News: Google’s Moonshot Factory

Google’s Moonshot Factory Bloomberg Businessweek/Technogy has a very interesting article about big research being done at Google’s Google X. “As the polymath engineers and scientists who work there are fond of saying, Google X is the search giant’s factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things. Google X (the official spelling is Google [x]) is home to the self-driving car initiative and the Internet-connected eyeglasses, Google Glass, among other improbable projects.” Some of the projects that have passed Google’s way include: Airborne Wind-power Generators The Makani AWT is a tethered, autonomous rigid-wing fitted with onboard turbines for power generation. Flying in circles at 1,000 feet (300 meters), the system mimics the motion, and speed, of a conventional turbine’s aerodynamically effective blade tips. Pictured is the Wing 7 flying in June 2012. Google bought Makani in May 2013. Photo by Makani Power Google Glass Google’s augmented reality head mounted display as glasses. Photo by Wikimedia Commons (Tedeytan) Google’s Multigenerational Nerd Fantasy: Space Elevators Artist concept of a space elevator. Photo by NASA/Advanced Space Transportation Program (Pat Rawlings) Google’s Lexus RX 450h Self-Driving Car Artist concept of a space elevator. Photo by Wikimedia Commons (Steve Jurvetson/Modified by Mariordo) Ballon-based Broadband Transmitters Google Loon launch event of June 16, 2013 was a test of the use of high-altitude balloons to bring internet access to undeveloped parts of the world. The initiative never progressed beyond the experimental stage. Photo by Wikimedia Commons (iLighter)

Just How Large is Google?

On 16th August 2013 between 23:52 and 23:57 BST the mighty Google went down. The real time analytics company, GoSquared Engineering reported a 40% drop in global pageviews per minute during the Google instance. The drop was followed by a spike afterwards as users got cought-up.

Credit: GoSquared Engineering