Jan 17, 2008 Google press release titled Google.org Announces Core Initiatives to Combat Climate Change, Poverty and Emerging Threats.

Blog posting at Search Engine Watch :

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, today announced the five core initiatives that it plans to focus on over the next five to ten years. The programs will receive more than $25 million in new grants and investments to initial partners from Google.org. Google's founders have made a commitment to devote approximately 1 percent of the company's equity plus 1 percent of annual profits to philanthropy, as well as employee time.

The five initiatives Google.org will focus on:

1. Predict and Prevent – using technology to predict and prevent the spread of diseases before they become local, regional, or global crises, by identifying "hot spots" and enabling a rapid response. Focus areas include global health threats, humanitarian crises, biological threats, and climate variability.
2. Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services – improving the flow of vital information to improve basic services for the poor in India and East Africa.
3. Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises – creating programs to support small and mid-sized businesses in developing areas, beginning with Ghana and Tanzania.
4. Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal – working toward a goal of producing one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal, within years not decades. This program was launched in November, and will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies.
5. Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles – an initiative launched this fall that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid technology.

"These five initiatives are our attempt to address some of the hard problems we as a world need to face in the coming decade," said Dr. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. "We have chosen them both because we think solving them will make a better, fairer, safer world for our children and grandchildren – and the children and grandchildren of people all over the world – but also because we feel that these core initiatives fit well with Google's core strengths, especially its innovative technologies and its talented engineers and other Googlers, who are really our most valuable assets."

A couple more details from the Google.org Web site and press release :

Predict and Prevent

Identify Hot Spots

Understanding the complex drivers that lead to emerging threats can help communities anticipate surprises and reduce vulnerability. Google.org is initially focusing on:

• Sharing knowledge across human, animal, and environmental health sectors
• Improving data collection, sharing, and analysis for enhanced vulnerability mapping and modeling
• Contributing to enhanced resilience of communities to withstand threats and adapt to changes

Enable Rapid Response

Timely, accurate, and accessible information can help prevent localized health crises from becoming regional or global threats. Google.org is focusing on:

• Using innovative methods to quickly find threats wherever they occur
• Confirming outbreaks and identifying their cause
• Alerting key stakeholders, from villagers to global health authorities

$5 million to InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters) to improve early detection, preparedness, and response capabilities for global health threats and humanitarian crises. InSTEDD will work with the community of relief and response organizations, governments, academia and top scientists around the world to address gaps in information flow with software and other technology-based tools and services. Acting as an innovation laboratory, InSTEDD aims to support the humanitarian community in preparing for and responding to global public health emergencies, working together towards a safer world. For more information, see http://instedd.org .

InSTEDD Technology

http://instedd.org/technology_field_lab

SMS Geo-Chat

This proof-of-concept level tool allows you to connect a cell phone to your computer and use it as a central ‘station’ for receiving and responding to SMS with a map as the main interaction tool.

This project takes advantage of the following technologies:

• RSS and GeoRSS as the standard data representation on the wire,
• Google Earth as the local interactive mapping application,
• A simple local web application that gets opened to ‘reply’ to the messages built with ASP.NET,
• Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps as free online mapping applications,
• Google Maps geocoding web services to translate addresses into positions,
• Microsoft Research SMS Toolkit to receive messages and send responses hooked up to an HTC phone,
• An ASP.NET web application to host the information online and display it using multiple mapping solutions.

Contacts Nearby

The Contacts Nearby application allows users to discover geographic locations of other people in their extended social network. Social networks or “friend graphs” are increasingly popular on the internet because they enable applications to learn of trust relationship between users. Combine this information with the geographical location of each user and you get a valuable tool in possible emergency situations.

This project takes advantage of the following technologies:

• Facebook as a provider for social information.
• Google Maps for visualization of geographical information.
• Google Maps Geocoding Services to translate addresses into positions.
• InSTEDD’s Twitter Bot technology which enables communication over SMS messages.
• An ASP.NET web application to integrate the application with Facebook.
• Facebook.NET - an open source library for developing Facebook application with .NET.

Social Software's Involvement

Jan 17, 2008 c|net article titled Twitter, Facebook called on for higher purpose

The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization that ambitiously aims to help communities around the world use Web and communications technology to identify and warn others of outbreaks like Avian flu or disasters like Hurricane Katrina. That technology, which will include social software Twitter and Facebook, will be used to coordinate rescue responses and help save lives, according to Eric Rasmussen, president and CEO of InSTEDD.

"We're not talking about pulling the red phone out of the bottom drawer here," said Rasmussen, a former adviser to U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, referring to Twitter and Facebook. "We're talking about using ubiquitous, free software that is repurposed when necessary to fit into a humanitarian need."

One such application will be the so-called Twitter bot framework, which bridges the Web service and phones with a location-detection feature that can link to a layer in Google Earth, Rasmussen said. That way, for example, Rasmussen could send a message about a patient with untreated symptoms in Laos via SMS on his phone, which might only have one signal bar of service. That message could then be broadcast to anyone subscribed to his messages, including aid workers at UNICEF or InSTEDD's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which could show his location and note on a Google Earth map.

"We can send an SMS message onto Google Earth in an emergency center, and it sees a dot with a color-coded response, with my name and date. Right underneath that, there's a button that says reply, and (aid workers can send a note that says) we have the resources you need 2 miles north...Suddenly there's a two-way conversation using nothing but a cell phone with one bar," he said, adding: "We've done this." The application will also let people query for friends nearby via SMS, he said.

One other application it's working on is a modification of Facebook that would allow aid workers to see where all their nearby contacts are, as well as reach out to all their "friends of friends" in the humanitarian community in the case of a crisis. "We've learned that going one layer in social networking is reliable (for finding helpful resources), but two layers isn't," Rasmussen said. He added: "Social networking in the humanitarian space, that's something you're going to see."

RE<C and RechargeIT

Energy Cheaper Than Coal

RE<C = Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal

Google is working initially in three areas of renewable energy technology with the potential to produce large amounts of electricity cheaper than coal: solar thermal, wind, and geothermal. The company has created a renewable energy R&D group within Google’s engineering ranks and is looking for talented engineers, technologists, energy experts and others to join.

As part of the RE<C initiative, Google.org is supporting strategic investments, including: $10 million to eSolar, a Pasadena, CA-based company specializing in solar thermal power which replaces the fuel in a traditional power plant with heat produced from solar energy. eSolar's technology has great potential to produce utility-scale power cheaper than coal. Google announced its intention to work closely with eSolar in November, and has now closed the investment deal.

RechargeIT

Through Google's RechargeIT initiative, Google.org is working to accelerate mass commercialization of plug-in vehicles by seeding innovation, demonstrating technology, informing the debate, and stimulating market demand. In June 2007, Google officially launched this initiative by unveiling its plug-in demonstration fleet, debuting Google's 1.6 megawatt solar installation, and announcing over $1 million in grants to support plug-in vehicle adoption. Google also teamed up with PG&E to demonstrate vehicle-to-grid technology to show how electricity might be transmitted back and forth between plug-in vehicles and the grid.