Someone needs to develop a public toilet that's self-cleaning but doesn't cost more than some houses. The problem is making it homeless and drug dealer proof. SF has had major problems with their self-cleaning toilets.[1] Portland succeeded, but theirs is armored to contain a velociraptor and provides limited privacy.[2]
Homeless proof - I'm really hoping the problems that Sidewalk Labs is working on don't include making sure homeless people don't have access to public bathrooms. I'm honestly not thinking of a lot of reasons for public bathrooms to exist aside from making sure people without houses have someplace they can use (whether that be as a bathroom, washing laundry, shaving, etc.)
Hasn't this already been invented? With the problem being that most westerners don't like the solution because it looks unfamiliar:
* You install a squat toilet
* It's cleaned by flooding the entire
toilet area with water, which once
turned off all washes down into the
toilet
* No toilet paper, you clean yourself
with water
I realize we're all programmers but why does this have to be a complex self-cleaning toilet rather than, say, hiring a few people to clean them? It's not like there aren't plenty of people looking for steady work and humans have the advantage of being really flexible when something breaks in a novel manner.
Because starting something like this is exciting, and there is no reason to keep it secret. I can't think of a good reason to not announce. It's not like they called a huge press conference or brought this out at a trade show, it's a quick blog post. Do you not tell your friends when you start some cool new project? People like talking about this stuff.
Also, more practically, ideas for this kind of venture can come from anywhere. Maybe someone reading this has a brilliant idea for improving city life, but doesn't have the money or entrepreneurial ability to make it happen. Maybe some startup has a great product in this area, and could really benefit from a partnership with a company with Google's resources. Maybe some city government wants to commission a project to track and optimize their energy usage, I don't know. Why would you intentionally work in isolation when there are potentially great ideas out there?
This is a huge undertaking where public support and co-operation is paramount. They cannot come out one day and tell people what they have done and what to do. They need to give a heads up.
Is it only me or does HN take all announcements cynically?
I wonder how much Google does this just to get positive PR to hire for their main businesses. It gives the impression that you'll be working on cool stuff like this when you join Google instead of the rest of the 99% that drives the ad hive (which is where you'll really end up).
I don't know where you are getting this from - do you have any personal experience to draw from?
It doesn't match my experience. In almost seven years at Google I've worked on amazingly interesting projects - from hardware to user-facing products.
I've never once, in my entire time, had any level of management tell me that I should be worrying about selling ads or monetizing my projects. The consistent message has been "build great products".
So the notion that 99% (or really any majority) of developers at Google "drive the ad hive" is completely untrue - at least in my experience.
It certainly didn't happen that way for me. I'm doing exactly the kind of work that I love to do. You're afforded quite a bit of mobility inside the company.
At what point is Google going to officially become a consulting company?
Right now, they seem to be playing arbitrage with engineering talent. They buy up engineers with large salaries and fancy perks. Those people, who now span almost every industry, are then used on projects like these. This has nothing to do with Google's core business or any branch of it at all.
It seems like Google is designing all sorts of products outside of its core competency (medicine, cars, now this?) with the hopes of either spinning it off, selling to the highest bidder, or...? I can't see shareholders liking Google trying to enter every market in the world.
I think Page and Brin can do lots of (relatively at Google scale) small-stakes things just because they want to, as long as the money keeps rolling in.
For example, the self-driving cars are a genuine passion of Page's as I understand it, and came about from his relationship with Thrun. They really do want to make the world a better place by preventing thousands of deaths and many more injuries a year, among other benefits.
I don't think that is hopelessly naive of me. These are youngish, bright billionaire geeks who have made a lot of people very good money. They can do things just because, at least while the gravy flows.
That doesn't mean that these projects are not good strategic business, just that they can be risky since the organization is prepared to tolerate a loss.
> I can't see shareholders liking Google trying to enter every market in the world.
Maybe the shareholders aren't investing in an advertising company and app store, but they're investing in the company that succeeds to a higher degree than it fails.
But maybe they like Google's brand power and unique company ethos?
How many other companies worth $350Bn+ with 50k+ employees have Google's operating style?
> Right now, they seem to be playing arbitrage with engineering talent.
I think the actual problem is that very few other companies know how to make appropriate use of engineers.
"Robert, you said this sprint that you would move the logo image 2 pixels to the left. Can you PLEASE come to the morning stand-up, listen to 26 people report their status, and then tell us if you have any roadblocks? kthx."
