Connecting the dots
At a company conference in Mountain View on Monday, it was left to Google's "Master of modalities" and vice-president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, to announce the firm's latest innovations in mobile search, including the latest on comprehensive voice search in a variety of languages.
With a nod to the venue - the Computer History Museum - Gundotra noted that just three decades into the computing revolution, it was already clear three major trends were now beginning to converge; with Moores law, connectivity and the emergence of powerful clouds aligning like stars in a cloudy sky.
Noting that people had come to expect "better, faster, cheaper computing every year," Gundotra said folks were only just coming round to understanding the innovation and change computing could really bring mankind, comparing the phenomenon, somewhat unabashedly, to Gutenberg's printing press.
With connectivity acting as the gel to cement everything together, Gundotra said the mobile device, with its camera, accelerometer, GPS and other features - all connected to the cloud - would become the eyes and ears of the digital world - a somewhat creepy concept, but not one unusual to Google.
Google has, of course, been tinkering with voice search for a little while now - and even Microsoft has been trying to make a go of it since 2005 - but Gundotra reckoned his firm had finally achieved something "really good."
