from the Next-up:-Barnyard-Labs-(Woof!-Woof!) dept.
Google CEO Larry Page has announced the launch of Sidewalk Labs, an urban living focused company that is similar in approach to the healthcare and anti-aging Google spinoff Calico:
Page says the new company will be "developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation, and energy usage." Sidewalk Labs will be run by Dan Doctoroff, former CEO of Bloomberg LP and the "Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding" for New York City.
There's a website up and running at sidewalkinc.com, which calls for a rethink of how we design cities. "By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems. At the same time, innovations in technology can be used to design communities that are more efficient, responsive and resilient."
There's also a press release, that says Sidewalk Labs will work on "making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently" and that it will "develop new products, platforms and partnerships to make progress in these areas." The press release calls out "ubiquitous connectivity and sharing, the internet of things, dynamic resource management and flexible buildings and infrastructure" as technologies it thinks can help with city life.
Sidewalk Labs seems to very closely follow the Calico model, Google's healthcare and anti-aging company: 1) find a leader in an up-and-coming-field (Sidewalk has Doctoroff, Calico has Art Levinson), 2) use Google's vast resources to start a spin-off company with said leader as CEO, and 3) have them work on moonshots. Like Calico, Sidewalk Labs is a separate company from Google and isn't part of Google[x] or any other division—we'd imagine Google has a large ownership stake in the new company, though.
Original Submission
Related Stories
Sidewalk Labs is under pressure to explain its smart city dream
Sidewalk Labs, the part of Alphabet focused on smart cities, is behind schedule. The company had planned to publish its grand vision for Quayside, a 12-acre site on Toronto's industrial waterfront, in the fall of 2018. Last June, however, the first version of its crucial Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) was pushed back to early 2019. "It will be a comprehensive document, but still a work-in-progress," a press release clarified at the time. A complete MIDP would then be published in "spring 2019," the company said, following a public roundtable.
The draft version of the MIDP is yet to materialize. And for many, it's been an agonizing wait. Waterfront Toronto, a public steward created by the Canadian government, announced its search for an innovation and funding partner back in March 2017. Sidewalk Labs put its name forward with a beautiful "vision" document that suggested, among other head-turning ideas, buildings made from timber, a flexible thermal grid and subterranean tunnels for deliveries and garbage disposal. The company won the bid in October and has spent the past 18 months researching those ideas, consulting with experts and gathering public feedback.
[...] On Tuesday, a group of concerned citizens launched #BlockSidewalk, a campaign dedicated to informing the public "what the project is, and why it should be reset." Julie Beddoes, a waterfront resident and #BlockSidewalk supporter, told reporters at city hall, "In Toronto, [Sidewalk Labs] is aiming to take over the functions of government -- do we really need a coup d'état to get transit and nice paving stones?"
Previously: Google Launches "Sidewalk Labs" Spinoff Company
Toronto's Eastern Waterfront: Google's City of the Future?
Sidewalk Toronto Has Only One Beneficiary, and It Is not Toronto
Related: How Pervasive is Google in our Online Life?
Trying to do without Google to see how hard it can be is a way to understand just how much Google's tentacles are intertwined in everyday's life
As part of an experiment to live without the tech giants, I'm cutting Google from my life both by abandoning its products and by preventing myself, technologically, from interacting with the company in any way.
Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra built a virtual private network, or VPN, for me that prevents my phone, computers, and smart devices from communicating with the 8,699,648 IP addresses controlled by Google... Because I'm blocking Google with Dhruv's VPN, I have to find replacements for all the useful services Google provides and without which my life would largely cease to function:
- I migrate my browser bookmarks over to Firefox (made by Mozilla).
- I change the default search engine on Firefox and my iPhone from Google—a privilege for which Google reportedly pays Apple up to $13 billion per year—to privacy-respecting DuckDuckGo, a search engine that also makes money off ads but doesn't keep track of users' searches.
- I download Apple Maps and the Mapquest app to my phone. I hear Apple Maps is better than it used to be, and damn, Mapquest still lives! I don't think I've used that since the 90s/a.k.a. the pre-smartphone age, back when I had to print directions for use in my car.
- I switch to Apple's calendar app.
- I create new email addresses on Protonmail and Riseup.net (for work and personal email, respectively) and direct people to them via autoreplies in Gmail. Lifehack: The easiest way to get to inbox zero is to start a brand new inbox.
...
This experiment is not just about boycotting Google products. I'm also preventing my devices from interacting with Google in invisible or background ways, and that makes for some big challenges.
---- continue after the break ---
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday June 13 2015, @01:13PM
So Google is going to lobby city and county governments to zone more land as residential than commercial?
Back in the 1980s, I read in the paper that the reason traffic was so bad in Silicon Valley, and that housing was so expensive as well as scarce, was that all the cities there zoned too much land as commercial. This because commercial land generates more property tax than does residential.
I know very well that our enlightened government officials must find some way to pay for all the wonderful services they bestow upon us. I just wish they would take a longer and more-systemic outlook. granted that they get more tax from businesses; how much does it cost us to build all the highways, to pay for the emergency room care of indigent car wreck victims, as well as engineers such as myself who leave the state entirely because we regard silicon valley as unlivable?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by forkazoo on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:24PM
Well, land use will certainly play a role in it. I imagine mixed use high density urban will be as important as just having more residential land. If all your residential land is capped at two stories and is miles away from jobs and services, then the city will still be a clusterfuck. (See most of Los Angeles, which has lots more residential square miles than San Francisco, but is still very much a clusterfuck.) By moving to a high density mixed use model, you can have tall buildings with lots of retail and office space on the same block. That reduces transportation pressure,w hich means you need to invest less land and money on roads and such.
Given this is "moonshot" thinking, I'd imagine they want to look at wacky things like no above ground roads so the whole surface is green space, and macroarchitecture where buildings connect at high floors so you can do elevated transit and tend your business while staying entirely above the 20th floor if all your destinations are high up, which reduces elevator trips in high density urban structures, which means more useful space per $ and per square meter of land. Intermixing urban agriculture can reduce the need to import food, which can moderate heavy truck traffic. This is Google. "zoning" won't be the limit of what they wind up trying to push.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday June 14 2015, @12:23AM
It's uncommon that I can pull that off but that's among the reasons I chose Portland.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @01:21PM
We might also be fighting WW3 or WW4 given the current state of international affairs.