic and even a technical point of view (such as this example), so I’m not going binary with this prediction. But I think the problems of apps will start to dim their appeal as a sure route to riches for startups and media companies alike.

Tabzines debut: As tablets such as Apple’s iPad and Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire become mainstream devices, as they surely will in 2012, it seems inevitable that native forms of content will emerge for them.

I may be missing one that already exists, though I don’t think any have broken out into the mainstream, or even the nerdstream. (I’m not counting curators like Flipboard, but they suggest ways to do tabzines well.) UPDATE: Well, I did miss Nomad Editions, a new collection of iPad-only magazines. (Aside to Nomad and Flipboard: Not everybody can afford an iPad. How about Android tablet editions?)

In any case, I can’t imagine that a device tailor-made for consuming media of all kinds won’t inspire some smart people to create what the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s CEO and wordsmith Randall Rothenbergcalls a tabzine:

Following the lead of Punch founder David Bennahum and Nomad Editions impresario Mark Edmiston, East Coast content entrepreneurs launch dozens of high-profile, original “tabzines,” pushing the borders of content creativity the way print aficionados Clay Felker and Harold Hayes did with magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. … The buzz around these “tabz” – and the demonstrable success of a few among readers and advertisers – divides the ad agency marketplace. Clients, once smitten with the promise of cheap scale offered by the media agencies and the acronym soup of SSPs, DSPs, RTB, ATDs, and DMPs, realize anew that nothing – not targeting, not data, not algorithms – is more valuable than a group of human beings totally engaged in an experience.

Well, it sure sounds good to this longtime magazine writer, anyway.

UPDATE 2: Well, ahem, I forgot about Fox’s The Daily, launched early last year. But it seems that many readers forgot about it too.

This revolution will be televised: Don’t call it cord-cutting, but television is ripe for disruption this year.

For one, Apple will likely launch a TV–perhapsSteve Jobs’ last legacy to the company he founded and restored into one of the world’s greatest. I know that’s almost a gimme, given all the coverage of Apple’s evident plans. But I think the company will move relatively slowly, because the TV set business isn’t exactly a very profitable one, and Apple’s entrance won’t automatically make it profitable even if some consumers go for the Apple premium. If Apple can bring some sense of organization to the clash of Web and television, or even persuade cable companies to offer a la carte channels, as some speculate, though, that will be a revolution worth buying into.

At the same time, Google’s efforts to reinvent TV will finally start to work. Yes, Google TV’s first effort was something of a bust, but rest assured that Google isn’t giving up on what is still, after all, the largest advertising venue by far. And it’s one ripe for Web-style reinvention as Internet Protocol brings trackability and measurability to the living-room screen. Think about the pieces Google is putting together: YouTube, Motorola, Google TV. Add them up, and yes, cable TV does indeed have something to worry about.

Update: Well, maybe you need to call it cord-cutting after all.

The Web startup bubble will start to deflate: Between app overload, a lot of features masquerading as products, a lot more features nobody really wants, and VCsand angels and superangels who no longer can keep track of all their little investments, many Web startups will start to find the going tougher this year.

Many will be acquired, or at least acqhired, so this won’t be a total loss. Nor will regular investors notice much because the companies never went public. So 2012 won’t see carnage of the sort we saw in the dot-com crash a decade or so ago.

But if only because talent, funding and advertising dollars aren’t unlimited, this could be the year when starting a Web company or launching an app no longer is a relatively sure route to success.

* There will be at least one monster initial public offering in tech. Take your pick (in more or less descending order of likelihood): Skype, Groupon, Zynga, Demand Media, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (only if it has to). But despite many stories that will call this event a bellwether,  the IPO won’t bring back anything like the bubble days of the late 1990s (and thank goodness for that) because there are still only a few marquee names that can net multibillion-dollar valuations.

Bingo! Four of those companies went public (and one, Skype, got bought by Microsoft), but it remains clear that the IPO window opened only a crack so far.

* App fever will cool. Good apps that encapsulate a useful task or bit of entertainment–Angry Birds, AroundMe, Google Voice–will continue to do well. But those apps that do little more than apply a pretty layer atop Web content won’t get much traction–and moneymaking opportunities are uncertain in any case. The bigger issue: Once HTML5 becomes the widespread standard for creating Web services, enabling much more interactive Web services right from the browser, I wonder whether the need for separate apps will gradually fade.

Wrong! I still wonder, even more this year, about the appeal of apps, which increasingly look like a return to the bad old days of constant upgrades. But the day of reckoning, if it ever comes, certainly didn’t happen in 2011.

* Google will get closer to offering a social networking service–or at least incorporating social features into other services–but they won’t slow down Facebook. Lots of people think Google will bellyflop again, after failures with Orkut,Buzz, and Wave, but I don’t buy the argument that the company’s algorithmic DNA can’t produce useful social services. (After all, the PageRank algorithm underlying its search is inherently social.) At the same time, Facebook long since left the launchpad, and the best Google can do is to divine the next step beyond overt social sharing.

