Google offers $10 million to 'sustainable transportation' firms
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Google.org incites others to share its love for plug-in hybrid vehicles and other cleaner forms.
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A think tank partly funded by Exxon Mobil sent letters to scientists offering them up to $10,000 to critique findings in a major global warming study released Friday which found that global warming was real and likely caused by burning fossil fuels.
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(InfoWorld) - GoogleÂ introduced a program on Tuesday to help nonprofit organizations use its Google Earth satellite mapping program to build Web-based applications that illustrate their mission and advocate their work. The program, called Google Earth Outreach, is a combination of resources that will help nonprofits use Google Earth, such as video tutorials for developers and online forums where nonprofits can connect, Director of Google Earth and Maps John Hanke said at an event at Google's New York office. Google also is making its Google Earth Pro edition available for free to nonprofits that fill out a grant application. The program is usually $400 per user, per year. Google is presenting case studies of the applications nonprofits have built using Google Earth on the Google Earth Outreach Web site. The program grew out of a group of Google employees' "20 percent" project, Hanke said. Google allows its employees to spend 20 percent of their time on projects they are personally interested in. After relief workers used Google Earth during Hurricane Katrina to locate stranded New Orleans residents, several employees wanted to use the product for humanitarian purposes, he said. "That opened our minds to something we never really considered -- that it might be something significantly meaningful in our product, not just [for] day-to-day utility and interesting and fun kind of things," Hanke said. Google had representatives from key nonprofits on hand Tuesday, physically and virtually, to promote the program. Most notably, famed wildlife advocate Jane Goodall appeared via video conference from London, where she explained how the Jane Goodall Institute's involvement with Google Earth Outreach is a far cry from how she used technology -- basically a pencil and a notebook -- when she first began her research living among chimpanzees in Africa in 1960. As part of Google Earth Outreach, the institute has a "geoblog" where users can zoom in and see the places in Africa that Goodall has written about in her books and track the progress and lives of the chimpanzees she has tagged in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. In this way, she said, people can feel as if they are more personally involved with the work she is doing and want to contribute to it. "It certainly is helping us hugely with our conservation efforts and also enabling us to involve a wider audience of people," she said. "People get really involved, really excited about this. It's like a soap opera for wild chimpanzees." Edward Wilson, president and CEO of Earthwatch, appeared in person at the event. Earthwatch, a scientific research organization for the preservation of a suitable environment for the earth, also is participating in the Google Earth Outreach program. Wilson said that the satellite mapping in Google Earth "shrinks the planet" so issues like the ones his organization are trying to spread awareness about become more accessible. Scientists can use Google Earth to zoom in and share information across the globe, so, for instance, "a turtle researcher in Costa Rica can share information with a turtle researcher in Malaysia," he said. Still, Wilson said, the key for a nonprofit is not just that its workers can find and share information, but that they can illustrate their mission to as many people as possible so they will get involved at a local level in global issues. That's why Google Earth Outreach is a useful tool for them. "Unless we get key stakeholders involved, it's not going to move the dial," he said. During a question-and-answer session, one attendee brought up problems Google has faced with government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense and other commercial and public entities that are none too pleased with the idea of the average person having easy access to the world's satellite imagery. Indeed, the company's mission to collect and give people access to as much of the world's information as possible has always inspired security and privacy concerns. For nonprofits that have to consider private interests as well as the public good, global satellite mapping can be a thorny issue, said Matt Merrifield, geospatial technology director for the California region of The Nature Conservancy. His organization works to set aside land to be preserved for environmental and ecological reasons and often has to work with private landholders who "don't want to see their land on a public level," he said. However, Goodall thinks that to help spur interest in the global issues nonprofits such as hers are advocating, it's better to give people as much information as possible. And pairing that information with visual representations of the work being done adds a personal element that inspires people to get more involved than they normally might. "Right from the beginning, I wanted to share everything I found at Gombe, and I was criticized for writing popular books," Goodall said. "But if we want to save chimpanzees, forests, and other creatures around the planet, this is the way to do it. It's not just to reach into people's brains but into their hearts as well."
