Google internet balloon spinoff Loon still looking for its wings
reuters.com
reuters.com
Disc: Googler.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-03/balloons-floating-ove...
They've got the lowest manual-intervention-to-mile ratio. They have the largest dataset. The largest simulation capacity. The biggest company in backing $. Its technology has the most revenue to date: 500M ;)
Why would Waymo pack up shop and leave? Does Google expect that Nissan will just come in and clean up demand the leftover self driving market?
Why would a company at the forefront of technical achievement decide to exit a market that we know will dominate a huge amount of the world economy? One that may un-employ 3% of all Americans in the first few years.
Google+ was killed despite an active community after Google forgot to patch glaring security holes for years. goo.gl was killed despite thousands of customers. YT Video Annotations. More and more.
Waymo might be killed of once they inevitably drive over a living person by accident. Or because they miss another target. Or maybe because Alphabet's CEO didn't have a good coffee today.
The reason Waymo would be cancelled is simple: self-driving cars are far from a reality. Why would you continue to spend billions of dollars developing something once you realize you have no idea how to develop it?
Obviously if they can make self-driving cars they will make a shitload of money. But why do you assume they can do that when they've missed their public milestones (not to mention their internal milestones), almost the entire original team has left, many of those original team members including the former lead are publicly saying the technology is decades away, and if you talk to anybody in the industry that's worked on it for more than a year they'll tell you it's all demoware?
Everybody always says this unless they live in the Bay Area or Phoenix.
I see multiple self-driving cars per day, sometimes a couple waiting for each other at the same intersection. Self-driving cars have been a reality for me since 2013. The future's here, it's just unevenly distributed.
If the technology has really been a reality since 2013 like you said, why is it still unavailable to the public 6 years later even after Waymo themselves said it would be ready last year and nothing happened? They still haven't let the public see the tech this many years later, still force reporters to sign NDAs and won't even allow them to choose their own routes, still have the vast majority of their hand-picked Early Riders who had to apply for the privilege bound by an NDA.
Have you been in one of those cars?
Even if they don't sell it, I'd fully expect them to get spun off before they take over the market. At some point, just organizationally, they're going to need to be their own company not subject to conflicting priorities from a parent organization.
The core organization doesn't want to focus better, if they did they would shut down every subsidiary that wasn't Google. Instead they're maintaining all of these bets because they realize that Google is about as big as it's going to get, and they need to go to the stock market with a long-term plan that isn't just stagnation.
Alphabet is a technology conglomerate and doesn't pretend to be anything else. They're like GE or Berkshire Hathaway. There's no issue with GE making washing machines at the same time they make jet engines and nuclear reactors, or with Berkshire Hathaway providing insurance, rail freight, and chocolates. Similarly, there's no issue with Waymo and Google both being subsidiaries of Alphabet.
https://www.telesat.com/news-events/telesat-partners-alphabe...
Hydrogen very much can and does go "boom".
https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/8498/how-explo...
The same effect is why natural gas stoves don’t explode in normal use.
The problem is that we can't make new helium, and the rate at which it's being used far exceeds what we capture from natural gas production. A decade ago this was considered a serious problem. https://phys.org/news/2010-08-world-helium-nobel-prize-winne...
Might be the ultimate damper on the technology too. (Though I still think it won't get off the ground, antennas getting cheaper all the time.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2019/05/24/there-is-a-...
Afaik the jist of it is that once it is used it escapes the atmosphere and there is a finite amount of it.
(Safer != inherently safe, to be clear)
No, it wasn't, and no, it doesn't. (The usual, but also wrong, story is that it was coated in solid rocket fuel.)
If there's any advantage to be had by Loon, it's that they _might_ be able to better serve densely populated areas better thanks to their denser cell coverage, and that they are able to provide service over regular 4G signals rather than requiring specially designed (and slightly bulkier) radio equipment.
Do they now have a way to keep them over Puerto Rico? If so, how?
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6551805...
Meet flight system P-496, which Loon’s operations team brought to a controlled landing this Sunday in the Ica region of Peru, where it was collected for analysis. This balloon was launched from Puerto Rico way back on November 18, 2018 and spent 223 days in the stratosphere, breaking our previous flight record of 198 days. P-496 traveled over 180,000 kilometers, circled the globe once, and spent nearly 140 days of its mission testing navigational algorithms over a defined area off the coast of South America. This successful flight and landing is important for a number of reasons. Steadily increasing balloon duration means each flight vehicle can work longer, bringing more efficiency to our overall operations. Continuing to improve our ability to remain above one location for extended periods of time is key to providing consistent coverage to those below. Landing and recovering our balloons safely is part of our commitment to sustainability in our operations. And analyzing this and other balloons will help us understand the properties that increase balloon longevity, with an eye toward future flights that last even longer. The team is already working to break the 223 day record.
Without this crazy entrepreneurial spirit, the government has historically had to step in and subsidize utilities to close the gap (e.g. electricity in rural Texas).
These thin film solar balloons avoid the corrosion of the ocean because they are floating above the clouds, anchored to a ship below. A portion of the solar is used to generate more hydrogen.