Bingo! Despite constant criticisms that it isn’t really taking off beyond the digerati, as well as nits about how it’s handling various features, Google+ is a very promising social beachhead for Google.

* It may be the fastest-growing company ever, but Groupon’s growth will slow. Of course it will! Otherwise it would be larger than Google by, like, July. The bigger question is whether eager investors will understand that as fast as the company is growing, and no matter how well it’s pursuing a local-business opportunity that many have failed to corral, it’s no Google or Facebook when it comes to net profit margins. Or at least I can’t imagine how it can be, if Groupon has to hire thousands of sales people and copywriters. But give it credit for cracking open at least a piece of the local-business market–and unleashing a flurry of competition, from a gazillion daily-deal startups to Google.

Bingo! In fact, Groupon faced a number of challenges, not just growth, and its stock price remains below its first-day closing price thanks to concerns about rising competition, business model, and management’s ability to shepherd a public company.

* Cable television cord-cutting (or at least cord-shaving) will accelerate thanks to continuing high unemployment, the growing amount of content on Netflix and other alternative services, and the likelihood that Internet-TV devices will keep improving. (For all its mixed reviews, Google TV will start to get more interesting as prices drop and TV apps arrive.) But the falloff in pay TV subscriptions will continue to be muted by the power that top cable networks wield, especially in sports and recent hit shows. And let’s face it, more than 100 million people currently paying for cable and satellite services know what they want.

Half-right. TV ownership declined for the first time as some people realized they can cobble together alternatives to $100-plus cable subscriptions. But as I also said, most people still more or less like their cable service, so change will be slow.

* YouTube will finally become a business. Between content deals, a spate of new ad formats, and the realization that online video ads are really the most effective brand advertising, Google’s video site will start bringing in the revenues that its massive audience always promised. This will be a big boost for Google’s display ads that CEO Eric Schmidt has been promising would be the search giant’s next billion-dollar-plus business.

Still to be determined. With a $100 million investment in original content, a big redesign, and an accompanying push for advertising, this may already be a reality, but we don’t know yet. So I was probably a bit early on this one.

* A Verizon iPhone will push smartphones into the truly mass market, because thanks to Verizon’s network, the damn things will finally work as phones as well as computers. But Verizon’s gain won’t necessarily come at the expense of Android phones, which are getting better all the time, and maybe not even AT&T; there’s plenty of growth to be had from feature-phone users making the switch to smartphones.

Jury’s still out. Depending on whom you read, smartphone sales may or may not be outpacing feature phone sales. And certainly Verizon’s iPhone was a big hit. But I think it’s going to be a bit longer before smartphones truly reach the global masses.

* Facebook will make steady progress on more targeted ads, finally providing some clarity after years of promises on how it’s going to fulfill the expectations implicit in its breathtaking valuation. In the past six months, I’ve already been getting noticeably more relevant ads on Facebook. But like every other company employing such targeting, it will keep running into privacy worries that could slow the rollout. And I’m still skeptical that people’s “likes“–or their friends’ likes–will be as accurate an indication of what they might buy as what they type into a search box.

Bingo! While we won’t know Facebook’s ad revenues for sure until it files for its IPO this coming year, and it remains uncertain that its social ads will steal any thunder from Google’s search ads, the company’s doubling of revenues this year, to more than $4 billion, means it’s doing something right.

* Game mechanics will spread further into realms such as e-commerce and health care. But these incentives and rewards that get people to play otherwise boring games such as FarmVille won’t be the panacea for Internet startups that some investors hope.

Bingo! While Zynga’s IPO was something of a bust, gamification spread to many new realms.

* Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will struggle to reach the masses. To date, they simply haven’t offered people a compelling reason–beyond those game mechanics, and rather weak ones at that–to bother checking in wherever they go. Coupons and special offers related to your location or the particular place you’re visiting will be crucial to making this activity worthwhile, but it obviously takes awhile to build a critical mass, because I hardly see any so far, and none very interesting.

Bingo! No knock on Foursquare, whose user base keeps growing pretty well, but Gowalla got sold and I ask you, how many of your friends use check-in services regularly?

* Q&A services such as Quora and Facebook Questions will start to get traction beyond the digerati. Quora, in particular, has an amazingly high signal-to-noise ratio at least for now, providing a glimpse of how the Internet will provide ways to tap people’s brains, not just the information they’ve decided to put on a Website. At the same time, these services could produce a venue for very targeted advertising.

Wrong! Quora may be doing OK for all I know, but Facebook Questions went nowhere. At this point, it remains uncertain whether these services will be must-do’s for most people, let alone develop into real businesses. Then again, Siri on the iPhone could change the game.

All in all, not too bad. Now we’ll see how I do for 2012.

Lots of people who were closer to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs than I have written moving memorials to a man who, in an industry and a region where people love to say they want to change the world, actually did it. The Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad–and Pixar!–none of these would have happened, certainly not in the same culture-jolting way, were it not for Jobs’ imagination and determination.

