Google Gets Into Battery Arms Race

"International Business Machines"? Is this the 1960s?

"These efforts have so far produced only incremental gains, a contrast for tech companies accustomed to regular, dramatic leaps in the efficiency of semiconductors."The difference is that the whole field of semiconductor technology is only about 60 years old. It's still a relatively young area and breakthrough advancements can still happen.Batteries have been around since before Benjamin Franklin flew his kite. Like steam power, it's a very old technology. Everything easy has been tried long ago.

The Holy Grail! Great minds at work with lots of money pouring into technology of batteries. Something good will happen!!

Tesla CTO has made the brilliant presentation on this subject couple of weeks ago. Now at least three Trillion dollar industries are investing into Lithium Technology: Mobile Devices, Electric Cars and Energy storage. Chinese Internet Giants are investing in electric cars using the favourable state-level supportive environment in China. Now we have Google joining the lithium race.

Musk is putting 1000 million into a lithium battery plant in Utah, yes? That says to me that nothing better is close.

Where is the fundamental physics behind new promising battery technologies? Without a foundation, you can only tinker around the edges for next to nothing improvements.

I don't have confidence in Google making anything... cars, batteries, whatever... until they figure out that the words I type into their search box are supposed be on the web pages they list as results.If one person can invent the light bulb, you can pour billions of dollars into a bunch of over-paid under performers and still never achieve success.

Battery of the future: aluminum-ion—safer, longer lasting, faster charging, lighter, flexible, cheaper—compared to lithium-Ion. Needs work to increase voltage.

4 people working at Google is s story. NOT!Every company from GM, Apple, Samsung... Has more effort and talent doing the same thing.

One of the issues is that as you cram more and more energy into a smaller and smaller space, you're essentially building bombs. It's a balancing act.

Before we get there, shouldn't some intelligence in product design be devoted to having a mobile phone, say, with a battery that can be easily slid on and off without having to open the back cover?