Project Loon and SuperTower both provide last-mile connectivity, but Project Loon uses solar panels and batteries.
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LOON Incubated in Google's research lab in 2011, Loon was spun out as an Alphabet subsidiary in July 2018.
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Loon began life in 2011 as a Project Loon, inside Google X, the search company's arm dedicated to incubating ambitious ideas.
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It's the second time Project Loon has been activated to assist with an emergency (the first was in Peru) and the first time Loon has been used in the U.S. The FCC earlier granted temporary approval for Loon to operate in Puerto Rico.
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But executives at five other wireless carriers courted by Loon across four continents told Reuters that Loon is not a fit currently, and may never be.
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Enter Loon SoftBank and Loon said Thursday that their mission is to bring the internet to "more people, places, and things worldwide" by building a telecommunications network in the stratosphere.
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The new company, which is changing its name from Project Loon to Loon, will continue working with mobile network operators to extend connectivity to rural and remote areas without Internet access.
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Richard DeVaul — Project Loon cofounder, former Alphabet X director
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She became a Trump supporting, still kind of a loon.
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A Project Loon balloon revealed at the initiative's launch event.
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Not crazy like a fox, but crazy as a loon.
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Alphabet's Loon signs deal with Telefonica to provide internet to remote parts of the Amazon Loon is Alphabet's high-altitude balloon company that is using its stratospheric technology to provide internet connectivity on Earth.
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Details: Loon delivered the first service to Peru's earthquake-hit areas within 48 hours, as compared to the 4 weeks it took to deliver the first Loon-based connections to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
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Alphabet also clarified that the Project Loon balloon program will continue.
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Loon was spun out as an Alphabet subsidiary in July 2018.
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"Multiple" additional entities are close to signing contracts with Loon, he said.
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Loon said it accommodated dietary restrictions and scheduled prayer time for guests.
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However, it is the communication band supported by X's Project Loon project.
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That business experience will be needed at Loon, which faces big challenges.
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His loon calls, when at last he does them, are deadpan-hilarious.
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Loon is slated to start tests with Telkom Kenya in coming months.
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Cassidy said in March that Loon was "getting close" to commercial deployment.
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Loon said it has the option to later invest $125 million in HAPSMobile.
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But four years on, Loon is still awaiting final approval to test there.
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Go deeper: Cellular internet service in Puerto Rico now available via Project Loon
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Loon coordinates with air-traffic control officials in all countries where it operates.
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Loon shared the story of its 98-day flight over Peru last September.
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And that same month, Loon balloons were spotted drifting over Yellowstone National Park.
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Ellen van Loon likes to surprise people by placing windows in unexpected places.
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"With Loon already active in a country, as is the case in Peru, our ability to respond to a natural disaster can be measured in hours or days rather than weeks," Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth said in a blog post.
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The technology is part of Project Loon, an endeavor by Google parent company Alphabet.
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Loon carries the gear with a large balloon, while HAPSMobile uses a large drone.
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Loon and HAPSMobile said on Wednesday that collaboration could be the key to adoption.
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Project Loon makes internet-delivery balloons, while Project Wing is a drone delivery system.
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It's just another step toward delivering the complex system Loon envisions in the future.
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Loon had already been working with Telefonica in Peru, which sped up the process.
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What do you make of Google offering to bring its internet-serving Loon balloons?
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Loon shared the story of its 98-day flight over Peru earlier this month.
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Others are in prison: Loon, on drug conspiracy charges, and G-Dep, for murder.
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Here are more details on its internet balloon unit Loon, according to the company.
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The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter-in-law Dr. Katherine Van Loon said.
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Loon balloons also helped out in Peru after a 2019 earthquake damaged cell networks.
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"We've never deployed Project Loon connectivity from scratch at such a rapid pace, and we're grateful for the support of AT&T and the many other partners and organizations that have made this possible," the Loon team said in a blog post.
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That means Project Loon can bring the internet to unserved areas using far fewer balloons.