Because I was busy enough watching Intel create the electronics revolution, chronicling Scott McNealy and Sun kicking Hewlett-Packard’s butt for awhile, and witnessing Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen birth the commercial Internet, I can’t share tales of watching the genesis of the particular revolutions Jobs sparked from a front-row seat. All I’ve got are a few small, even inconsequential tales of Steve Jobs from my brushes with him over the years. But I wanted to share them anyway in the hope that they add a little more color to the life of a man who brought so much to ours.

I met Jobs face-to-face for the first time just before he was to introduce, if I’m not mistaken, the NeXTcube computer in 1990. BusinessWeek writer Kathy Rebello and I visited Jobs to see the machine at NeXT’s offices in Redwood City, Calif. He was his usual charming self–and make no mistake, despite his well-deserved (and self-described) reputation as an asshole, he was very charming. And his enthusiasm was infectious even though I had doubts about whether he could widen NeXT’s wedge between Apple and Sun into a sustainable business.

I remember two things distinctly. One was his focus on the shape and design of the jet-black machine, which I recall him touching fondly. That love of good industrial design is something he clearly never lost.

The other thing I remember is that he nervously fingered the wedding ring on his finger. When I jokingly asked him if it perhaps it wasn’t fitting so well, he launched into a story about his grandfather, who was a machinist (if I remember correctly–though seeing that his adopted father Paul was a machinist, I wonder if I heard wrong). Anyway, he said his grandfather was operating a machine with his wedding ring on, and it got caught in the machinery, removing his finger along with it. So every time he felt the ring on his finger, it gave him a twinge.

Now, this was Jobs before his canonization as the savior of Apple, so perhaps it’s just an example of a CEO trying to make nice with reporters with a personal tale. Still, the story stuck with me precisely because it was such a human, uncorporate story to bother telling.

I also saw Jobs just a couple of times doing his famous product introductions. One was the introduction of the first NeXT machine at a huge gala event in San Francisco in October 1988, if I recall correctly, because BusinessWeek writer Katie Hafner needed help reporting on a NeXT story she was working on and I was the new guy getting sent to whatever needed doing. (She thought she was getting an exclusive, though Jobs apparently promised an “exclusive” to two other publications–vintage Steve Jobs.)

In demonstrating a built-in dictionary that could call up definitions with amazing speed, he said, “Hmm, what shall we look up? How about ‘mercurial’?” That was the most common descriptor of Jobs at the time, and his joke brought down the house. Like I said, he could be the most charming guy in the room when he wanted to conjur up his famous reality distortion field.

The next time I saw Jobs onstage was just three years ago in San Francisco at his introduction of the iPhone 3G at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, helping out my BusinessWeek colleagues and Apple aces Peter Burrows and Arik Hesseldahl. I hadn’t seen Jobs in person in many years, onstage or anywhere else. Of course I knew about his health issues, but as I liveblogged the event, it still struck me how frail he seemed:

Maybe it has been far too long since I’ve seen Jobs speak in person. But he seems a little laid-back, even tired?

As it turned out, this appearance kicked off another round of speculation on his health. Even without the benefit of hindsight today, it felt to me that, at the least, Jobs’ ability to carry Apple entirely on his shoulders was fading.

Update: Oh, how could I forget that photo shoot? For a special issue on Silicon Valley in 1997, BusinessWeek had somehow gathered many of the leading lights of the Valley at that time. I later wondered how on Earth we made that happen, but there’s Jobs on the left, dressed characteristically with more style than the rest put together.

I don’t remember much about Jobs’ behavior during the shoot beyond his huddling with his friend and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at one point. And maybe that was the point: While there was no doubt he had to be in that photo, he wasn’t yet Steve Jobs, the icon, he was the guy who had just returned to Apple after it bought NeXT and faced a huge uphill battle to save it. Still, he was Steve Jobs; I remember his letting the magazine know that he was annoyed about the photo because his white shirt stuck out from under his vest.

One last story: My wife and I used to frequent a small restaurant in downtown Palo Alto called Caffe Verona. One evening around 1999, more or less, we were getting coffee, and suddenly I noticed that ahead of me was Ellison. That was interesting enough, but then I saw him take his drink out to the small patio entrance–where sat Steve Jobs and his wife.

Being a reporter, and because I think neither recognized me in the dark, I took a seat outside a few feet away, hoping to overhear any juicy details about coming products, Silicon Valley gossip–whatever. Long after my wife went back inside to get warm, I kept nursing my cappuccino and pretending to read magazines. So what did I overhear?

A half-hour of talk about the details of macrobiotic diets.

It was a mildly funny story to tell for years afterward. After Jobs’ health issues, it became less funny. But I always thought it was significant for another reason anyway. Here was one (actually, two) of technology’s leading lights, and they somehow found time to pal around talking about everything but their businesses.

Ultimately, what I remember about Steve Jobs was not the showman, the icon, the visionary. I remember a real human being who just happened to change the world.

