14 DAY TRIAL // The SXSW conference is now underway and companies, large and small, took the opportunity to showcase their products. Google's Marissa Mayer was there and talked about her new area of interest at the company, location, local and everything related to them. She had some interesting numbers to share but also laid out Google's strategy, or rather, vision in this space.
It's nothing we haven't heard before, CEO Eric Schmidt has been talking about very much the same things on every occasion he gets, but it does underline, once again, how important the mobile space is for the company.
To showcase a trend, Mayer revealed that Google Maps for mobile is surging in usage. At this point, 40 percent of usage happens on mobile devices and the number is growing.
On several occasions, on New Years and Christmas, mobile usage surpassed desktop usage, the first time this has happened for any Google product. It's hardly surprising though, Maps is probably the Google product that can prove the most useful on mobile devices.
What's more, since Google keeps adding location-based services to mobile Maps, users keep coming back. There are 150 million mobile Maps users now, up from just 100 million in August last year.
Another area where Google is focusing is with navigation. Google Maps Navigation is growing in popularity and more users are now relying on it for turn-by-turn directions rather than on traditional GPS devices.
The recently introduced traffic feature, which adjusts the route based on conditions, is already saving drivers more than two years' time each day which would be otherwise spent stuck in traffic.
Mayer also touched on Hotpot, the local, social recommendations that Google launched a few months ago. It's been very focused on Hotpot and is adding new features all the time. It's also promoting it in more places. Already, there are three million recommendations in Hotpot.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg, Mayer believes. Users can access all sorts of relevant data now, but what if devices already knew what you want and surfaced the data without users having to look for it or even know they want it.
This is the direction in which Google is headed in and it's the same line of thought that soon to be former CEO Eric Schmidt has repeated plenty of times.