Google RoboCars - World Domination or Salvation?

From Google (10/9):

What we’re driving at

Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

This is killer stuff.  Google is transforming itself from search engine to global engine. Today I was reading:

Google Inc has thrown its financial clout behind an ambitious $5 billion proposed electric transmission line intended to spark investment in new wind farms off the heavily populated U.S. East Coast.

The move, which is a gamble as no offshore wind installations have yet been built in the United States, marks the Internet search giant's latest move away from its core business, joining investments in solar energy and a plan to develop a car that will drive itself.

Japan's Marubeni Corp and New York investment firm Good Energies are joining in financing the planned 350-mile underwater electric cable, which will be led by transmission-line developer Trans-Elect. It will help developers of offshore wind projects to surmount a major cost challenge -- connecting their turbines to the grid in a way that allows them to sell to multiple customers.

"This will serve as a clean-energy superhighway, with on-ramps for wind farms and the ability to be intelligently expanded," Rick Needham, Google's green business operations director, told a news conference in Washington. "We can help kick-start an industry that can provide thousands of jobs."

Watch out, they are everywhere.  While these initiatives will not drive earnings/margins in the near-term, I believe that they will ultimately pay handsome dividends.

Google Price Index - Bring It On!

Interesting story on the continued impact of Google:

Google is using its vast database of web shopping data to construct the ‘Google Price Index’ – a daily measure of inflation that could one day provide an alternative to official statistics. 

The work by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, highlights how economic data can be gathered far more rapidly using online sources. The official Consumer Price Index data are collected by hand from shops, and only published monthly with a time lag of several weeks.

At the National Association of Business Economists conference in Denver, Colorado, Mr Varian said that the GPI was a work in progress and Google had not yet decided whether to publish it.  While the Federal Reserve is unlikely to panic just yet, Mr Varian said that the GPI shows a “very clear deflationary trend” for web-traded goods in the US since Christmas.

Although the data are not seasonally adjusted, Mr Varian said that prices rose during the same period a year ago. The ‘core’ CPI in the US, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.9 percent on a year ago in August.  "It’s a quite different picture if you go to the UK where you see a slight inflationary trend,” Mr Varian said. He attributed the rise in the UK GPI to the weakness of sterling.  Mr Varian emphasized that the GPI is not a direct replacement for the CPI because the mix of goods that are sold on the web is different to the mix in the wider economy. Housing accounts for about 40 percent of the US CPI, for example, but only 18 percent of the GPI.

The GPI shows a “pretty good correlation” with the CPI for goods such as cameras and watches that are often sold on the web, but less so for others, such as car parts, that are infrequently traded online.

Mr Varian said that the GPI had been inspired by a personal shopping experience: “A tragedy struck our house a few months ago because my favorite pepper grinder broke.”  On typing ‘pepper grinder’ into Google Shopping, Mr Varian was struck by the list of prices. “What’s the first thing you want to do if you’re an economist? You want to construct a price index,” Mr Varian said.  Mr Varian also discussed some of his other work on using Google’s search data for economic forecasting. He said that he is working on “predicting the present” by using real-time search data to forecast official data that are only released with time lags.

For example, searches for “unemployment insurance” may be a good tool to predict actual claims for unemployment insurance, or the unemployment rate.  Mr Varian said that Wall Street analysts are still more accurate, because they can take account of changes such as lay-offs of census workers, but Google search data may help to improve the accuracy of their forecasts.

Personally, I would like to see them get further into market/economic stats (recall they already have Google domestic trends Goog Domestic Trends.   They have no policy axe to grind (aside from world domination) and real time data could help analysts/investors get a better feel for the "real economy" in real time.