It’s uncertain what Google will talk about, but events like this often are a forum for introducing new features. The last time Google did a similar event, the company introduced Google Instant, which shows search results as you type–a very significant change in its iconic search engine. Given how much competition Google’s facing not only in search but from social services from Facebook to Quora, it seems likely the search giant will have some notable new features or services to talk about. I’ll be liveblogging the highlights (as will many others). You can also watch it here. And you can submit questions to insidesearch 2011@google.com.

UPDATE: Google announces three key new features:

1) Voice search on desktops and notebooks, not just mobile.

2) Search by image, not just words.

3) Instant Pages, which eliminates load times when clicking on pages in top search results.

Bottom line for us: Easier and faster search no matter where you are.

Bottom line for Google and its competitors: It has no intention of getting one-upped on mobile devices.

PR honcho Gabriel Stricker introduces the event, and Singhal comes onstage to promise “numerous exciting things” they’ll talk about. A lot will be about getting rid of barriers between you and the information you want: Knowledge emerges from you having facts and information. With search, we strive to make sure there are no derailments in your train of thought. Search is all about removing these barriers between you and the knowledge you seek.

One of the biggest barriers: You’re not in front of a computer all the time. But with mobile devices, that’s not such a problem anymore. He shows Google search traffic on desktop search over the week. It drops toward end of week, then starts to rise on Saturday and Sunday. For mobile, though, search stays steady through the week until Friday evening, when it rises before a slight decline into Sunday.

By time of day, search traffic is dead at 5 a.m., then rises very quickly, dips around noon, and at evening, traffic slows down significantly around 9 p.m. That’s for desktop again; for mobile, there’s also a fast rise in the morning, a notable uptick around lunchtime (texting), with gradual rises through 11 p.m., after which traffic drops fast. Your quest for knowledge does not slow down, he says, when you have a mobile computer at hand all the time. We’ve seen 5X growth in mobile search traffic (didn’t catch over what period).

At Google, our job is to get a hole-in-one every time. That’s harder on mobile–screens are smaller, so it’s even more critical you get the first result right. Google’s approach to desktop search laid the foundation for mobile search success, Singhal says. Keys are relevance (Google’s algorithms), simplicity of Google’s interface, and speed of results–all especially key for mobile.

Scott Huffman, engineering director for mobile, comes on to talk about how mobile search is breaking down barriers to the quest for knowledge. (Google seems to be trying to elevate itself above the competition by emphasizing how it wants its search to provide not just immediate answers, but knowledge. We’ll see if this is more than semantics.)

In mobile, we’re constantly thinking about how to make entering the query easier, then selecting a result to get an answer. Googler Steve will be demonstrating some stuff, so here’s the meat of the event. A shot of the mobile phone search shows several icons, like restaurants, bars, and coffee, at the bottom of Google’s iconically spare search query page. Click on Restaurants, and you get joints close to you, with address, phone, reviews, etc.

Huffman also demos Google’s Instant Search, launched on mobile in March.

He searches “Hilton Hotel Moscow,” where he will be visiting. He types in “HI” and Hilton hotels shows up. Then he types “mos” and the Hilton in Moscow shows up in the results. Very fast, very few clicks. There’s a spyglass icon, introduced a couple months ago, that brings up a visual search mode, showing instant previews of pages.

Now he pulls out a tablet and starts searching for St. Basil’s Cathedral. There’s a more open, easier-to-click layout that is more appropriate for a tablet. And there are a lot of images if you search on images, because it’s easy to scroll to see a bunch of photos.

Another new feature: Google announces Google Goggles with translation capability. So you can take a photo of a sign and get a translation of it on your mobile device.

Mike Cohen, Google’s manager of speech technology, starts talking about searching by voice. In the past year, mobile speech inputs have grown by 6X. Google gets two years of nonstop speech into its system every day. This is just the beginning now. What more is needed for a successful speech interface? One is accuracy–as close to perfect as we can possibly make it. The other is ubiquity, meaning it needs to be available to every device, platform, language, etc. Only then does it become a basic habit.

Progress toward these basic capabilities: First for accuracy: The higher the accuracy, the more repeat usage Google gets. We feed our speech recognition system massive amounts of data, so it learns–pronunciations, meanings, etc. Just for U.S. English, just to train phrases, we feed the system 230 billion words’ worth of data. That takes many CPU-decades of computing time.

Now for ubiquity: A little over a year ago, Google released voice input, so whenever the keypad on Android pops up onscreen, a microphone activates so you can speak if you want. Developers may not even realize their application thus is speech-enabled. Today, voice recognition is available in 23 languages.

Johanna Wright, director of product management for search, comes on to talk about what’s next. She tells a story from her own family, all of whom are trying to learn Spanish. Her husband asked what “squirrel” is in Spanish. She told him to take out his phone and say, “Translate squirrel into Spanish,” and the result, “ardilla,” was what she said it was. So… drum roll… Google today is announcing voice search on the desktop. So the demo guy utters several searches, like “Worcester, Mass.,” and up come the relevant results. So does “Wooster College,” pronounced of course the same way but spelled differently.

