The company announced Friday morning that it will open its first dedicated research lab on the west coast early this year. The facility will be used as a way to collaborate with all the tech firms that are in the area.

“Ford has an incredible heritage of driving innovation in the transportation and manufacturing sectors during the past 107 years,” Paul Mascarenas, Ford chief technical officer and vice president of Research and Innovation, said. “Now it’s time to prepare for the next 100 years, ushering in a new era of collaboration and finding new partners to help us transform what it means to be an automaker.”

Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally will speak more on the new research lab during Ford’s CES Innovation Power Panel keynote on January 11.

The company said that Ford Research and Innovation, the company’s engineering arm, will open the new research lab in the first quarter. Its focus will be keeping pace with consumer trends and preparing for the future by investing in technologies like cloud computing.

The lab will connect with Ford’s Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, California and Ford employees working with Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

“Silicon Valley represents a deep and dynamic technology neighborhood and is far from Dearborn,” K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for open innovation with Ford Research and Innovation, said. “With so many opportunities and so much potential, our new lab will allow us to scout new technologies and partners in their own environment and continue our expansion beyond the traditional automaker mindset to drive innovation for a better mobility experience.”

The number of employees at the new lab will be comparable to a tech start-up. The emphasis will be placed on quality over quantity.

The new lab will not replace work already being done at Ford’s other research labs in Dearborn, Michigan, its European lab in Aachen, Germany or the recently opened technology office in Nanjing, China.

Some of the things that Ford’s R&D groups are working on right now include OpenXC, a research platform that allows developers access to Ford vehicles to connect with cloud-based apps and services, and allowing access to the cars’ sensors to develop apps that connect with their vehicles.

“Ford integrates technologies, software and electronics at the same pace as the most innovative companies in the world – our platform just happens to be the car,” Mascarenas said. “The new Silicon Valley lab will propel us further as we look at the many facets of life where mobility interacts with society and see how we can make those experiences better for millions of customers around the world.”

A post on the LatLong Blog announced late yesterday, "Audi is the first car manufacturer to bring Google Earth directly into the vehicle and to combine that with a set of useful Google services.  We’ve worked closely with them to create a compelling in-car experience integrated with the Audi navigation system.  You’ll be able to enjoy 3D satellite imagery, terrain information and a wealth of additional geo information relevant to your current location: layers like Wikipedia to learn more about your surroundings or Panoramio images to get another view."

The post then continued, "To help you figure out where you want to go and how to get there, we’ve also brought Google Maps and Local Search into the A8, and linking it to your desk.  You can send business listings directly from Google Maps to your car: search for an address at your desk, send it to the car, and by the time you go to the parking lot your car will know where to go.  While in the car, you can use Google Local Search in the same rich quality as at your desk."

Now, car guys may wonder if Audi couldn’t have used this project’s budget to squeeze a few more horsepower out of the A8′s engine.  More sane folks would probably just appreciate a lower price.  Still, this tech is sure to prove useful at times, if only to stave off boredom while stuck in traffic jams.

Look for the trickle-down effect to take place, too, eventually putting Google Earth within reach of more and more drivers.

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Not that I have too much sympathy for those salespeople, as the numbers may indicate encouraging things about consumers.  You know – that they are shopping around and logically considering their options, rather than falling in love with one model’s heated cup holders.

eMarketer’s numbers (which were actually provided by Borrell Associates) are interesting regardless of one’s interpretation, however.  “Local online advertising by automakers, dealers and individual sellers will escalate to $4.2 billion in 2011, up from $2.3 billion in 2006,” predicts Lisa Phillips.  She goes on to note that the current $2.3 billion represents 11 percent of overall spending on ads.

Yet, as mentioned earlier, the payoff – shoppers becoming buyers – just isn’t happening.  “The NADA’s ‘2006 Dealership Internet Survey’ shows a monthly average of 319.9 unsolicited prospects visited dealer sites in 2006, compared with just 227.9 per month in 2005,” reports Phillips.

“But of the qualified leads these dealerships received – 52.9 in 2006, up from 29.5 in 2005 – the conversion rate to sales dropped, from 26.4% in 2005 to 19.2% in 2006,” she continues.

What could auto dealers do to increase that rate?  Well, it might be good if they somehow made their advertising more effective.  But, for better or for worse, they might also get some results by sprinkling a few more heated and cooled cup holders around.

To be honest, I can’t process all of it in what we’ll call a “timely fashion.” But Austin has augmented the equations with about 3,500 words of text, and those I can handle. He starts with the basics, writing, “Google’s PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content.”

Austin goes on to describe the “monthly popularity contest among all pages on the web to decide which pages are most important,” and here’s where matrices (not the automobiles, sadly) and all other manner of math tools come into play.

After working through several steps and arriving at an intermediate solution, the paper drops a disclaimer: “there can be no absolute measure of a page’s importance, only relative measures for comparing the importance of two pages through statements such as ‘Page A is twice as important as Page B.’”

In another blessedly understandable snippet of English, Austin concludes that we can “interpret a web page’s PageRank as the fraction of time that a random surfer spends on that web page.”

The mathematician is even kind enough to include an explanation. “This may make sense if you have ever surfed around for information about a topic you were unfamiliar with: if you follow links for a while, you find yourself coming back to some pages more often than others. Just as ‘All roads lead to Rome,’ these are typically more important pages.”

To get into the details of the article, however, you’ll need to set aside a couple of hours and possibly call the American Mathematical Society for help.

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Among the vehicles involved in the recall are the Tacoma, Tundra, Sequoia, Landcruiser Prado and 4Runner/Hilux Surf, built between May 2001 and December 2003.

Most of the recalled vehicles are from the U.S. with 789,000 of them being recalled in North America, 23,800 in Japan, 19,000 in Europe, and 12,000 in Australia. As BBC News reports,

The company recently reported a fifth year of record profits on the back of higher sales to the US and China.

Toyota is not the only Japanese vehicle maker that has had to recall vehicles. Profits at Mitsubishi Motors have tumbled and executives are still facing law suits amid allegations that they covered up defects for a number of years.

Only one accident involving one of the vehicles in question has been reported, and that was in Japan. Most of the vehicles being recalled from Japan are Hilux Surf and Landcruiser Prados.

Toyota shares fell 0.78% in morning trading ending at 3,820 yen. The shares went down about 0.8% in Tokyo after the recall announcement was made.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.