My impression is that the fraction of Google that works in these types of ventures is tiny. I don't mean to suggest they won't produce anything of value. These small ventures that Google launches are all about having a big impact with a (relatively) small investment. In terms of headcount, though?
I don't think shareholders of Google should be concerned about this; they should stick to being interested in ARPU, CPC trends, etc.
That depends how you define Google's core competencies. Some of their main core competencies(where they lead the world probably) are AI/machine-learning and high-speed software development. Those skills are now the core of every business("software is eating the world"), so Google has lots of options. Another core competency is long-time investment in high-risk projects - which basically nobody does.
Also one criteria of choosing projects for X - is projects in areas where there's little competition. Once you start from that point, maybe the analysis framework of "core competencies" is less useful.
I think you are buying into the marketing/PR hype. The majority of headcount actually works on core products like advertising & search. The headcount in fringe areas like things like X is a very small % of total engineers. This basically is a huge boost for recruiting because every engineer hopes to work on these moonshot teams.
I don't see how Google designing "outside of its core competency" is a problem, though. Lots of companies span large numbers of only tangentially-related verticals-- go take a look at Hitachi or Sony or Samsung, for example.
*Larry Page said: “By improving urban technology, it’s possible to significantly improve the lives of billions of people around the world. With Sidewalk, we want to supercharge existing efforts in areas such as housing, energy, transportation and government to solve real problems that city-dwellers face every day. Every time I talk with Dan I feel an amazing sense of opportunity because of his passion for all the ways technology can help transform cities to be more livable, flexible and vibrant. And when you combine that with his experience as an investor, in NYC government, and as CEO of the large information company Bloomberg LP, I can’t imagine a better person to lead these efforts.”
Let's get serious. This initiative is not about toilets, smart flushing and homeless.
I'm fine with it as long as I don't have to have anything always connected to internet, sync data in the cloud and be forced to agree/manage/monitor gazillions of privacy changes, terms and conditions where companies decide to update and change their data protection acts, the ways the share, store and manipulate my data.
Maybe we should firmly keep big technology companies, already in tune with the NSA friends, get closer to our families and private lives. The last thing I'd want is Google, Bloomberg, IBM, Facebook and Cisco circulating all my activities (toilet flushes including) for the sake of my children, future nephews and my neighbours to NSA, have my own cars or my own house lock me out because Palantir discovered about my passion for Moroccan tea or my kid flies a Chinese quadcopter in the backyard.
Without attacking Google, the consensus is that Google Launches {Project} is not anymore news than it is a long sigh and a jaded response of "Oh Google just launched another project, go Google. Now to work on my side project".
It's interesting that Google chooses to create new companies for problems orthogonal to its core purpose, instead of choosing to diversify itself as a company into multiple industries. Is this a common phenomenon or is it something that is new?
And I can't even scroll to the right! Is there something wrong with my chrome configuration (maybe a plugin not playing nice)? Or can someone else repro this on their mac?
So they targeting companies like Siemens now? They do not make public transportation systems, they do not make energy systems, they do not build houses.
From their homepage: "By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems."
Yes.
People move into a few big cities because companies companies like Google congregate there, ultimately creating problems such as skyrocketing rents, congestion, declining real living standards, homelessness.
Google holds an obvious solution in its hand. By altering their way of working they could support remote working, creating clusters of specialized work forces and communities online rather than in a narrow physical location.
Are you suggesting that an industry driving people into cities is new? It isn't. It goes all the way back to the industrial revolution, and the main alternative before us at present (suburban living) only dates back to the '50s.
And it's not a panacea: the car-oriented nature of suburban life is environmentally pretty terrible (not to mention that detached single-family dwellings are less efficient to climate control, and more expensive to provide services to for municipalities). And suburban life brings with it the long commute, the length of which is a better predictor of happiness (negatively, of course) than almost any other demographic factor, including income, marital status, house size, or any of the other things people think make their hour and change in a car every day worth it.
> People move into a few big cities because companies companies like Google congregate there
Actually in big cities like New York, Google's office doesn't make a dent - most Googlers can just take the subway. The Mountain View office is only 4 times bigger, but because Mountain View wants to be a suburb and not a city, it now enjoys gridlocked roads every day.
Living space and roads are severely limited resources, but in most cases the proximity to resources is more important. That's why people move into cities, not just because of jobs. Think hospitals, shopping, culture, friends, child care, inspiration, work, face-to-face interaction, play, love.
Unless you find a cost-efficient way to decentralize all of this, people will be attracted to each other.
