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Project Loon

google.com

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Re: Project Loon

#181

Post by gulfie »

After the communications platform goes up, then the other payloads can hitch a ride.

Imaging getting real time video from the stratosphere to everywhere all the time. The weather data alone would be awesome. The traffic data would be great. The IR imagery catching forest fires or amazon jungle burning would be great. An almost real time collection for finding illegal logging or toxic waste dumping.

When there are clouds of these ballons going overhead, who will notice an extra one or two that happen to have militarized payloads.

Re: Project Loon

#182

Post by superasn »

Unless of course it is a trade secret, how wonderful would be if the engineers at Google would release more detailed diagrams of the balloons, circuits, and how it is supposed to work (the pump, antenna and everything, not the simplistic version). Maybe they are having some challenges which can be crowd sourced for ideas too. They have obviously done a lot of research and this idea can certainly spawn other awesome ideas or help other indie projects.

Project like these can be a really nice experiment on teaching and getting ideas from bored internet hackers.

Re: Project Loon

#183

Post by personlurking »

ekr wrote: post #166
temp453463343 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything they're done is centered around ads and getting more data on their users to sell more ads. Even this project, in the end it's about getting more people online to look at their ads. (not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever) EDIT: To those saying they're playing the long game; Playing the long game doesn't make sense. The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor…

Joke: Maybe they have some incentive from NSA or whatever to get and store information from everyone on this planet.

considering the news, makes sense they'd do this

Re: Project Loon

#184

Post by Sven7 »

goldfeld wrote: post #160
Sven7 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrast their behavior, with other companies sitting on mountains of cash. They don't need to do this. Yet they do. That's good enough for me. Though opening up their index and creating a search marketplace might seal the deal.

Whoa, they'd rather do a thousand as many baloons as whatever amount they're doing now, than that last part of your post. That's, you know, core business.

:)

But think about it...right now they have a random bunch of 10 or so tabs (flights, recipes, patents etc) above the search box. Is that it?

To expand search to its full potential that list has to expand.

What better way to do it than create a marketplace? It would be a good experiment to run a pilot in some small country or city and see what happens. Unlimited API access to google search...any app built on top of that platform that gets X number of hits becomes another tab above your search bar...for a price...or advertisers could make it free cause domain based search can get them better targeting.

Re: Project Loon

#185

Post by Geee »

I wouldn't vouch for it until the complete tech stack is open-source, and the devices are manufactured and deployed by someone else than Google. I expect them to be shot down eventually if that doesn't happen.

Re: Project Loon

#186

Post by venomsnake »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #149
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #19

It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going. They built all these new services & products around their core product (search) and it's paid off tremendously. It's definitely something to model future companies off of. When you win the race, don't stop, keep running.

Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project. First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time. Second, this system is extr…

Actually it seems cheap to scale. You need a lot of very very smart software but google have a couple of hundred idling geniuses to spare. And if you change helium with hydrogen (not a big deal if a balloon blows up) - everything else is standard components - i think that if they aim for third world coverage the price of transmission must be cheaper than current wireless. And you got much less regulatory hurdles.

Re: Project Loon

#187

Post by spuz »

Geee wrote: post #185

I wouldn't vouch for it until the complete tech stack is open-source, and the devices are manufactured and deployed by someone else than Google. I expect them to be shot down eventually if that doesn't happen.

What? why? Most networking and routing hardware is proprietary, what's different about balloons?
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