So Sunday night I had dinner with a friend who works for Google X. My friend can’t talk about what he’s working on, but he did say that there’s an announcement coming up soon about one of the X projects. A quick visit to the internets confirmed this, with absolutely no more information than I had already.
Google has recently moved two of their top executives over to covert projects at X. Will they be working on Glass, or something entirely different? With all the Glass news at SXSW, it seems unlikely another announcement about Glass is in the offing. It’s also definitely not a space elevator. (Damn! I want to travel Friday-style!)
With failure an inbuilt feature of the moonshot process, it’s part of Google X culture to keep their blue-sky goals under wraps. We’ll just have to wait and see.
However, my friend tipped me to the public arena for the X team’s innovative thinking- Solve for X. At the Google-supported forum’s annual event in February, eighteen radical technology moonshot proposals were viewed and shared. You can watch them at solveforx.com and contribute your own ideas.
And of course, the Google Lunar X Prize teams are hard at work. The 30 million dollar competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the Moon was first announced in 2007, and the annual Team Summit has just concluded in Santiago, Chile. Maybe they’ll build my space elevator?
Suzanne on Google plus
this post originally appeared on the T324 Blog.