An in-the-works project called Flutter provides an inexpensive, power-efficient alternative to Wi-Fi and covers an area a hundred times larger. Get enough transmitters to communicate, and you could cover whole cities. This is the future of controlling our connected devices in the Internet of Things.

Google Public Alerts provides emergency information during natural disasters. But government agencies often store information in closed formats, making it harder to share and analyze data. Google.org is promoting the adoption of international standards of web data to speed up response efforts.

On the news that Google Reader, the aggregator of choice for many people's RSS feeds, was retiring, one coder took matters into his own hands and created a veritable clone. He kept the UI basic, posted his code publicly, and invited anyone who'd like to run it to do so—in true open-source fashion.