PayPal, Microsoft and Google’s visions of the future

Today seems to be a day about future trends.

For example, I stumbled across a great discussion about the future of the internet with Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

This is a 45 minute interview with Mr. Schmidt at a Gartner Symposium in the USA last year.

Key comments from the interview, identified by Read-Write Web, include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

• Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

• "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.

• "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."

• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

• "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"

• It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

This stumble was followed by an email from FSClub friend Milos Hoschek who sent me a link to this video of PayPal's vision for the future:

Fantastic.  Everywhere you go, you pay with PayPal.

What happened to Visa and MasterCard I wonder?

It reminds me much of a video made by AT&T in the 1990's:

Recognise the voice?  Here's a clue:

Anyways, strong American male cheesy voice-overs are the de facto standard for technology future focused videos, as evidenced by this one from Microsoft:

Something slightly wrong about that?