Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City!

Awesome news for Kansas City last week! Being a Kansas City resident and living in Kansas, Google's ultra high-speed broadband announcement was very exciting.

People are asking what's possible with this new infrastructure. I was fortunate enough to speak with executives from Cerner Corporation on the day of the announcement and they immediately thought of imaging. With 1 Gbps Internet speeds you could stream live video and images of CAT Scans, MRI's, X-Rays, video fluoroscopy treatments and much more. It would be awesome to have a local physician sitting in a Kanas City school reviewing these images in realtime with the patient and the students (given the patient's permission of course). I think that would certainly capture the imagination of a student and perhaps light a passion that will last a lifetime. This could also all be done on a web-centric operating system like Chrome OS as 1 Gbps is about the same speed you can pull data from your local hard drive.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This broadband project directly furthers that mission. Most people have no idea what Google's mission is or how broadly and literally company leadership takes it.

Let's take one example that seems an "odd" thing for Google to be working on, self-driving cars. We've reached a point when most, not all, of us take Google.com for granted. Younger generations have no idea what a pain it was to find information in a single book much less an entire library. Future generations will also take self-driving cars for granted.

How do self-driving cars fit into Google's mission? The easiest way to understand this is to think of the car from the perspective of an individual who is blind. Even those of us with sight are often blind - blind to that stop sign, traffic signal, traffic jam over the hill, a pedestrian or biker.

A person who is blind does not have access to information. They lack access to information about the location of other cars, of the lanes on the road, of street signs, etc. To a person lacking sight, yellow lines, stop signs and brake lights are not useful. Should Google succeed in its mission, information will be universally accessible - sight will not be required to take a car to your destination.

How close is Google to delivering self-driving cars? Probably closer than we think, this is a very challenging problem to solve with LOTS of variables. Google is good at solving big problems though and 35 million miles are already driven daily using Google Navigation so Google knows how to get there, they just need to keep working on the rest...

...and it looks like they're getting pretty damn good at it already.