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The project also falls short of what Google-parent Alphabet has achieved with Project Loon.
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The lawsuit also cites two patents which predate Project Loon and which Google supposedly infringes.
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Known as Project Loon, the technology was developed by Alphabet's X, the company's innovation lab.
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The FCC has given Google permission to deploy its Project Loon balloons over Puerto Rico.
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The company will attempt to enable LTE connectivity using its high-flying Project Loon balloons.
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Both patents predate Loon and the company does not appear to have licensed either one.
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Claude Rousseau, research director at Northern Sky Research, said the SoftBank-Loon project looks promising.
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I waited tables at the resort where city dwellers came for lobster and loon song.
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"The opportunity is bigger than any one of us," says Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth, who explains that Loon came to learn that the solutions to some of its biggest hurdles were not just about developing better technology, but also about finding the right partners.
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More From PCmag Alphabet's Project Loon, Wing Leave the Nest Did Your Twitter Follower Count Drop?
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But the station later reported that "a meteorologist who works for Project Loon" nixed that theory.
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What I *want* to see though is with Project Loon, which we've haven't heard about lately.
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A map of Peru's flooding, and the areas where Project Loon is active in the region.
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In that way it was similar to another moon shot, Project Loon, and to Facebook's Aquila.
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Loon declined to comment on costs, but said it is continuing to improve coverage and longevity.
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Loon says its balloons will reach Kenya in the coming weeks for its first commercial trial.
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But if his lyrics seem superficially familiar, Kent Loon is far from your average Floridian rapper.
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Alphabet (Google's parent company) rolled wireless service through a network of balloons, known as Project Loon.
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It has since become Loon, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google.
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The downside: Because they are solar powered, the Loon balloons only offer service during the daytime.
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The head of Alphabet's 'Project Loon' balloon-internet project has stepped down after only six months.
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That's what the engineers at Oakland University's Embedded Systems Research Laboratory did with their Loon Copter.
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Telkom will launch balloon-powered internet with Alphabet's Loon next year, both firms said last week.
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The Loon balloon project is part of X, the experimental division of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
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Correction: This article previously stated that Alphabet has been spending more than $1 billion on Loon.
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Minnesota chose the common loon, whose haunting wails echo across the state's northern lakes each summer.
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Last year, Loon beamed connections to Peru after floods there and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
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This extends the existing partnership between HAPSMobile and Loon, which began with a strategic alliance between the two announced last April, and which recently resulted in Loon adapting the network hardware it uses on its stratospheric balloons to work with the HAPSMobile stratospheric long-winged drone.
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It originally read Alphabet Swaps Project Loon Balloons for 'Boxes' to Bring Light Beam Internet to India.
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Project Loon head Alastair Westgarth announced the success of the effort in a blog post on Wednesday.
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Alphabet's Project Loon has officially deployed its LTE balloons to Puerto Rico, the team announced this afternoon.
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That drops the cost, which could make Loon much more attractive to business partners around the globe.
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Loon served about 20,000 unique users in the first 2 days of service, a representative told Axios.
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A few days earlier, it recruited a broadband veteran to head its Project Loon internet balloon initiative.
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Sources describe most of X's public projects — Project Loon, drones, robotics and wind energy kites — as rudderless.
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Enter Loon Copter: A drone that can fly, operate on the surface of water, or dive deep.
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The move signals that the company is getting closer to rolling Loon out as a commercial project.
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You probably remember Alphabet's Project Loon sending internet balloons to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last year.
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Before the floods hit, Project Loon was already testing for connectivity with a Peruvian telecommunication company, Telefonica.
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What's covered: Project Loon supports basic internet communications including text messaging, basic web access and e-mail.
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As for whether Loon will be cheaper than building infrastructure in remote areas remains to be seen.
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He starts as a vice president at X and general manager of Project Loon in mid-September.
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Loon is located in Mountain View, California, where it has an around-the-clock flight operations center.
