IT HAS been a busy month for the Internet giant.
Only on Tuesday, it launched its much-awaited foray into mobile phones, even as it celebrates a short but trailblazing 10 years of existence this month.
On Thursday, in typical Google style, the company is asking for ideas to change the world, through a new project called 10100.
Part of Google's 10th year celebrations, the plan - Project 10100 - is to award US$10 million (S$14 million) for up to five ideas that can help as many people in the world as possible.
The company will identify 100 best ideas and then ask Internet users to vote and select the final 20. From here, a panel of judges will narrow down to five ideas for funding.
How can US$10 million change the world, you ask, when a hundred times that amount had failed to stop the famines and wars in Africa?
Google says it’s not a publicity stunt, that the money’s not aid money, but a way to tap on the collective brainpower of Net users.
What kind of ideas? Google gave the example of the Hippo Water Roller, a simple device that lets Africans roll a barrel of water along the ground over different terrain, instead of having to balance it on the head, as they usually do.
The device, which lets its users carry more water and more efficiently, is the kind of stuff one identifies with Google, and indeed the Silicon Valley from whence it spawned.
I’m talking about something impossibly simple, incredibly practical.
That, in essence, is what made Google its money. Its website, as it was a decade ago, is still little more than a text bar where you typed in a term to look up stuff.
But behind the façade, a number of technologies work together to understand what you are looking for when you type, say, “Android”. That, by the way, is the name of Google’s new mobile phone software, as well as a robot designed to mimic a human.
The smart thing about Google’s search is that it can roughly pick out what you are looking for, whether it is the software or the robot.
As the company turns 10 as the world's most power Internet company, people are beginning to ask if it would one day dominate the Net like Microsoft dominated everyone's computer screens.
US antitrust regulators are considering a case against Google, which owns more than 60 per cent of the online search market there. And privacy advocates are asking if Google knows too much about Web surfers.
Still, those teething pains aside, Google and indeed other Web 2.0, or second wave of dot.coms, have come to represent what is good about Silicon Valley.
This is a place where dreamers (think Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford graduate students) can dream up a big idea, make it work and earn millions from it.
This is where millionaires are dressed in bicycle shorts and suits alike, and where bankruptcy and failure are part of corporate education, not the end of the road.
We’re not talking about pyramid schemes here. The Valley, as it’s called by those working there, has spawned Netscape, Hewlett-Packard and countless other technology firms that have changed lives.
From this famed San Jose area, one finds not just innovation but optimism.
That, in a quirky way, shows in what Google is doing with this “change the world” project today. It’s a dream, but who knows, the world’s problems can always be solved with a small start.