The electricity that has allowed Google to power an attempt a latter-day Bell Labs has always been ads, and the company wants to make sure it doesn’t run out of juice. Maybe someday the search giant will be making astounding sums of cash from fleets of driverless taxis or brain chips, but for now it needs to get ads to your eyeballs. From Rolfe Winkler at the WSJ: 

“Advertising may be coming to your thermostat and lots of other strange places, courtesy of Google.

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on ‘refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.’

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like Facebook and Twitter both disclose. Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will ‘continue to evolve’ as more ‘smart’ devices roll out.

‘Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,’ the company said in the filing.”