We bought Titan Aerospace to help us solve some problems such as : giving more people access to Internet, monitoring environmental damage like deforestation, helping during disaster relief, etc.
Disclosure: I work for Google. The above is all what employees are allowed to share, and all I know (I don't even work within or with robotics groups).
All these large tech advertising companies like Google and Facebook talk about huge untapped emerging markets, about moving internationally. Yet these emerging markets lack a very critical component: infrastructure. Yeah, great you want to expand the reach of your ads to new countries but most of those developing countries(3 billion people) still use feature phones and mostly with voice/text.
So why would they wait for the infrastructure to be built?
Google can fly a fleet of autonomous, artificially intelligent, solar powered mesh-connected internet drones across a wide geographic area(wider than what traditional telecoms can offer) offering faster(albeit likely slower compared to developed markets) and cheap internet. It'll practically run itself. They then can turn around and license these drones to the governments of those same developing markets where internet maybe slow or nonexistent or too costly to build in traditional ways(laying pipe, etc).
It's brilliant and potentially a huge money maker due to their, again, first-mover advantage. Facebook had it but blew their cash on da Rift.
Comments
We bought Titan Aerospace to help us solve some problems such as : giving more people access to Internet, monitoring environmental damage like deforestation, helping during disaster relief, etc.
Disclosure: I work for Google. The above is all what employees are allowed to share, and all I know (I don't even work within or with robotics groups).
All these large tech advertising companies like Google and Facebook talk about huge untapped emerging markets, about moving internationally. Yet these emerging markets lack a very critical component: infrastructure. Yeah, great you want to expand the reach of your ads to new countries but most of those developing countries(3 billion people) still use feature phones and mostly with voice/text.
So why would they wait for the infrastructure to be built?
Google can fly a fleet of autonomous, artificially intelligent, solar powered mesh-connected internet drones across a wide geographic area(wider than what traditional telecoms can offer) offering faster(albeit likely slower compared to developed markets) and cheap internet. It'll practically run itself. They then can turn around and license these drones to the governments of those same developing markets where internet maybe slow or nonexistent or too costly to build in traditional ways(laying pipe, etc).
It's brilliant and potentially a huge money maker due to their, again, first-mover advantage. Facebook had it but blew their cash on da Rift.
I'd love to see some automated cable-laying bots that can just dig underground and pull fiber optic cable behind them.