Sometimes, though, says Wright, you don’t have the words to describe what you’re looking for. That’s where Google Goggles comes in. So Google is also announcing… drum roll again… search by image. Googler Peter demonstrates. He drops an image into the search box and… results show up that actually show that place in other images. Santorini volcano, for instance. He also drops in an image of a logo, and it shows the organization it’s for (in this case, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority).

This will roll out globally in coming days at images.google.com. You can copy and paste an image URL, upload images from your desktop, and drag and drop images into the search box, and there will be Chrome and Firefox extensions for it.

Singhal is back onstage to talk about what’s next for Google Instant. It’s now available in 32 languages. And it will be available in coming weeks for Google image search.

Now he’s talking about the importance of speed. The Web is still slower than changing TV channels or flipping through pages of a magazine. Users on average take 9 seconds to enter a query, and 15 seconds to select a result, and five seconds to load a page. In between, network and serving time are almost negligible. Autocomplete speeds up entering a query, and Google Instant speeds up result selection.

It’s that page loading time that the third announcement of the day addresses; final drum roll for… Instant Pages. Alex Komoroske, product manager for Chrome, demo’s a comparison of a regular page and one with Instant Pages. Nothing’s precached. Click page with Instant Pages, and it loads instantly vs. (in this case, going to the Washington Post) 3.5 seconds.

Another example: Smithsonian Folklife Festival–again the site comes up instantly vs. a couple seconds on the regular page. Also the Spy Museum–zero seconds vs. almost 4 seconds.

So, Singhal says, the five seconds on average that it takes for a page to come up is now effectively gone. Google does this with Chrome’s pre-rendering technology. (So does this mean it works only on Chrome browsers? Would appear so for now.) This week it will be available in Chrome beta (and right now in the developer version if you dare).

Now to the Q&A:

Q: When will Instant Pages come to Firefox? Singhal: The code is out there, so won’t be long.

Q: Which ad results will be preloaded? Komoroske: Ads are not preloaded yet. Wright: Can imagine that will come soon.

Q: Pre-rendering has been around a long time, so what’s different here? Komoroske: Firefox does pre-fetching, but this goes further to get images, even Javascript. Singhal: Google’s relevance algorithms help decided what to pre-render, saving bandwidth by not pre-rendering everything.

Q: On local mobile search, can you get recommendations from friends? Huffman: Yes, the recommendations through Hotpot will be there.

Q: Voice search on Chrome only? Wright: Yes, for now.

Missed a few rather arcane questions to my mind, but I see Alan Eustace is onstage as well. He’s senior vice president of knowledge, a relatively new title whose meaning was not apparent until now. Newish CEO Larry Page, he says, wants Google to provide not just answers but knowledge.

Q: To what extent is search speed an advantage for Google products such as Chrome and Android? Singhal: Not just for Android, like Google Instant works on all browsers. Likewise, Google is opening up Instant Pages code so any browser could use it. Wright: In search, we’re not focused on speed for a [particular] platform, we’re just focused on speed.

Q: Face recognition used in image search? Singhal: No. If you use a face to search on and there’s the same or similar photo somewhere on the Web, you’ll probably find those.

Q: What about social? Why nothing new on that? Wright: Social is very important for search, but today we wanted to focus on these features and speed.

Q: What’s the impact on search volume? Singhal: Every time we shave even 50 milliseconds from a search, we see people search more.

Q: What do you need to know about a person to serve Instant Pages results? Singhal: Instant Pages works for anyone, not just those logged into Google.

And that’s it except for demos onsite here.

Q: Is Netflix so successful that it’s driving up the cost of content beyond what even it can afford? Hastings: We’re in this virtuous cycle. We’re paying more for content, but we continue to grow with 35% gross margins. So it works as long as subscriber growth continues.

Q: Is it just handing over money to Hollywood that has improved its perception of Netflix? Hastings: Yes (in a word).

Q: What about the Starz deal (a key one for lots of movies and TV shows, which Netflix got cheap a couple years ago)? Hastings: We’ve grown a lot since then, so we’ll pay more for the content.

Q: $200 million as rumored? Hastings: Wouldn’t be shocking. (Though Starz wants a lot more than that.)

Q: Where do you go next to get fresher content? Hastings: We look at what we think our subscriber count will be at the end of the year, so what is our budget? Then we go out and do deals. Consumers want us to have all the new stuff. But the new stuff is very expensive. You can’t get it at $8 a month. We’re really much more of a complement for the new-release business.

Q: Are you interested in getting those new shows immediately? Hastings: No. Many in the network business feared that many households would cut the cord. There was a lot of nervousness. And last year there was a bit of cord-cutting. But it turned out that was because of fewer households/economy/etc. Then the last two quarters, there was growth in cable subscribers.

Q: Will that change again? Hastings: In the long term, we’re all competing for time-share of the consumer, and wallet-share. Not competing directly, but for a share of consumers’ time and money.