I doubt I'm in the minority here when I say I wouldn't move to a 'specialized and remote' community inhabited by people who are all affiliated with the same company. I don't live to work, and I don't want to be surrounded solely by people who are affiliated with the company I work for.
While one of the reasons I live in Manhattan is because the job market is very good, I also enjoy it precisely because there is diversity. I can walk down the street or take the train and see hundreds of people working hundreds of different jobs in dozens of industries. That's why people are moving to cities - they're exciting. There's things to do and people to meet.
People comparing Apple and Google on everything forget that both companies are very different in their missions. It's not about right and wrong, it's just different.
Google is bassically just five products- search, ads, gmail, youtube and android. Anything else is just roundoff error, even though they may be very interesting.
This is visionary. We are becoming a predominantly urban species and there are incredible tech opportunities both from a business and from a social benefit perspective. Walkscore, Bikewise and Open311 are a few examples that come to mind, but that's just tip of the iceberg. After the internet-of-things, the internet-of-habitat is coming. It's brilliant that Google wants to help invent it.
Microsoft, IBM, GE, Siemans, and even companies like Cisco, Rockwell and others have all been making moves here.
Nice to see Google finally joining the rest of the tech industry ;-) I have to assume this was prompted by the sort of standards work Nest were doing, and the sort of impact that Google Maps is having on traffic.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/occupied-san-francisco-... [2] http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/01/why-portlands-public-t...
[+] [-] alexnking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenr|10 years ago|reply
If you have so many homeless people, maybe you should solve that problem first?
[+] [-] acdha|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rainymood|10 years ago|reply
http://www.street-art.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1-1.jpg
and
https://pinkylightsaber.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/public-t...
while useful, they usually are quite smelly though.
[+] [-] w-m|10 years ago|reply
They're free to use, not drug dealer proof, and close at night. I'd say they work well, but they're rather ugly.
[+] [-] pierre|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WL2ZnE1vAU
[+] [-] rough-sea|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abalone|10 years ago|reply
What does "time to get to work" even mean here? Doing what?
[+] [-] burkaman|10 years ago|reply
Also, more practically, ideas for this kind of venture can come from anywhere. Maybe someone reading this has a brilliant idea for improving city life, but doesn't have the money or entrepreneurial ability to make it happen. Maybe some startup has a great product in this area, and could really benefit from a partnership with a company with Google's resources. Maybe some city government wants to commission a project to track and optimize their energy usage, I don't know. Why would you intentionally work in isolation when there are potentially great ideas out there?
[+] [-] sidcool|10 years ago|reply
Is it only me or does HN take all announcements cynically?
[+] [-] robzyb|10 years ago|reply
Sometimes the first challenge is to figure that out.
Sometimes it makes sense to note the problem in the early stages.
I think its kinda cool that Google is exploring this.
[+] [-] reagency|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eggie5|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NN88|10 years ago|reply
All the things the US Government should have been doing
[+] [-] outside1234|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvgoogler|10 years ago|reply
It doesn't match my experience. In almost seven years at Google I've worked on amazingly interesting projects - from hardware to user-facing products.
I've never once, in my entire time, had any level of management tell me that I should be worrying about selling ads or monetizing my projects. The consistent message has been "build great products".
So the notion that 99% (or really any majority) of developers at Google "drive the ad hive" is completely untrue - at least in my experience.
[+] [-] scotth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiouscat321|10 years ago|reply
Right now, they seem to be playing arbitrage with engineering talent. They buy up engineers with large salaries and fancy perks. Those people, who now span almost every industry, are then used on projects like these. This has nothing to do with Google's core business or any branch of it at all.
It seems like Google is designing all sorts of products outside of its core competency (medicine, cars, now this?) with the hopes of either spinning it off, selling to the highest bidder, or...? I can't see shareholders liking Google trying to enter every market in the world.
[+] [-] robotresearcher|10 years ago|reply
For example, the self-driving cars are a genuine passion of Page's as I understand it, and came about from his relationship with Thrun. They really do want to make the world a better place by preventing thousands of deaths and many more injuries a year, among other benefits.
I don't think that is hopelessly naive of me. These are youngish, bright billionaire geeks who have made a lot of people very good money. They can do things just because, at least while the gravy flows.
That doesn't mean that these projects are not good strategic business, just that they can be risky since the organization is prepared to tolerate a loss.
[+] [-] robzyb|10 years ago|reply
Maybe the shareholders aren't investing in an advertising company and app store, but they're investing in the company that succeeds to a higher degree than it fails.
