• Yelp would bring Google a scalable platform to get information and reviews about every local business
• TechCrunch also speculates that we could use these QR codes to check in to Foursquare, Gowalla, et al. Local is social.
• Google Goggles goes the next step and lets you take a picture of a place — or object (or soon, person)
• Google’s reported phone is said to have a “weirdly large camera.” If that camera becomes a key to visual search, that makes sense, eh?
• google is trying to get better at recognizing speech to prepare for a voice-controlled (read: mobile) web world. That, say Chris Anderson and Tim O’Reilly, is why they give away GOOG411 for free: to learn our voices.
• Google Earth is coming to the cockpit of the new Audi, giving drivers rich geographic data about where they are and where they’re going.
• GoogleMaps on Android will now tell you what’s nearby.
• Let’s not forget that Google will make money on local — Eric Schmidt said on CNBC a year and a half ago that Google will eventually make more on mobile than the web. This is why Google bought mobile ad leader AdMob for $750 million.
• * Google DNS is supposed to speed up the web for you (speed is a big Google cause these days) but it also gives Google an invaluable source of data about web usage
• I see a day when search (like news) is no longer one size fits all. Search will be customized, personalized, and targeted to us and our contexts: who we are and where and when we are asking for something. This, I think, could mean the slow death of the dark art of SEO.
• Google launches social search. This creates more context and gives Google another clue to intent.
• Google added Twitter to its search results. That’s pretty much a BFD. But it shows they’re trying to grapple with the live web. And that’s why there are never-ending rumors about Google buying Twitter.
• Wave is an important shift in the metaphor for content creation, making it collaborative (read: social) and live.
• Add in the social bits above: Yelp is a community tool; QR codes and visual search will let us talk about places and things and find each other and meet; Foursquare and Gowalla make local social and Google could help them.