A New Facebook Lab Is Intent on Delivering Internet Access by Drone - Polidicks

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/technology/a-new-facebook-lab-is-intent-on-delivering-internet-access-by-drone.html[/url] [quote]SAN FRANCISCO — Watch out, Google. Facebook is gunning for the title of World’s Coolest Place to Work. And its arsenal includes unmanned drones, lasers, satellites and virtual reality headsets. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Thursday that the company was creating a new lab of up to 50 aeronautics experts and space scientists to figure out how to beam Internet access down from solar-powered drones and other “connectivity aircraft.” To start the effort, Facebook is buying Ascenta, a small British company whose founders helped to create early versions of an unmanned solar-powered drone, the Zephyr, which flew for two weeks in July 2010 and broke a world record for time aloft. “We want to think about new ways of connectivity that dramatically reduce the cost,” said Yael Maguire, engineering director for the new Facebook Connectivity Lab. “We want to explore whether there are ways from the sky to deliver the Internet access.”[/quote] I was questioning facebooks motives, and I was seriously considering that they were basically going to inflates FBs stock worth, then trade it for other companies and just kinda ditch it, but now I think I see what they are doing. For facebooks future I see massive diversification. Sure, the website will be the core thing linking all of their sectors together, but I see them splitting the whole app thing off into it's own game company and delivery service, and using the oculus to enrich that experience. It seems from this article that they are also working towards providing an internet service that covers whole cities or maybe even whole metropolitan areas. I know a lot of people dislike facebook for their ad heavy service, but in all reality they do provide a good smooth service. I'm excited to see what they end up doing. They could end up with something really cool if they learn from google about connecting all their services int he coolest ways, but stay away from strong-arming you into them.

Sounds like Google's Project Loon. [url]http://www.google.com/loon/[/url]

[QUOTE=drake90001;44376693]Sounds like Google's Project Loon. [url]http://www.google.com/loon/[/url][/QUOTE] Looks like it's gonna be Facebook vs. google in the future then eh? google was buying into a bunch of other sectors as well IIRC

[QUOTE=frozensoda;44376709]Looks like it's gonna be Facebook vs. google in the future then eh? google was buying into a bunch of other sectors as well IIRC[/QUOTE] Sounds like it. Although, I'm definitely more for Google than Facebook. Facebook just seems kind of shady to me, not going to lie. Then again the same argument for Google could be made. I dunno. Either way, I think the competition is good.

I bet that this is going to get criticised by edgy kids who think facebook's going to steal their personal info and don't imagine how a company could diversify, while google's drones and robots are recieved better

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[QUOTE=drake90001;44376693]Sounds like Google's Project Loon. [url]http://www.google.com/loon/[/url][/QUOTE] Hey, the name is based off the guy in charge of designing youtube!

[QUOTE=Crash155;44376923]Hey, the name is based off the guy in charge of designing youtube![/QUOTE] Just one guy in charge of designing all of YouTube? :v: What's his name?

[QUOTE=drake90001;44376948]Just one guy in charge of designing all of YouTube? :v: What's his name?[/QUOTE] Loon!

[QUOTE=frozensoda;44376709]Looks like it's gonna be Facebook vs. google in the future then eh? google was buying into a bunch of other sectors as well IIRC[/QUOTE] "A bunch of other sectors" is the understatement of the year, they've been averaging one acquisition per week since 2010. Last acquisition was an American company called GreenThrottle, on March 12. Second latest is spider.io, UK company that dealt with anti ad-fraud, and their technology will be incorporated into DoubleClick and AdSense. Internet security, artificial intelligence, home automation, robotics, ads and design, robotic cameras, robotic wheels, robots, robotic arms, computer vision, robotics, humanoid robots, gesture recognition, airborne wind turbines, natural language processing, social prediction, cloud computing, deep neural networks. I just went back a year, and they've been buying stuff since 2001.