Q: Who’s your biggest competitor? Hastings: TV Everywhere, cable, telco, satellite. Most likely the competition will be bundling Internet content as part of the cable or satellite package–that’s TV Everywhere. It’s a formidable competitor. We can compete with personalization and social.

Q: Where does Netflix go from here–sell to Apple? Hastings: No (not considering selling to Apple). We’ve got a great long-term future. Around 23 million subscribers.

Q: You’re getting more competition, though. Hastings: We’re getting some competition–Amazon launched something that’s a competitor in Prime (Amazon Prime free videos)

Q: What about international expansion? Hastings: We went really bold–to Canada. (Laughs at that.) It gave us enough confidence to go with streaming around the world. YouTube is a global streaming video service. But with professional content, we have to go country by country, for example getting specific approvals for France, etc.

Q: How quickly will that international expansion go? Hastings: It depends on the response. If it goes really well, we’ll lose more money (for awhile). In Canada, we’ll get to profitability in one year after launch.

Q: Explain the original programming (that Netflix has started doing, such as the recent House of Cards deal). Are you a Hollywood mogul now? You don’t look like one. Hastings: Thanks. On original programming, mostly what we’d like to do is previous-season shows, like from HBO. We do better on catalog. That generates demand for current-season. What we have to see is, can we write a big enough check that HBO will give previous season to us rather than hold it for HBO Go. On House of Cards with Kevin Spacey, we’re not actually the creator. We agreed to license it sooner (than we otherwise would have).

Q: So you don’t imagine making movies and premiering them on Netflix? Hastings: I don’t think we have an expertise in doing that. We’re more a channel of distribution for the studios.

Q: How do you look at the distribution competition, like Hulu? Hastings: There’s Hulu, Amazon, YouTube. Also pay-per-view. But mostly we compete for time with pay TV.

Q: What about mobile? Hastings: We’re big on all platforms. Video is nice on mobile when you’re working out or commuting, but most of Internet video is consumed on television. You’ll have an app store on TV. The laptop is still the biggest single device.

Q: Would there be a Netflix television? Hastings: No. We want to be agnostic on the device.

Q: What’s been the difficulty of making real Internet TV happening? Hastings: There weren’t any killer apps. Now there’s YouTube, Netflix.

Q: How important are tablets? Hastings: Apple TV is bigger than the iPad for us. We’re TV-screen-centric. Tablets are nice but not a revolution.

Q: Where do you go from here? Hastings: WiFi TV is one big thing. Also higher-density fiber optics, meaning basically unlimited video.

Q: What do you make of the stories saying Netflix accounts for so much of Internet traffic? Hastings: It’s only the last mile. We cache our content all around the edge. So we’re nonexistent on the Internet per se.

Q: What do you make of David Einhorn’s attack on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer? Hastings: As a board member, I care a lot about Microsoft. The best way for me to serve Microsoft shareholders is not to answer that question.

Q: What worries you the most as CEO? Hastings: Getting long in the tooth. That’s why we spend so much time on culture and talent density (smaller number of very productive people).

Q: Are you surprised no one’s become a large competitor of yours? Hastings: Blockbuster was several years ago. But since then we’ve got economies of scale. Something will eventually replace the Internet–not sure if it’s in 100 years or 10 years. It’s hard to imagine what it will be.

Q (now from audience): Amazon seems to have more films on pay-per-view streaming; are they doing better than Netflix on that? Hasting: We have everything that’s on DVD and Blu-ray. But we can’t be at $7.99 a month at unlimited content. It’s not trying to be full reference on pay per view. Not planning to offer that kind of content for a small monthly fee. So it sounds like no big plans for Netflix pay-per-view.

Q: What show would you love to get? Hastings: The Wire. (But) HBO needs a big, big check.

Q: We (university person) are seeing fewer students bringing TVs to college, less real-time content. Do you see competition heating up for Netflix as Comcast etc. do more over the top programming? Hastings: Cord-cutting isn’t really happening. At some point everything will be on the Internet. But we’re one little pocket of content.

Q: Do you ever see offering news and sports? Hastings: No. Or, say, instructional videos. We’re never going to be able to defend and sustain that. That’s a different brand.

Q: Could you start another brand for that? Hastings: We could start another brand. We have no plans to do that.

Q: What is the prognosis for ad-driven online video? Hastings: That segment will be very large–Hulu, etc. But we have a niche strategy.

Q: How will Netflix contend with bandwidth caps? Hastings: Once you lay fiber optic, you can offer unlimited bandwidth for nearly free. So it will happen eventually. Fiber will get to every home over the next decade.

Q: How will Netflix use social for discovery of new content? Hastings: Eventually will integrate with Facebook. We have to figure out what people are comfortable with. We just have to take it a little bit slowly. (We cancelled our own social network in 2008 after three years.)

Q: What would you do to change the rules on content licensing? Hastings: It would appear the rules are good enough because we’ve been able to be successful. Piracy has been absolutely devastating in the music industry. So I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have fears about piracy in video. We’re outcompeting BitTorrent in the U.S. Will see if we can do the same in South Korea where piracy is rampant.

