Why One Silicon Valley City Said “No” to Google – Next City

Beautiful article, nice graphics.

Even when they do get the benefits they want, a small municipality has reason to fear becoming heavily reliant on one big player. After all, Mountain View once had Intel and Sun Microsystems; Hewlett-Packard packed up its Cupertino office in 2012. That’s a big loss to a tiny city, but the region remains largely unchanged. Mountain View may not want millions more square feet of Google office space and the community benefits that come with it, but another town just down the road likely will.

Big companies in small cities are bound to exert some of their own power, either purposefully or passively. Much of this seems inevitable — it’s how this valley was named “Silicon” decades ago. But these companies are no longer dealing just in silicon. Regardless of Google’s loss in North Bayshore, soon Mountain View will feature Google-designed cars running on Google-funded roads planned by Google-paid city engineers. Where they once built semiconductors and software, tech is shaping the future of human communication, infrastructure, transit, law and collective lived experience — all the things that make up a city.

via Why One Silicon Valley City Said “No” to Google – Next City.

Waze – Did it Steal Data from a Rival Traffic App? – Neurogadget.com

How did PhantomAlert discover the theft?

PhantomAlert claims that it became aware of the data theft after realizing that Waze displayed its proprietary information. The traffic app maker claimed that Waze used information for which they never obtained authorization or consent. PhantomAlert goes ahead to say that Waze not only copied it’s database, but also went a step further and incorporated the same on its platform. PhantomAlert made these claims through its lawyers when filing the lawsuit against Waze.

via Waze – Did it Steal Data from a Rival Traffic App? – Neurogadget.com.

Google’s Self-Driving Car Pals Revealed – IEEE Spectrum

at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, project director Chris Urmson named Continental, Roush, Bosch, ZFLS, RCO, FRIMO, Prefix, and LG as companies that had helped to build the pod-like vehicle.

via Google's Self-Driving Car Pals Revealed – IEEE Spectrum.

Specs: plug-in electric

Roush Enterprises: from Detroit, design integration and final assembly of 100 units
LG: battery supplier, possibly similar to the systems in Tesla’s vehicles (modular lithium ion system)
Bosch: long-range radar, electric powertrain supplier; about to acquire ZFLS (German steering systems company)
ZFLS: parallel, redundant motors
RCO Engineering: seats designer
FRIMO: plastic and composite components for interior/exterior
Prefix: general automotive design and manufacturing engineering firm
Continental: “intelligent transportation systems” business unit based in SV, developing competing autonomous vehicle technologies; supplying tires and some electronics/components
Nvidia: microprocessors for object detection and recognition

LIDAR units (currently $70k) are being designed in-house.

The Places You’ll Go – James Fallows – The Atlantic

The major change in mapping in the past decade, as opposed to in the previous 6,000 to 10,000 years, is that mapping has become personal.

There’s an Android app we’ve released called Field Trip. You download it, and it says, “I don’t want to bother you, so how often should I talk to you?” You tell it “all the time” or “rarely” or whatever, and then you turn off your phone and put it in your pocket and don’t think about it again.

Then when you’re walking around, say in Washington, D.C., the phone will buzz and say, “You are 25 feet from an accurate map of 2,700 solar objects. If you go over there to the Einstein Memorial, you can see them.” Or you might be walking down the street and it will beep and say, “The rowhouse one block to the left is the No. 1–rated Greek restaurant within 500 miles,” or maybe: “Around the corner behind you is where a scene from your favorite movie was filmed.” It is using your location to search in a database of “interesting things,” and it learns what kinds of things you care about. It means having your life enlightened by travel knowledge, everywhere, or getting to walk around with local experts who know your tastes, wherever in the world you go.

via The Places You’ll Go – James Fallows – The Atlantic.