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"I've always liked the complexity of larger-sized projects," Ms. van Loon said over coffee in London.
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I was at the birth of this "Loon" project in New Zealand seven years ago: When Loon people get expansive, they talk about many thousands of balloons spinning around the globe, designated recovery centers to bring down flagging units, and operations centers sending up dozens of replacements every day.
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However, it appears that Loon has never attempted to provide emergency connectivity at the scale Puerto Rico requires.
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Helping speed up the process is the Loon team's existing involvement with telecommunications provider Telefonica on the island.
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At issue was its effort to deliver internet access to remote areas by balloon, known as Project Loon.
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In that way, LEO satellites start to resemble Loon balloons, although they're much, much higher in the sky.
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This looks more like the balloons that Google's parent company Alphabet has used for its Loon connectivity program.
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Allegedly, Google began to work on Project Loon after breaking off talks with Space Data in early 2008.
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Rounding out X is Project Loon, the Internet-blasting balloon initiative, and Makani, an acquired wind-energy company.
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Next step: actually testing a network with real-life users in trials, rather than just Loon team members.
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Mike Cassidy, who stepped down from Loon, ran the team "like a fire drill," a former employee said.
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The owner of Amber Vet, Dr. Brian Loon, added acupuncture to his clinic's routine practice three years ago.
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For the uninitiated, Project Loon involves balloons that sail through brisk winds at some 65,000 feet of altitude.
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With Loon, meanwhile, Google this month learned the power — and necessity — of having lobbyists in the nation's capital.
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And wireless carriers were initially cautious about working with Loon because they saw it as a potential rival.
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Last year, Loon signed a deal to test its internet-beaming balloons with Indonesia's three largest wireless carriers.
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The new investments will be geared principally toward eliminating bottlenecks and improving the pipelines' measurement systems, Loon said.
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Puerto Rico residents with other LTE phone brands will also be able to connect to the Loon balloons.
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The air smelled like pine and campfire smoke and a shrill loon call echoed off the granite shores.
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Loon will be led by executive Alastair Westgarth, while James Ryan Burgess is the new CEO of Wing.
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Loon will begin providing service in 2020, provided the deal gets all the necessary regulatory approval it requires.
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Of that 200,000, roughly one-quarter have access to connectivity at least at 3G quality, according to Loon.
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In 2018, Loon announced it was partnering with Telkom Kenya to deliver internet to regions of central Kenya.
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Loon has an option to invest $125 million in HAPSMobile for a minority stake at a later date.
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Incubated in Google's research lab in 2011, Loon was spun out as an Alphabet subsidiary in July 2018.
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Loon will use its high-altitude internet balloons to provide mobile internet from Telefónica to the selected areas.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly identified the balloons used by Project Loon as hot air balloons.
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Originally, the company thought Project Loon would require hundreds of balloons drifting more or less aimlessly across the globe.
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The reason they wanted to fire Roseanne was, I mean, she used to be kind of a leftwing loon.
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Joe Lauria, a meteorologist at WDAF, another CNN affiliate, said the strange objects could be part of Project Loon.
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Image: AlphabetOne of Alphabet's crazier attempts to bring the internet to more rural and isolated areas was Project Loon.
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Alphabet's solar-powered internet drone division, once a kind of sister project to Loon, was shut down in 503.
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I thought of Google X's Project Loon, which is a plan to fill the skies with glittering polyethylene balloons.
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"Project Loon," which engineered the advanced technology, allows for basic communication and data usage in collaboration with AT&T.
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Its concept would have attracted approving nods from any number of hirsute, loon-panted prog-rockers in the 1970s.
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Space Data Corp has sued Google, claiming that it stole the idea for Project Loon during a 2007 meeting.
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One thing is for sure: Space Data's technology is not used with nearly as much frequency as Project Loon.
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One of Google's data-spewing Loon balloons appears to have crashed in the South American country over the weekend.