That’s it.

If I remember previous events, this one is a little different in that Carlson, not each individual panelist, is presenting the trends. Each of the panelists raises a paddle with green on one side, to show they agree that the predicted trend will happen, red on the other to show they don’t. Yeah, it’s kinda hokey, but it’s fun. The audience votes with handheld devices as well as little red and green cards.

Trend No. 1: Age Before Beauty: Baby boomers will dictate the technology products of the future. Jurvetson says they won’t dictate design, though he flashed the green because he thinks they have so much purchasing power that they potentially could drive new products. But he says nobody’s really building things for the market so the products that are addressing it aren’t selling; the Jitterbug cell phone for seniors isn’t doing that well, for instance. Saffo, who voted against this trend, says even geezers won’t want to buy uncool stuff like cell phones with big buttons. Universal design, useful to all, will prevail–like the Kindle, which is practical and (not least) provide larger fonts.

The audience is a sea of red on this one.

Trend No. 2: The doctor is in: There will be complete automation of diagnoses, combining AI, the Internet, and low-cost medical instruments. Several red paddles on this one. Saffo, who seems to be more positive on the potential says this will actually be a tool for doctors and paramedics. Jurvetson says this trend is “patently absurd,” with no chance of much automation happening in the next three years. Royan doesn’t think this will happen anytime soon either–not because of technology, which is already there, but because the system won’t change quickly.

Audience reaction: Mostly red.

Trend No. 3: Made for me: products unique to the needs of specific individuals, such as cell phones that have only the hardware you need for the particular features you want, or customized 3-D printing. Panelists are half-green, half-red. Chopra says this trend, while not strong yet, will help restore U.S. manufacturing. Saffo: The hitch here is the three-year time frame. 3-D printing will take decades to get to the mass public. Jurvetson agrees because it’s way too expensive to do one-off physical products unless you have to. But there is a great opportunity in personalization, just via software code. Royan thinks this trend, while not likely to happen near-term, is very important to U.S. manufacturing.

Audience: Mostly red, once again.

Trend No. 4: Pay me now: technology and business models based on attracting customers to share large amounts of information exclusively with service providers. Three greens, one sorta red, from Saffo: He says service providers will not pay us for our data, but instead will provide services that encourage us to share info with them. Royan agrees, but indicates he voted green because it will happen longer-term. So does Jurvetson.

Audience: sea of green.

Trend No. 5: Rosie, at last: Robots will become embedded in our environments, and taking advantage of the cloud, will understand and fulfill our needs. Didn’t catch the panel votes, but here’s what they had to say: Jurvetson says this will happen in the factory well before it happens in the home. Royan: Robots are here to stay. Saffo, who has said before that the next big thing will be robots, nonetheless says it’s a couple of years or more off.

Audience is decidedly mixed on this one, though the majority think it’s right on.

Trend No. 6: Social, really: the rise of true social networks, designed to maintain real, respectful relationships online. Perkins says this is obvious, so on to No. 7. Not really. Saffo sort of likes the trend, in the sense that he thinks it will be cool in the future not to be obviously on LinkedIn or Facebook (though many will lurk). Jurvetson says there’s a problem with “ambient intimacy”; 80% of divorce lawyers use Facebook to build their cases. Royan says the social network trend has been toward more real identity disclosure, as well as more fine-grained features for controlling that identity.

Audience: mostly green–in fact, higher than any other trend at around 80% positive.

Trend No. 7: In-your-face augmented reality: hyper-accurate artificial people and objects that fundamentally enhance people’s experience of the world. (Hello, Cisco; the maker of telepresence systems is a sponsor of the dinner.) Panel is half-green, half-red. Chopra says augmented reality has proven itself in key sectors like the military. Saffo says it’s happening to some extent is 3-D movies. Royan doesn’t buy it. You can’t replace in-person meetings. Jurvetson: Hyper-real immersive environments won’t happen in business in the next three years. But the idea of a technology overlay atop the real world is more compelling.

Audience: mix of green and red.

Trend No. 8: Engineering by biology: practical, engineered artifacts, devices, and computers based on biology rather than just on silicon. Panel: Couple of greens, a red, a waffler. Jurvetson: Some opportunities but not in the next few years. Real opportunity in biological means of reducing oil consumption. Royan: Voted this trend down but wishes it would happen. Saffo (the waffler, I think): The trend is clearly underway; Craig Venter engineered a completely artificial cell. Being in genomics will get you a date; being a software engineer won’t.

Audience: More green than red, while electronic voting shows an even split.

Trend No. 9: ‘Tis a gift to be simple: Cyber defense through widespread adoption of simple, low-feature for consumers and businesses. Panel goes half-green, half-red. Saffo votes green but sounds skeptical–Windows was supposed to make computing simple originally–but apps show that there’s an appeal to simpler software. Royan: I don’t want simple software, I want simple-to-use software. Jurvetson says going to simple software is actually leading to a lot of Internet attacks. The simplicity of the transfer pipes is a mistake. The complexity is in the user interface, the browser, where the mix of content and software code opens the way to malware. Chopra says the government is more interested in fault tolerance than attack prevention.