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Google.org, the philanthropic arm  of Google Inc , said on Thursday it is expanding beyond  funding for alternative energy to focus on projects in health  and combating poverty and climate change.
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LOS ANGELES - Google Inc. is bankrolling a $30 million space flight contest for private companies to safely land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images and video to Earth.
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Google activates the solar panels covering the roof space on its campus and says it will provide $10 million in grants for hybrid cars.
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A report says Google is putting together a group to lay a data cable under the Pacific to reduce costs and increase capacity.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida  - Web search leader  Google Inc. will sponsor a $30 million competition for an  unmanned lunar landing, following up on the $10 million Ansari  X Prize that spurred a private sector race to space.
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Google's plans for an inventory-reduction service could be worth billions to global companies.
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The U.S. government and several mobile phone companies have announced a $10 million initiative that takes advantage of cell phone networks to improve heath care in the developing world.
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By Hazimin Sulaiman  TECH companies are gradually moving towards a greener Earth with a little push from the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) pioneered by Intel and Google. The initiative is rapidly gaining momentum among major IT players.
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Google generated most of its revenue -- $411.7 million -- through text-based ads displayed on company-owned sites. That&#39;s an important factor, because Google doesn&#39;t have to share the money with other advertising partners.
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Germany gets a green light from the European Union to give $165 million for research on internet search-engine tech that could challenge Google. The Theseus project would develop an advanced multimedia search engine to translate, identify and index images, audio and text.
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What's green and plastic and costs $10 billion dollars? Boeing's newest addition: the 787 Dreamliner
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Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc, said on Thursday it is expanding beyond funding for alternative energy to focus on projects in health and combating poverty and climate change.
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Google Inc. launched an initiative Tuesday to help charities and other non-profit groups use maps and satellite images to raise awareness, recruit volunteers and encourage donations.
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(InfoWorld) - Google on Monday turned on the solar panels covering nearly all the roof space on its corporate campus and announced that its philanthropic arm plans to dole out over $10 million in grants to support hybrid cars. The announcements follow one last week made from Google's offices in Mountain View, California that launched an industry-wide initiative around improving the energy efficiency of PCs and servers. The solar panels, which make up the largest solar installation on a corporate campus in the U.S., produce 1.6 megawatts of energy, enough to supply about one-third of Google's energy use on the campus, said Jacquelline Fuller, a Google spokeswoman. In addition to the solar panels, Google has also unveiled a new employee parking garage where drivers can charge their plug-in cars, powering up their batteries using solar energy. Plug-ins are hybrid cars that users can drive in all-electric mode for around 30 miles before relying on the gas engine. Because automobile manufacturers aren't producing plug-ins, Google is converting hybrid cars into plug-ins. So far, it has converted four Toyota Prius and two Ford Escapes, Fuller said. On its RechargeIT Web site, Google is posting data on the performance of the cars. Eventually, the company plans to have 100 such plug-in cars that employees who take public transportation to the office will be able to use to run errands during their work days as part of a car-sharing program. The announcements about the changes to the corporate campus were part of the launch of the RechargeIT Initiative by Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company, on Monday. The plan includes several efforts mainly around plug-in cars, starting with grants already dispersed to a variety of groups. Google.org has given $200,000 each to the Brookings Institute in support of a conference next year about federal policy to promote plug-in vehicles and CalCars for the continuation of its educational initiatives about the cars. The Electrical Power Research Institute, Plug-In America, Rocky Mountain Institute, and a professor at the University of Delaware all have also received grants for their plug-in car projects. In addition, Google.org has earmarked $10 million for investments in companies and projects that support alternative transportation that reduces the use of fossil fuels and emissions. Later this summer the company plans to formally request proposals for the grant money. Last week, Google hinted at the impending launch of environmental initiatives when it hosted the introduction of theÂ Climate Savers Computing Initiative. That group, which includes a who's-who list of the technology industry such as Intel, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard, is setting a series of standards that will incrementally improve the efficiency of power cords used on PCs and servers through 2010.