According to Google CEO Larry Page, Google is planning to improve cities and people’s lives all over the world by creating Sidewalk Labs, a new independent company. Sidewalk Labs’ mission is to improve people’s life, businesses and governments in cities by building new infrastructure, platforms and products, applying new technology and investing in partnerships in order to solve any major issues cities all over the world face everyday, like housing and living costs, transportation, health, energy usage, traffic, equity, etc.
“We are at the beginning of a historic transformation in cities. [...] At a time when the concerns about urban equity, costs, health and the environment are intensifying, unprecedented technological change is going to enable cities to be more efficient, responsive, flexible and resilient,” said former CEO of Bloomberg Dan Doctoroff in a press release.“We hope that Sidewalk will play a major role in developing technology products, platforms and advanced infrastructure that can be implemented at scale in cities around the world,” Doctoroff added.
Former deputy mayor of New York City Dan Doctoroff will run Google’s new company Sidewalk Labs. It is not announced yet the amount of money invested in the new project, but according to Google CEO, the investment will be ‘modest.’ “By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems. [...] Making long-term, 10X bets like this is hard for most companies to do, but Sergey and I have always believed that it’s important. And as more and more people around the world live, work and settle in cities, the opportunities for improving our urban environments are endless,” wrote Page in a Google post.
Google, the Silicon Valley giant that has been very active during the last years by applying new technologies, building a self-driving car and many other projects, is not the first company to focus on improving urban issues all around the world. Tech giants like IBM and Cisco have already invested in improving the life in cities by applying information technology and improving cities’ efficiency and making people’s life way easier.
New York University’s Center for the Urban Science and Progress, and the University of Chicago’s Urban Center for Computation and Data are also being involved and are ‘applying modern digital technology to cities’ physical systems,’ according to The New York Times. “It’s great to see an ambitious private sector initiative like this recognize that cities are important,” director of the N.Y.U. urban science center director Steven Koonin said. “And there are technology opportunities, but they are complicated,” Koonin added.
Page said that Sidewalk Labs will be similar to Calico (short for California Life Company), an independent Research and development biotech company established by Google Inc. and Arthur D in 2013. Calico’s goal is to combat aging and associated diseases. Last September the company run by Arthur D in collaboration with pharmaceutical company AbbVie announced that the two companies would build a research center in the San Francisco Bay Area to fight various diseases that affect the elderly.