Google.org, a For-Profit Charity

Google has set up a subsidiary, Google.org, a for-profit philanthropy with initial capital of a billion dollars. Not being organized on a tax-free basis carries both advantages and drawbacks. From the article: "Unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes." One of Google.org's first projects is the development of a plug-in hybrid vehicle that achieves a mileage rating equivalent to 100 MPG.

Comments

Non-registration link

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link to the same story that doesn't require registration

http://news.com.com/Googles+unusual+approach+to+ph ilanthropy/2100-1014_3-6115533.html

Re:Can't wait

[ozmanjusri]

I can't wait to see how Google finds a way to profit from a battered women's shelter.

Well, this IS Slashdot. News for Nerds. Things that batter.

/Me going to hell. What a downer.

Plug-in is inline with Google's existing vision

[rsborg]

I know that Google employees receive a $5000 discount (plus a few other perks that I'm not clear on) on any purchase of a hybrid vehicle that gets 45 mpg (ie, Prius, Insight or Civic Hybrid).

I think one or both of the founders drive a Prius as well, so this would be inline with their vision of what can be done to make the world a better place.

interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I submitted this story (same exact NY time article even) 3 days ago, when it was news.

Anyhow, the term "non-profit" evokes a warm fuzzy feeling that it shouldn't. John D Rockefeller did more to save the whales (via kerosene) than GreenPeace ever will.

Hybrid Vehicles?

[atomicstrawberry]

First we'll have the gCar, and it will cost far more than it's actually worth, but investors will cough up the money anyway. Apple will follow suit with their iCar, which will be made out of translucent white plastic, but will only run certain fuels. After making a suitable amount of money selling their iCar, they will begin to market successively smaller iCars, and charge more to get them in black.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Redmond, Steve Ballmer will be plotting to 'fucking kill' them both. Unfortunately by this stage he'll have put his back out throwing chairs, so he'll instead switch to 'fucking kill'ing them with a motorised chair with wheels, which Microsoft will market it as the Zume.

Re:Hybrid Vehicles?

[atomicstrawberry]

It's his greatest invention: a chair that throws itself

Re:Hybrid Vehicles?

[atomicstrawberry]

Ever tried to listen to Ogg Vorbis on your iPod?

Innovating

[kbsoftware]

I don't always agree with Google tactics but at least they are innovative. Certainly changing the internet, computers and now looks like cars and beyond. Microsoft which doesn't innovate just buys or steals will have a hard time competing with such a company. Since I don't see Google being any more evil then Microsoft, I have to cheer to Google since like I said at least they are innovating :) Yeah ok I did a crappy job of explaining the message I'm trying to get through.

Re:Innovating

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I don't always agree with Google tactics but at least they are innovative. Certainly changing the internet, computers and now looks like cars and beyond.

On the other hand, one could easily make the criticism that Google has lost focus and are all over the map, doing a lot of things and most them not anywhere near as well as they do web-searching. Perhaps this is a downside of having too much cash - they just don't have enough good ideas and talented people to make efficient use of all that money.

Re:Innovating

[cgenman]

Remember, Google requires their employees to spend one day a week on a pet project. A lot of things like Google Earth and Picasa come from these. Some of these have tremendous data value, like Orkut and Google Desktop. Some, like Picasa, may someday have tremendous data value but don't currently. But they're only hitting 1/5th of the engineer's time.

Valuable Google Assets: Alerts, Blogger, Desktop, Directory (DMOZ), Images, Maps, News, Toolbar, Web Search, Gmail, Mobile, SMS
Could be Valuable: Book Search, Catalogs, Checkout, Finance, Froogle, Local, Scholar, Video, Calendar, Groups, Talk, Translate
Silly, fun, useless to them: Earth, Picasa, SketchUp,

In the labs: Google Trends, Music Trends, Visually Impaired Search, Notebook, Mars, Page Creator, Public Transportation Maps, RSS Reader, Web Accelerator, Taxi Finder, Suggest, Froogle Mobile, Sets.

With the possible exception of Mars, that seems pretty interconnected. Some of the silliest ideas, like Google Maps, gMail, the Google Toolbar, etc have become standard usage now. Even the silly ones, like Google Earth, were part of their push to create 3D maps of all major US cities, which would have been a valuable resource if they could have pulled it off.

They're like the Bell Labs of the 'net. Lot of pure research, some of which is or might be stupidly profitable. But we'll all reap rewards in the end.

Like Omidyar Network?

[otisg]

I hope it turns out as good as it blurb makes it sound. I believe Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Network was founded with the same/similar goals in mind.

Beyond "don't be evil"

[timboc007]

I'm glad to see that Google is going beyond their "Don't be evil" motto to "Be good". I applaud their apparent sense of social responsibility.

I believe that much good can be achieved by large corporations who are willing to contribute to making the world a better place - whether it be through science for science's sake (e.g. Bell labs), welfare, world aid or whatever. I will be interested to see how this translates into a "for-profit" environment... presumably their profit margin expectations will not be as high as they might otherwise be?

Re:Wow, the evil begins

[spoco2]

"And the largest disadvantage to a "for-profit charity?" Your donations are NOT tax deductible.

They've slit their own throats on this one."

Yeah, the people behind Google, the most successful web venture in the world, didn't give any thought at all as to the consequences of making it a for profit charity.

Have you perhaps thought that they are targetting other methods of funding that don't rely as much on the tax deduction angle? How about that they are planning on making products that can make money and therefore self fund the charity?

I highly applaud them, and I think the lack of needing to be non profit could be very liberating and free them up to do many things they otherwise may have not been able to.

Very excited to watch this one!

Re:Well it has to suceed

[zobier]

The new director of Google.org is Larry Brilliant!

That's Dr. Brilliant.
I'm just waiting for Capt. Obvious to join the conversation.

Re:Odd.

[BacOs]

Odd that Google would take a for-profit route

I don't find it odd at all. I'm involved with several FLOSS projects and one of them recently researched starting its own foundation (non-profit) or corporation (for profit). Everyone I talked to (including people associated with the Mozilla Foundation and the Python and Apache Software Foundations) recommended starting a for profit corporation. The restrictions placed on federally tax exempt (501(c)(3)) organizations was too great in their opinion. With a for profit corporation, you have much fewer restrictions.

Hindu guru

[Psychotria]

From the article: (Brilliant)... has studied under a Hindu guru in a monastery at the foothills of the Himalayas

Anybody who can study with a guru sitting on them has my respect

Re:equivelent MPG

[Anonymous Coward]

A common system for evaluating advanced technology vehicle energy sources (hybrids, fuel cells, etc.) uses the "GREET" model developed by Argonne National Labs. This model considers the 'well-to-wheels' efficiency, which gives the most accurate picture of how a particular fuel or energy source is used. In the end, you get a measurement of miles per equivalent gallon of gasoline, or MPEGG.

http://www.transportation.anl.gov/software/GREET/i ndex.html

MPG?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought DivX was the norm these days

Same way they profit from everything else:

[mcc]

Targeted advertising.

Re:equivelent MPG

[Mr Z]

So far, I've seen two main methods of computing the fuel economy of a hybrid. The silliest one is the EPA method, which simply measures emissions and plugs them into a government mandated formula. This works for most traditional cars, but for hybrids it tends to overstate the fuel economy. The other accounts for the amount of gasoline and electricity from the grid used to power the vehicle. If you never plug your vehicle into an outlet, this is equivalent to dividing travel distance by number of gallons of gasoline. If you do plug your car in at night, it gets harder to calculate, since we don't typically burn gasoline to create electricity on the grid.

About the best you can do is compare emissions equivalence. Electric motors are zero-emissions at the point of use, but the coal plant on the edge of town will belch a little more if you're drawing from the grid. To find a useful ratio, you have to make assumptions about the particular mix of energy sources providing electricity to your home: Coal, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, etc. For specific regions that's doable, but for a nationwide scale you have to work with averages.

Given how cheap electricity is compared to many things, I suppose most people will just look at what they're paying at the pump, though.

--Joe

Before the Google love-in gets out of hand

[caitsith01]

...this development, along with the Bill and Melinda foundation, means we now have extremely large, extremely rich companies doing what our governments should be doing.

If they're promoting cleaner vehicles or saving kittens it's all fine and dandy. But what about accountability? What if Google, with its billions, starts doing things that some of us strongly disagree with? Would Christian conservatives be happy if Google started a campaign to push condoms in schools and third world countries to help stop AIDS? Would progressives be happy if Google started a campaign to restore family values through aggressively marketing church youth groups?

Let's remember that this is the same Google which is arguably supporting the tyrannical Chinese government's censorship. Fundamentally, we should be asking, what is Google's agenda? What if we disagree with it?

I expect many people will be inclined to give me responses about it being an example of a company doing what it wants in a free market, and that it is still bound by the law. However, I say, TANSTAAFL, and I prefer my social engineering to be done by the government because in principle at least the government represents me and my interests, whatever my financial involvement.* Are we looking at a future where democracy is contingent on share ownership?

* yeah yeah, spare me

Google seems a bit like Apple around here at times, perhaps a little too far above reasonable criticism. A great many people seem to ignore the fact that it is a self-interested entity in a competitive market, and at the end of the day what it values is what's good for Google and not the good of all mankind. Even if you think this is great, I urge you to think about whether it's really a positive thing to have one company exerting so much influence over the information we receive (google.com), knowing so much about what we are interested in (google.com), what we talk about (gmail), where we go (google maps/earth), what we buy (Adwords, froogle), what we are creating (the emerging word processing software and related tools, Picasa), and apparently now, how we operate as a society.

Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?

Re:Before the Google love-in gets out of hand

[bishiraver]

Google.org does not blowback money to google.com, the search engine company.

The government should do a few main things:

-make sure other people don't take my stuff, my life, or impose upon my life in a negative way.
-protect my life and the sovereignty of my country.
-make sure its populace is well-educated and healthy
-deal with the people who cross the above two in a just manner.

In doing the above in a farsighted manner, it will maintain a good quality of life through protecting our nature reserves (if we don't have nature reserves, then arguably a future generation may indeed have a lower quality of life, lack of knowledge, and a higher death rate. Education and health may well be an extrapolation of 'protect my life.'

Of course, to do all of that a huge network of laws is written, several branches of government are created, and everything gets bogged down in beaurocracy - especially if morals are the key focus of politicians.

Google's involvement with the chinese government is actually a far cry better than any other search engine - when pages are censored, it tells the user that there were results that were censored. In a devious way, it does more to increase the knowledge of government censorship in China better than showing everything.

Google is doing things with google.org that a government shouldn't have to do. And you've seen what kind of bumbling the beaurocracy does when this kind of thing is involved.

Because google's company is knowledge based, it is not beholden to the same types of shareholders as, say, an oil company. This is well shown by their work on a hybrid-electric car. And because it has shareholders, instead of throwing money at problems like poor food and water quality in developing countries, it will work to fix the causitive issues. And with the brilliant minds they have there, I have no doubt this will be extremely successful.

Re:Before the Google love-in gets out of hand

[catbutt]

I have a hard time seeing how a corporation doing things with the intent of making a positive change is likely to cause more harm than a corporation doing things only for the purpose of enriching its shareholders.

Re:Before the Google love-in gets out of hand

[Anonymous Coward]

"...this development, along with the Bill and Melinda foundation, means we now have extremely large, extremely rich companies doing what our governments should be doing."

Actually, you have it completely backwards. This is exactly what private groups should do and the government should not.

But I believe we have a first principal mismatch. You want the government to do everything and do not trust the individual. I on the other hand don't want to the government doing anything and I trust the individual.

It reminds me of a conversation with a friend. He was going on and on about how he wished the government would tax him more so that the government could do good and give his money to those in need. Sadly, it never crossed his mind to give to private cherity. He, like you, worships government.

See, by having the freedom to choose which charities to give money to you can give to causes that you support. You are not forced to give to causes that the government forces you to give to under threat of imprisonment. Maybe you don't like the military, abortion, or perhaps welfare. The government doesn't give you a choice.

Why don't people know what true liberty is?

"Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?"

Ask that about government. Government has a military and secret police forces.

Re:Plug-in is inline with Google's existing vision

[dago]

Well, to be even more complete, one could also say that traditionnal car manufacturers already have diesel cars that go under 4 l/100km (over 58 mpg). Volkwagen already sold cars that could go down to 3 l/100km (or over 78 mpg).

Ok, that's not in the US, and you still need particle filters, but still, I also think that limiting the options is a bad idea.

Re:Odd.

[argoff]

The truth is that most people need is the power to help themselves, not aid. For example, if a person in LA went down to the store, bought and cooked up some hot-dogs, and then sold them on the street corner - he would likely be in jail, taxed, and fined over 40K before the night was out - and then be forced to get permits and inspections at great expense to himself. I'm sorry, no argument about government protecting people can justify that kind of behavior.

In Africa, a large amount of US aid was used to build a milk plant. But it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control. Many aid loans were blown by corrupt leaders, who then left it to the citizens to pay back.

In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them. But not if government officials demand bribes, permits, taxes, and high fees at every step of the process, and not if they demand high fees on everything imported and exported, and not if the judiciary is so corrupt or slow that they have no recource if land or other items are taken from them. If you had 100 million dollars, would you put it in Venesuela or North Korea right now? People who have paid a bitter price. That's a lot of money, and then they wonder why they have employment problems.

In China, millions of people died from hunger until the farmers were able to have property rights, then the problem disapeared and the economy started to boom. Really, who would slave away on a farm where they own none of the take and none of the land. Once again, the people in China didn't need charity nor help from the government, what they needed was property rights. Charity would have prolonged the problem and made it worse. What they needed was the power to help themselves, once they got it then the poverty problems took care of themselves naturally.

My car will get negative 100Mpg

[goombah99]

I'm developing a car that will get negative 100MPG to cancel this out.

Actually I'm trying to cancel out this goofy definition of MPG when there's electricity involved. Does a pure electric car get Infinity Miles per gallon?

This sort of reminds me of a prank a friend pulled in college. One guy was always entering the room to announce he had managed to drive is economy car so skillfully that got outrageous gas milage. Tiring of this, my friend started adding a gallon of gas to the braggarts tank every night so that his milage and brags got bigger and bigger. Then the next week he started siphoning out a gallon out of the tank. The brags "mysteriously" ceased without explanation.

So my car is going to use photovoltaics, and have an onboard device that inhales smog, and uses the electricity to produce gasoline. Then I'm going to drive up to gas stations, connect the hose and pump gas back into the filling station tanks. That will mess with their arithmetic! and I'll have my negative 100MPG vehicle.

Re:My car will get negative 100Mpg

[ColaMan]

He's talking about the plug-in hybrids... I suppose you could convert the cost of the electricity into how much gas that would buy and go from there.

eg: You use $1.20 of electricity to charge your electric-only car up. Gas costs $2.40/gal. You have bought the equivalent of 1/2 gal of gas. You drive 100 miles before recharging, thus you've reached the equivalent of 200MPG.

Re:One billion dollars for FOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine what one billion dollars would achieve if spent for FOSS?

25 clones of Tetris
24 C standard libraries
23 stupid desktop widgets
22 pointless window managers
21 HTTP servers
20 Wiki web applications
19 useless shells
18 password crackers
17... Eh, you get the point: Take Freshmeat's frontpage and extrapolate, and that's at best! What you'd probably get is a bunch of people demanding 55 grand a year to work on utterly useless crap.

Google! Fuck Yeah!

[DaMouse404]

Coming again to save the motherfucking day yeah! -DaMouse

Re:Homework not done and it shows.

[Technician]

FYI, the Prius does not use a Lithium battery.

For long battery life, they do a lot of battery management to make the battery last the life of the car.

For starters they do not treat the battery the same way you would treat a cell phone or laptop battery. Full charge then deep discharge cycles are not done. The battery is rarely charged to 100% and almost never discharged below 50%.

There are Prius cars out there with over 250K miles and still going strong on the original battery. Do some online research on the rate of Prius battery failures. Most battery failures are not the HV traction pack but the 12V cabin battery.

Cell phones and laptops are often charged fully and run down below 50% for long battery run-time. This kills batteries. Cell phone and laptop batteries life is not expected to last more than a couple years. The Prius battery on the other hand is expected to last the life of the car. The plug in mod may change the expected battery life considerably.

Re:Odd.

[xappax]

it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control.

Ever heard of the Bhopal disaster? It was one of the most deadly industrial accidents ever, and it was due to the negligence of Union Carbide employees (a US corporation). How about the Exxon Valdez? Yet another vast catastrophe caused by irresponsible employees of a US corporation. Or hey, a little closer to geek-home - how about when MasterCard allowed 40 million credit card numbers to be stolen (the largest such leak ever reported) due to poor software design?

The funny thing about these incidents of corporate irresponsibility is that not only did these companies have totally stupid policies that were very likely to result in danger, once disaster struck they were totally unaccountable for the damage they caused.

