Tag: google

Sidewalk Labs Flow

Sidewalk Labs announced that it is building “Flow,” a digital platform that seeks to address the real-time transit problem and more. Flow will aggregate and analyze mobility data from a great number of sources—including Google Maps, Waze, municipal data, and eventually, remote traffic sensors—to identify what’s causing congestion and which areas need what kind of service. This won’t just be software for transit officials to lord over, though. Flow will also have a public, outward-facing element in the form of digital kiosks that provide real-time transit information and wifi, similar to those currently in beta testing by Link NYC. That way, “citizens without a smartphone or data plan use new dynamic mobility services”. The kiosks will also include remote sensors that anonymously gauge parking availability, traffic flow, and rider demand. Eventually, those sensors could be used to test and regulate autonomous cars.

Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes

Though widespread interest in software containers is a relatively recent phenomenon, at Google we have been managing Linux containers at scale for more than 10 years and built 3 different container-management systems in that time. Each system was heavily influenced by its predecessors, even though they were developed for different reasons

Lists are the new search

This in turn reminds me of a story in the New York Times, many years ago, about small Japanese shops who wanted only word-of-mouth customers and so made themselves hard to find (even by Japanese standards). In particular, there was one denim shop in a back-alley of Tokyo called ‘Not Found’ – so as to be ungooglable. One can call this curation, or hipsterdom, or just a Veblen good. But in the past, such things were always geographically constrained – you had to live in a big city (while chain retail took homogenized versions of the same thing to everyone). I wonder, as ecommerce matures, how much will be carved out into exactly the kind of spectrum of large and small retail beyond the big aggregators, and how far this removal of geographic constraint might make it easier rather than harder for them to take sales from the giants, in part by removing that density problem. That is, there might be a lot more lists, they might be hard to find, and not be part of some global aggregator, and that might be OK.

syzkaller

syzkaller is a linux kernel fuzzer, and it is finding TONS of bugs. the whole “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is clearly total bs, since there aren’t many eyeballs at all. but with this, maybe there’s some hope to get a kernel that is substantially more secure and less crashy.

BoringSSL

We recently switched Google’s 2b line repository over to BoringSSL, our fork of OpenSSL. This means that BoringSSL is now powering Chromium (on nearly all platforms), Android M and Google’s production services. For the first time, the majority of Google’s products are sharing a single TLS stack and making changes no longer involves several days of work juggling patch files across multiple repositories. This is a big positive for Google and I’m going to document some of the changes that we’ve made in BoringSSL in this post.

Project Sunroof

i’m really excited about this. solar is mostly held back by inefficiencies of installation and planning, not the actual cells these days. i hope this expands worldwide as fast as possible.

Project Sunroof uses information that’s in Google Maps to figure out how much sun falls on a roof and takes into account stuff like the angle of the roof, the weather, and obstructions like trees and chimneys. Then it uses those measurements to figure out how many panels you’d probably need and how much you could save on your electric bill, including solar incentives in your area

Alphabet

After yesterday’s surprise announcement that a “slightly slimmed down” Google would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the new Alphabet, which would also own the newly spun out Calico, Fiber, Nest, Google Ventures, Google Capital, and Google X, Google’s focus is tighter than ever, and just in time: the long awaited shift in advertising from legacy media, most notably TV, seems to have finally begun in earnest, and Google (along with Facebook) is primed to be a chief beneficiary. As I noted, I find this very exciting.