But maybe they like Google's brand power and unique company ethos?
How many other companies worth $350Bn+ with 50k+ employees have Google's operating style?
[+] [-] VikingCoder|10 years ago|reply
I think the actual problem is that very few other companies know how to make appropriate use of engineers.
"Robert, you said this sprint that you would move the logo image 2 pixels to the left. Can you PLEASE come to the morning stand-up, listen to 26 people report their status, and then tell us if you have any roadblocks? kthx."
[+] [-] jfoster|10 years ago|reply
I don't think shareholders of Google should be concerned about this; they should stick to being interested in ARPU, CPC trends, etc.
[+] [-] minthd|10 years ago|reply
Also one criteria of choosing projects for X - is projects in areas where there's little competition. Once you start from that point, maybe the analysis framework of "core competencies" is less useful.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
That could happen. It happened to IBM[1] and HP[2], both of which were once product companies.
[1] http://ibm.com/consulting [2] http://www8.hp.com/us/en/business-services/it-services/it-se...
[+] [-] slykat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonathonW|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohitsdom|10 years ago|reply
Have they ever done this? Or even shown any interest to sell a business unit they own?
[+] [-] vicpara|10 years ago|reply
Let's get serious. This initiative is not about toilets, smart flushing and homeless.
I'm fine with it as long as I don't have to have anything always connected to internet, sync data in the cloud and be forced to agree/manage/monitor gazillions of privacy changes, terms and conditions where companies decide to update and change their data protection acts, the ways the share, store and manipulate my data.
Maybe we should firmly keep big technology companies, already in tune with the NSA friends, get closer to our families and private lives. The last thing I'd want is Google, Bloomberg, IBM, Facebook and Cisco circulating all my activities (toilet flushes including) for the sake of my children, future nephews and my neighbours to NSA, have my own cars or my own house lock me out because Palantir discovered about my passion for Moroccan tea or my kid flies a Chinese quadcopter in the backyard.
[+] [-] steeples|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harigov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vowelless|10 years ago|reply
Sometimes I have to increase the size of the page to ease my reading. This is what I get:
http://puu.sh/iklL3/08aa3d3563.png
And I can't even scroll to the right! Is there something wrong with my chrome configuration (maybe a plugin not playing nice)? Or can someone else repro this on their mac?
[+] [-] bsbechtel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealmarv|10 years ago|reply
http://w3.siemens.com/topics/global/en/intelligent-infrastru...
http://w1.siemens.com.cn/sustainable-city-en/sustainable-cit...
[+] [-] chvid|10 years ago|reply
Yes.
People move into a few big cities because companies companies like Google congregate there, ultimately creating problems such as skyrocketing rents, congestion, declining real living standards, homelessness.
Google holds an obvious solution in its hand. By altering their way of working they could support remote working, creating clusters of specialized work forces and communities online rather than in a narrow physical location.
[+] [-] vlasev|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apendleton|10 years ago|reply
And it's not a panacea: the car-oriented nature of suburban life is environmentally pretty terrible (not to mention that detached single-family dwellings are less efficient to climate control, and more expensive to provide services to for municipalities). And suburban life brings with it the long commute, the length of which is a better predictor of happiness (negatively, of course) than almost any other demographic factor, including income, marital status, house size, or any of the other things people think make their hour and change in a car every day worth it.
[+] [-] klipt|10 years ago|reply
Actually in big cities like New York, Google's office doesn't make a dent - most Googlers can just take the subway. The Mountain View office is only 4 times bigger, but because Mountain View wants to be a suburb and not a city, it now enjoys gridlocked roads every day.
[+] [-] relet|10 years ago|reply
Unless you find a cost-efficient way to decentralize all of this, people will be attracted to each other.
[+] [-] manacit|10 years ago|reply
While one of the reasons I live in Manhattan is because the job market is very good, I also enjoy it precisely because there is diversity. I can walk down the street or take the train and see hundreds of people working hundreds of different jobs in dozens of industries. That's why people are moving to cities - they're exciting. There's things to do and people to meet.
[+] [-] filiwickers|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharp11|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swannie|10 years ago|reply
Nice to see Google finally joining the rest of the tech industry ;-) I have to assume this was prompted by the sort of standards work Nest were doing, and the sort of impact that Google Maps is having on traffic.
[+] [-] gull|10 years ago|reply
Is the best solution a frontal attack? Or could it be moving away from existing cities?
Could one design a new city from scratch?
[+] [-] vuyani|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply