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Alphabet Says It Shut Down Titan Drone Internet Project
- beebeebush 10y agoThere was so much "positive" feedback from everybody about this project. Was it all just "fake news" or did they lie results ? These days upstanding citizens is hard to believe anything from these corporations. All news about anything seems to be fake.
- sidcool 10y agoI guess Project Loon would live on
- startwhat 10y agoGoogle starting to resemble Xerox
- bpicolo 10y agoAnd yet they still have a huge money faucet.
- jayjay71 10y agoI think what's sad is not that they shut down the project soon after acquiring Titan Aerospace, but that they kept it quiet for almost a year. That sort of PR practice makes me worry about their internal culture. Edit: It concerns me because I wonder how many other projects they've announced and shut down without telling us, and what that must be like for the employees who are no doubt under NDA who are shuffled around and unable to talk about it. Imagine if your company were acquired by X, and then you get fired, and you can't even tell your friends or potential employers it's because X axed the project.
- HappyTypist 10y agoCompanies don't typically announce they've shut down a generally unannounced project. I consider Titan one.
- jayjay71 10y agoI don't see it that way - the acquisition was public and there were articles on the project in the past. http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2/8131145/googles-titan-drone-flight-internet-access http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2/8131145/googles-titan-drone...
- pdimitar 10y agoIn a broad interpretation, such a practice could be interpreted as innovation stifling. Buy a solid player and covertly shut it down -- (1) no expenses for you outside the buying and (2) others might/will be discouraged to progress in the area because you, Alphabet/Google sent the message that you will do things in the area.
- hydrogen18 10y agoOn the contrary. Blizzard cancelled a project also called Titan which they had never actually publicly announced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_...
- freehunter 10y agoAlso Microsoft's unreleased booklet PC, Microsoft Courier. Never officially announced as anything other than a concept, but they did offer an official notice that the project was canceled.
- asynchronous13 10y agoBut if you buy something for a lot of money, and then you figure it out you paid way too much you don't typically walk around bragging about it.
- jayjay71 10y agoOwning up to mistakes is the fastest way to make progress. Waiting so long to admit that a project failed worries me. X is supposed to be a moonshot factory, where failures are celebrated and reality dictates that the majority of their undertakings will fail. To me, the delay is indicative of a culture more concerned with appearances than substance. Maybe X had good reasons for staying quiet for so long, but unless they say why it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.
- sangnoir 10y ago> Owning up to mistakes is the fastest way to make progress. Pretending they never happened is indicative of an opaque culture that is more concerned with appearances than substance. What makes you think this didn't happen internally?
- jayjay71 10y agoI don't know what happened internally. But if that happened internally and they weren't willing to announce it externally, that shows they are concerned with appearances. And if that didn't happen internally then they have a cultural issue where they are afraid to embrace failure and learn from it. Obviously I have limited information and I am not trying to define X based on this one event. But I do think it says something about the culture there.
- ZeroFries 10y agoEvery company is concerned with appearance. It's how they're judged.
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- Animats 10y agoThat seems to have happened to some of the robot companies Google bought. Bot and Dolly [1], which did robot-assisted special effects for Hollywood, had actual products, customers, and film credits in major movies. Now they're just gone. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6JcybgDFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6JcybgDFo
- baq 10y agomy guess is they realized a LEO constellation is simply a better idea. google invested $1B in spacex after all.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThat's what I don't understand. If they pushed this technology further (high-altitude, solar powered drones) it seems it could take over a big chunk of satellite industry. If you don't actually need space, then solar drones seem like so much better option - significantly cheaper to make, significantly cheaper to launch, etc.
- Grue3 10y agoMaybe it's easier to keep things orbiting in space than floating in the air? The earth atmosphere is not as predictable.
- baq 10y agomy thoughts exactly, and also no problem with keeping the batteries charged overnight while flying, no FAA/other countries' counterparts issues, etc.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> no problem with keeping the batteries charged overnight while flying Satellites in LEO have night and day cycles too, albeit shorter. But you have more problems with keeping batteries cool during the day and warm during the night, and also each additional gram you want to add to a satellite costs a lot of money thanks to the magic^Wtyranny of rocket equation - so you can't just spam solar cells and batteries like you could on an aircraft. > no FAA/other countries' counterparts issues, etc. Space is pretty regulated too; you can't just lob a piece of junk into whatever orbit you want and call it a day.
- tim333 10y ago
- bsn54 10y agoFree internet for all remains a dream forever I guess!sad indeed!
- tim333 10y agoWell the gear costs something. Cheap internet for all may be doable.
- mirekrusin 10y agoIt's a shame (non-military segments of) governments don't do this kind of projects. Instead we're spending tons of money on rusting tanks, flying killing machines and what not.
- briandear 10y agoLet's pretend the US ended all military spending. Would you think that wars and defense would just become irrelevant? A strong military prevents wars. Would Taiwan be free of it weren't for all those "flying killing machines?" Would South Korea or Japan even exist if it weren't for the military strength of the US? The main reason we didn't go to war in Europe against the Soviets was because of all of those 'rusting tanks.' Communism didn't fall because of luck; the US outspent and out produced the Soviets and bankrupted them. Threats to freedom still exist and they aren't stopped without diplomacy backed by the threat of force. Most of the most significant innovations of modern history came about because of free-market capitalism, not because of governments -- with very few exceptions. The role of government isn't to innovate -- it's to maintain an environment that makes innovation possible.