Audience goes mostly red–lowest yet on the electronic scale, in fact.

Trend No. 10: Reverse innovation: developing countries  will turn around the flow of innovation, as Silicon Valley begins to learn more from them about innovative applications than they need to learn from us about the underlying technology. Panel: three greens, one red. Chopra in particular disagrees with the second part about the U.S. influence elsewhere. Saffo says this trend has already happened–like China. A wild card is the youth bulge in Africa. Silicon Valley used to be the only place where significant innovation happened; no more, but we are listening to the outside world. Jurvetson says this is an opportunity for Silicon Valley to learn from those markets, like how mobile payment systems might work. They vote for president in Estonia by the cell phone. If you want to know the future of multiplayer games, look to South Korea.

Audience: Mostly green; electronic voting shows the same–second-highest positive vote.

Although I think I prefer it when the panelists present their own couple of trends each and then get cut to shreds by the others, there was a lot of food for thought here. And despite that last one about the potential threat to Silicon Valley, it’s clear from what these folks are thinking and talking about that there’s more than enough innovation still happening here.

Q: What’s Google like now with Larry Page as CEO? Mayer: Google’s always been focused on the user, and Larry even more so. The other thing that’s happened is we had projects that started small like Chrome and Android that are now large. There’s a lot of optimism. A lot of energy.

Q: Is it good for competition and the industry that there’s Facebook, Bing, and other significant competitors? Mayer: It causes everyone to work that much harder and get that much better.

Q: What are you doing now? Mayer: I’m VP of Maps and Local (guess her title has changed a bit?).

Q: Is Google scraping other sites’ content for its Place pages? Mayer: People expect results to be comprehensive. So we want to get people really good data when they search for local information. It’s really meant to be a directory. There’s not enough information there to make a decision… so you go to the reviews and other sites.

Q: Is Google going to show only its own reviews once it gets enough of them? Mayer: Today we aren’t getting a lot of [our own] long-form reviews. (So I guess not, for a while at least).

Q: What are Google brands that matter going forward? There’s so many, I’m confused. Mayer: We’re really trying to streamline that. Not as many separate brands like Hotpot, etc. There’s Maps and there’s Local. Maps is the geospatial location and it should be personalized. Places is the local side of it, the textual and descriptive side. Those are really the two big pillars in this space.

Q: How are things going on the mobile side? Mayer: Great. We just crossed the 200 million installs on Google Maps for Local. About 40% of our traffic for Maps is mobile. More on the weekends, could cross permanently in June.

Q: What’s your goal to be successful in the next year? Mayer: Get you places you want to go or didn’t know you want to go. Enhancing our data. On the very far reaches, I’m starting to look at contextual discovery: Can we figure out from your context just the right information you’re likely to want without searching for it. Like if you walk into a restaurant that your friend went to last week, maybe you could see what they ordered.

Q: What are you personally investing in besides Square and One Kings Lane? Mayer: Also Minted, Gene Security Network. I’ve been active as an angel for a little while. It’s fun. I love watching how companies go through the growth phase, and helping them get through that. I’m not on Angel List or anything like that.

And that’s it. Well, not much there, sorry to say. You’ll get more on what Mayer and Google are planning for the local market here.

Q: How do mobile payments affect daily deals and other local commerce? Tilenius: We call it the age of mobile-local.Consumers will be able to walk around and get deals. You’ll see us embedding offers throughout our mobile experience. Gersh: We could retarget consumers [with advertising] who were in a retail store. It could be Groupon having local pickup for offers.

Q: How can you make local advertising work, beyond Groupon? Rampell: Local businesses would rather get a check than a click, and they’re willing to pay for that. Tilenius: Groupon is a great model, and congratulations to them for creating it. But Groupon has tapped into one element of it. Ultimately it’s going to be about customer management.

Q: What’s compelling about Near-Field Communication (which allows consumers to wave a cell phone at a product to get more information or to pay for it), which Google is backing? Tilenius: The ease of use is compelling. You could see a product in Gap and if it’s not in your size, you could use NFC to order one in your size and have it shipped to you tomorrow.

Q: How soon will mobile payments catch on? Tilenius: It’s going to happen quickly. There’s already a ton of activity in this space (though a lot of it is overseas). In Singapore, everybody uses NFC for payments.

Q: How would NFC help local or e-commerce? Gersh: If you go to a local coffee shop and say I can promise you 1,000 new customers if you install this device, they’ll probably do it.

Q: What do you think of Square’s latest announcement? Rampell: Square is really competing with cash. If you want to make a $500 purchase at a flea market, this works better than cash. They can manage the fraud problem. Tilenius: Square isn’t trying to compete with Visa and Mastercard. They’re servicing really small merchants and displacing cash. It would work well to pair deals with that.