Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google and a Kansas University and LHS graduate, greets long-time friend Mark Henderson, Lawrence, left, after McClendon gave a lecture at KU’s Nichols Hall. McClendon was a co-creator of Google Earth.

Brian McClendon, Google vice president, predicted a movement toward Internet use on mobile phones Monday during a visit to Kansas University.

The KU and Lawrence High School graduate told his audience of mostly students and instructors about a movement toward storing data remotely, so that users can access it anywhere.

The trend, cloud computing, is evident in Web-based e-mail systems such as Gmail, and in other Google applications such Google Docs, which stores documents and spreadsheets in remote locations so they can be accessed in any location using the Web.

He said that there are nearly 3 billion cell phones in use today — nearly enough for 50 percent of the world’s population — and more than 500 million 3G data subscribers who can access the Internet on their phones, a number that is projected to grow steadily.

“The future of the Internet is the mobile phone,” he said, saying that, soon, people in developing countries like China and India will have only ever accessed the Internet through phones.

McClendon — who graduated in 1982 from LHS and earned an electrical engineering degree in 1986 from KU — encouraged audience members at Nichols Hall to familiarize themselves with programming languages such as Java and to work on developing Web-based applications for phones.

He also said that cable television and Internet technologies would likely continue to move toward more on-demand access.

“Not everybody’s going to watch ‘Mad Men’ at the same time anymore,” McClendon said. “What are we going to talk about?”

McClendon, who was the co-creator of Google Earth, also answered a few questions on the project, which requires an immense collection of satellite images, aerial photos and maps of terrain from across the globe.

Some of the greatest challenges on the project that seeks to present photographic depictions of the entire world at high resolutions come from aggregating the data together, and making sure things like the colors of the maps match up, he said.

“We care about settings,” on the project, he said. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but it’s one of our most important things.”