- celticninja 10y agoI would say that many significant innovations have been driven by the military applications. Rocket technology and drones are 2 that come immediately to mind but I am sure there are many others. Not defending the military industrial complex though.
- 10y ago
- TeMPOraL 10y agoInteresting. Though I wish someone pursued this particular tech (solar-powered drones) further - high-altitude, long-duration drones could be a good replacement for many things we use satellites for, and drones would be much cheaper to launch...
- AnkhMorporkian 10y agoThere are lots of companies working on light solar-powered drones, and in fact some of them call them pseudo-satellites. Airbus, Boeing, NASA, DARPA... the list goes on and on. This really isn't a setback for the field in general.
- fdsaaf 10y agoNever hire executives from Wall Street. Not even once.
- wpietri 10y agoAs Wilde had it: "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
- bane 10y agoA few nights ago, over a liberal quantity of beers, my friends and I came up with our latest nonsensical conspiracy theory. Google was started by some of a group of time travelers who were sent back in time from an apocalyptic future bringing advanced technology with them. They would use just enough of the tech to make vast sums of money, then use that money to invest in the tech that destroyed their future world. By investing in tech they already know would work, they would vacuum up all the resources and talent around that technology so that nobody else would bother (because who could come in cold and compete against a titan like google?) and then some time later kill all of the projects very publicly in order to make us all think that these technologies were nonviable. Except instead with every piece of world changing technology they killed, they were buying their future Earths freedom from the apocalypse they were fleeing from, even if that future they were creating destroyed their own and left humanity in a just post-agrarian stage of development. This group has been infiltrating our timeline for decades, first with blimps, then Atari, then Xerox, now Google. Their motto is "save us before we destroy us"
- pawadu 10y agoAt this rate people will soon use "alphabet" as a verb the same way they made "google" into a verb: "we were doing steady progress but 3 months before release the management decided to alphabet the project and send everyone home."
- pluma 10y agoThat'd be great because "google" as a verb already has other meanings ("search with a search engine").
- pawadu 10y agoIsn't there a legal name for this (i.e. company name/product becoming a common word)? I think it has legal implication for a trademark, but in the case of Alphabet it was already a common word so it probably has no meaning.
- mattnewton 10y agoYou could be thinking of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark Or the related term "genericide"
- pawadu 10y agoThats is, thanks!
- amorphid 10y ago> At this rate people will soon use "alphabet" as a verb the same way they made "google" into a verb: New headline => Alphabet alphabetizes Titan Drone Internet Project
- PaulHoule 10y agoOh yeah, Loon is going to be so much more feasible. Loon makes the spatial economics of providing internet so much worse since it has to cover the 3/4 of the world that is ocean plus all of the places that are deeply uninhabited. To get fiber into rural places you just have to parallel the electric lines. Except there is something ritually unclean about wires and we can't do it.
- trhway 10y ago>To get fiber into rural places you just have to parallel the electric lines. you can run the Internet signal on the same electric wires.
- euyyn 10y agoWhy would you need the balloons flying over the ocean? They can control their longitude. Plenty of rural places in third-world countries without an electric grid too.
- autotypo 10y agoUnattended wires will be sold as scrap.
- yousry 10y agoI can assure you that a time travel longer than 0.00125 seconds into the past is not possible for the near future.
- iplaw 10y agoSo the Titan Project got Alphabit?
- pgt 10y agoCached version to counter HN effect: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dtWSiWi8N-AJ:pascaleggert.de/macpro.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=za http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dtWSiWi...
- asynchronous13 10y agoThis article has a few details that are very different than the way I heard it. What follows are rumors, but I work in this industry so I have a few sources that I trust. Google did not win the bidding over Facebook. Facebook actually won the bidding with a bid of about 60 million dollars. Facebook pulled out during the due diligence phase. Google swooped in and picked it up for about 20 million after Facebook pulled out. (Rumors remember, I can't find sources for these numbers right now) Internally, Google was very quickly disappointed in their purchase. They found out that they had pretty much bought a nice PowerPoint slide deck and not much else. Titan still had a long way to go before they had a viable drone. Anyway, that is the rumor that I heard. I'm only somewhat envious of the drone companies that are selling out for tens of millions of dollars, while I sit here and work my butt off to keep making a product. https://youtu.be/b7SjOOuTct0 https://youtu.be/b7SjOOuTct0
- jpm_sd 10y agoAs an ex-Xer, I can tell you that the PowerPoint presentation wasn't even that good.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoApple's car Blizzard's game Google's drone Lesson: if you want your project to be cancelled, call it Titan.
- umeshunni 10y agoVery large, ambitious/vague projects seem to get the codename Titan. Unsurprisingly, they eventually fail.
- sangnoir 10y agoUnless you're Nvidia.
- stichers 10y agoTitanDB - today forked to become JanusGraph https://blog.grakn.ai/janus-launch-22be6ac3b197#.q9pme0jfd https://blog.grakn.ai/janus-launch-22be6ac3b197#.q9pme0jfd
- nickhalfasleep 10y agoMuch like aircraft-delivered nuclear weapons, are these being quickly replaced by impending low orbit micro-satellite constellations under development now?
- Gravityloss 10y agoThey're leaving the market to Airbus Zephyr, which was in the lead already? https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military-aircraft/uav/zephyr/ https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military-air...