It would be moronic to claim that the government knows best, or that massive bureaucracy is an effective way to make decisions, but this song and dance about how profit-driven instutitions magically become the most efficient and responsible is absurd.

In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them.

Yes, those factories are often sweatshops. Those roads often damage delicate environment which is needed for eco-tourism, scientific research, or agriculture. Those mines can be unregulated death-traps for miners in addition to causing toxic runoff pollution of local water supplies. None of these problems concern the investor, just the local population. In short, the "infrastructure" eagerly pushed by foriegn investors really isn't infrastructure for the improvement of the country or it's people so much as infrastructure for the improvement of the investor's bottom line. Sure, some officials are just corrupt fucks, but has it ever occured to you that there might be good reasons to try to restrict, regulate, and/or tax foreign companies trying to exploit your sovereign nation?

I agree with the sentiment that people need to be given the freedom to take care of themselves, but I don't think that empowering and depending on exploitive investors and multinational conglomerates is the way to give people that freedom.

Simpler way to measure it!

[Rockgod]

You could do all that or just measure the costs incurred maintaining that vehicle in terms of $/mile or miles/$. This makes details of the fuel used irrelevant. This way most economic car would be the one that gives more miles per buck. And yeah we could keep all the pollution norms in place to make sure that the new type of fuel would be easy on environment.

Re:Simpler way to measure it!

[Eivind Eklund]

Well, I'm from Norway - I think we have the highest gasoline price in the world. I just believe it is STILL underpriced, and that the correct thing to do would be to make the price real - in other words, include the cost of cleaning up after negative sides of the gas. Markets are very very good at optimizing, but they have to have the correct input price. The price of a resource isn't the cost of getting it out of the ground - it's the cost of getting it out of the ground plus the cost of cleaning up afterwards.

Re:Simpler way to measure it!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

And even with our absurdly high tax rates on fuel, some political parties are still talking about adding mega-taxes on "highly polluting vehicles" (as in, extra thousands of pounds per year for having one).

The thing is, I used to drive a little 1.2-litre Vauxhall Corsa (1995 model) to work. Now I drive a 2-litre turbo Subaru Impreza WRX (2003 model). The former was significantly more fuel efficient (though as an interesting anecdote, far less fuel efficient than the newer model) and would be in one of the lowest bands for these new "environmental taxes". The latter is deemed a monster, and would be in the highest or second-highest band. And yet in reality, the WRX's emissions aren't much higher than a typical family saloon.

What's really telling is that when I drove the Corsa, I commuted around a 70 mile round-trip per day to get to work. Now I work in the city where I live, and do maybe 1/10 of that. I generate vastly less pollution now than I used to, and most of what I do generate is sitting in artificially generated traffic queues designed by our local bus-mad council to make car driving unappealing and promote bus use. And yet, these proposed "environmental taxes" would penalise me far more today.

If you insist on using the tax system to make some behaviours unpopular (I question the ethicality of this approach in any context, but that's a different matter) and you want to make pollution from cars unpopular, then taxing fuel rather than the type of vehicle makes far more sense.

Re:One billion dollars for FOSS

[Eivind Eklund]

As an OSS developer, I can say that 1 billion dollar would make fairly little difference, and might make a negative difference. People seem to believe that open source software would be tremendously helped by money. I've worked with a very large open source project (FreeBSD), and have seen how we fairly often have had problems with spending money. Anyway, before, we had the problem of vetting the people that worked on things. We tried just hiring people to do a project for us a few times, and got so-so results in many of the cases. Fortunately, we also had a lot of people that worked as consultants and did FreeBSD stuff in their spare time. So we tried paying one of those to spend more of his time on FreeBSD.

Oops. Bad plan. We got a time disparity: He had lots of time for FreeBSD, and the volunteers didn't have time to catch up...

We seem to have learned a bunch about how to spend money since - there's been pushed some amounts of money through the project (many scales down from a billion dollars, though) and it doesn't seem to mess thing up. However, we spent years learning how to do that, and there's still clear limits on how much money we would be able to spend positively. I suspect Google understands this. Through their Summer of Code projects they seem to be pushing about the right amount of money that open source can gracefully accept. Pushing another billion dollar into the open source economy in a sudden fashion would in my opinion most likely destroy large parts of the Open Source world.

Eivind.