Smith is replacing Google.org's current chief, Larry Brilliant, who's getting put out to pasture with some vague job involving "philanthropy evangelism." (In Hollywood, they give retiring executives producer deals; in Silicon Valley, they make you an "evangelist," a flowery marketing title which really means you get paid to give speeches at conferences and have lunch with people who also don't matter.) She'll now oversee do-gooding investments, like Google's push into renewable energy and disease tracking. That's on top of her day job wrangling deals with Google partners like MySpace (a relative success) and Facebook (an abject failure). She's close to founder Sergey Brin, a source of considerable soft power in the supposedly unhierarchical company.

Meanwhile, her spouse, Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, gets most of her power in the industry from running D, an annual tech-CEO conference she organizes with Walt Mossberg, the paper's powerful gadget reviewer. Mossberg gave Swisher away at the couple's first, unofficial wedding; the couple later got officially married before the passage of Proposition 8, California's gay-marriage ban.

Swisher has a lengthy disclaimer about the relationship on her AllThingsD tech blog, and the couple have wrapped up Smith's Google holdings in trusts so Swisher can reasonably claim she doesn't control them. People in the industry still look askance at the relationship, questioning how Swisher might have an ulterior motive when she's tough on Google competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. As Smith's ambit grows, those questions will rise in volume.

But Swisher causes as much trouble at work for Smith as Smith causes for Swisher. The latter's savage reporting on the antitrust implications of Google selling ads on Yahoo helped derail an agreement between the companies, and almost got Google sued by the government. Smith's job makes things difficult for Swisher as a reporter; Swisher's reporting gets Smith's bosses in hot water with the feds. If these two are still together, it must be love.

(Photo by Lane Hartwell)

Considering how CEO Eric Schmidt funnels money to his real estate-developer wife Wendy Schmidt through charitable organizations and cofounder Sergey Brin's wife Anne Wojcicki cashed in on Google's money for her vanity gene-sequencing startup 23andMe, Google.org seems more like another vehicle for the Mountain View advertising firm's executives to lavish money on friends and family.

Nice to see NASA was able to find room at Moffett Field for Makani Power, the startup headed by kite-surfing dudes Saul Griffith (Tim O'Reilly's son-in-law) and Don "Father of Kite Surfing" Montague, which received $10M bucks from google.org, the foundation headed by kite-surfing dudes Larry Page & Sergey Brin.

So to recap, the Valley is a meritocracy, and there's money for anyone with a good idea. Assuming "anyone" means "marrying into the local entrepreneurial aristocracy" and "merit" means "can totally shred at kite surfing."

Hopefully some of that power will go to San Francisco, which is already struggling to meet its power needs, and working on building new fossil fuel-powered plants. Because the City's hunky god-mayor, Gavin Newsom, wants to build a fleet of electric cars and a network of charging stations, and that power currently comes from coal and oil. Thankfully, Newsom is practically BFF with PG&E, so surely they can bask together in the warm rays of publicity and profits, respectively. (Illustration by BrightSource Energy)

What the project doesn't do is compare the environmental cost per person-mile to that of Google's private commuter bus fleet. Nor does it compare the total carbon footprint over time of a newly-manufactured plug-in electric hybrid to, say, converting an existing automobile or improving public transportation. But then, shiny new cars are the classic California status symbol, and alternative-fuel vehicles are just the latest form of conspicuous consumption — the paint job just screams, "Look at me and how environmentally conscious I am!" (Photo Google.org)

Far more important than the amount of money you put in is the way you nurture the work that you do. The way you conceive it. The way you think about it strategically. The people that you get to work with to, ah, to tackle a problem.