Google shocked the tech industry with a radical restructuring. Google as we knew it is no more. Yes, Google is still there, but it’s now part of a parent company called Alphabet. Alphabet is Google broken up into many pieces, pieces that over the years have sometimes struggled to co-exist together. One of those free parts is Google X. Google X is the radical idea bending anything is possible wing of Google, which will now be run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Now that Google X is its own company free of the restraints of the old structure, it can continue working on brave new frontiers in not just computers but medicine and travel as well. Right now Google X is working on a lot of amazing new projects such as Nest, Google Fiber, Calico, Project Wing, Self Driving Cars, and Project Loon.
All of these projects are game changers in their own right, but the ones with the most promise so far are Google Fiber and Calico. Calico for starters is a project designed to increase all human life to one hundred years. This past July Calico announced a partnership with AncestryDNA in hopes of finding out how genetics affects human longevity. David Botstein had this to say in a July press release ; “Our common experience suggests that there may be hereditary factors underlying longevity, but finding the genes responsible using standard techniques has proven elusive,” This is an extraordinary opportunity to address a fundamental unanswered question in longevity research using high-quality human pedigrees.” Calico hopes that’s once we understand how we age, we can find a way to increase our time, which might seem simple in words, but put into practice its colossal in scope.
Google Fiber is probably the most well know of the Google X programs. It has already launched in a few majors cities across the country. Austin, Texas, Kansas City, Kansas and Provo Utah already have Google Fiber running with incredible results. San Antonio, Texas, Nashville, Tennesse and Atlanta, Georgia are a few of the new cities about to receive Google Fiber shortly. What makes Google Fiber so amazing is that it brings fiber optic internet speeds that are one hundred times faster than what we typically use here in the United States. Another bonus of fiber is that although it might cost the same as standard internet service, it’s sure to be much much faster and stronger, as well as coming with HD TV service packaged with it. Kansas City has seen a boom in business ever since Google Fiber went live there a few years ago, and San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor is looking for the same results. “So many people are looking at this as a benchmark of our progress as a city,” “Hopefully, more people who don’t know that much about San Antonio, once they associate this city with a world-renowned brand like Google, it will give them a different impression of what we are doing here,” Mayor Taylor said while speaking to the San Antonio Business Journal. It’s amazing how Google X did all this while wrapped up in the old Google structure. Just think what things Google X can achieve now that’s it’s free to stand on its own two feet.