Whole Travel Blog

The San Francisco-based design firm Mike and Maaike, which designed Google’s G1 phone, has come up with the Autonomobile, a concept for a self-driving, low-speed electric car of the future. They acknowledge that this car will probably never be built - especially considering the years of skepticism and months of anticipation before the G1 was launched - but they hope to at least provide some inspiration for the future of ground transportation.

Who needs a steering wheel? Give me a couch!

The design by Mike and Maaike takes the opposite approach to Tesla Motors, which is working to spur interest in electric vehicles by making them sporty and fun to drive. So instead of all the bells and whistles of a sports car, the Autonomobile’s design is all about quality time while in transit. A lounge area with no steering wheel, accelerator or rear-view mirror allows comfortable seating for 7, whether working on computers, watching television or just relaxing and conversing. Technology has a long way to go before it can provide this type of experience, but hopefully this provides inspiration for the designers of our future transports.

Just in time for Halloween, Google released a haunted house full of energy-saving suggestions, calculating the corresponding amount of money and carbon emissions saved if followed.

Check out their tips here.

Yesterday, TechCrunch mentioned BusinessWeek’s CTO article which discusses Obama’s plan to hire a CTO of the United States should he win the presidency race come November.  Among the names in the mix for this job are internet evangelist Vint Cerf, CEOs Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Bezos (of Microsoft and Amazon, respectively), as well as Princeton professor, Ed Felton.

Tasked with the responsibility of overseeing “a job-creating national broadband build-out,” another key element of this job is a green one: to create and manage a federally-backed $50 billion green tech fund.

Read more about Obama’s CTO plan at BusinessWeek here.

Google recently announced its efforts to green its data centers, wanting to operate the “world’s most efficient data bases.” However, beyond just efficient data centers, before the end of the year, two of its data centers “will run on 100% recycled water, and by 2010 [Google] expects recycled water to provide 80% of [their] total water consumption.” They even created a website dedicated to “sustainable computing” which outlines its green mission and Google’s commitment to being carbon neutral as a company. Will this mean that Larry and Sergey will be buying carbon offsets for each trip they take aboard the Google jet?

Check out details of Google’s greening efforts here.