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This will allow iPhones to connect to Alphabet X's Project Loon balloons in the region, which were activated today.
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"We are always in discussions with governments and telcos around the world," said a Project Loon spokesperson in London.
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Alastair Westgarth will become chief executive officer of Loon and James Ryan Burgess will be the CEO of Wing.
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Well, maybe we'll see Google Wing in action, or some drones, or Loon…or ya know, self-driving cars.
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Transportation Internet of Balloons How Loon, Google's newest sister company, uses stratospheric balloons to make the web truly worldwide.
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The Loon lab in X's Mountain View headquarters is piled with the results of generations of falls and spills.
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That means Project Loon will be able to work with significantly fewer balloons in flight at any given time.
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BREAKING: FCC issues experimental license to Google to provide emergency cellular service in Puerto Rico through Project Loon balloons.
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Tom Moore, who previously co-founded WildBlue Communications, will head up Project Loon, Bloomberg's Brad Stone reported on Tuesday.
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They float at 60,000 feet above the sea level, well above air traffic, wildlife, and weather events, Loon said.
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Once completely submerged, the Loon Copter looks more like an underwater plane as it propels itself through the water.
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Google's Project Loon is an ambitious plan to float internet into the life of anyone who is currently without.
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Loon says that balloons will now make small loops over a land mass, instead of circumnavigating the whole planet.
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The whack Dillon gives Thurman in the opening minutes is the first indication that we're dealing with a loon.
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LotusFlare is working in the Philippines and Sri Lanka with Google's Project Loon Internet balloons, but isn't in India.
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The project may have been monumental, both physically and politically, but Ms. van Loon wasn't the building's greatest fan.
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"Today, unlike when they started as X projects, Loon and Wing seem a long way from crazy — and thanks to their years of hard work and relentless testing in the real world, they're now graduating from X to become two new independent businesses within Alphabet: Loon and wing," Teller wrote in the post.
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With Loon, meanwhile, Google-parent Alphabet this month learned the power — and necessity — of having lobbyists in the nation's capital.
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In that way, a Loon network can reliably mimic a terrestrial LTE one, even as it floats in the sky.
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Loon has tested balloons for nearly a decade and expects to hold its first commercial trial in Kenya this year.
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Google's parent, Alphabet, has been testing the use of balloons to help bring connectivity in remote areas via Project Loon.
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Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon.
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Alphabet, which launched Project Loon in 2013, uses solar-powered, high-altitude balloons to provide internet service in remote regions.
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It has touted a few small subsidiaries, including Loon, as being crucial to its next act: diversifying beyond ad sales.
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What's next: Loon plans to start using its balloons to deliver regular service as opposed to just responding to disasters.
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What's important about these shapes is what they represent to Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, Waymo, and Loon.
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Yet before it proceeds with its plans in Puerto Rico, Loon needs to find a carrier network to partner with.
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A project from Oakland University's Embedded Systems Research, the Loon Copter operates pretty similarly to other flying drones when airborne.
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Project Loon, a part of the Google X research division, aims to spread broadband internet access with high-flying balloons.
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Project Loon is still in testing, although Google-parent company Alphabet has previously announced partnerships with telecommunications carriers in Indonesia.
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Then I get sent to a Sundance premiere, and openly weep into my dirty winter coat like an uncorked loon.
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Telesat also said it had an agreement with Alphabet Inc subsidiary Loon to build a control network for the constellation.
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We need an all out ban on Chobani yogurt... The Muslim loon owner wants to destroy the US with #MassMigration.
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Van Loon says the compounds are as strong as normal rubber and even smell of gum — minus all the stickiness.
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Miyakawa said HAPSMobile had taken a minority stake in Loon at its request and a right to observe board meetings.
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Just last week, the Loon team said it was looking into helping Puerto Rico, still devastated by Hurricane Maria, regain connectivity.
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X is home to Project Loon, an effort to beam the Internet from the stratosphere down to people here on Earth.
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Emboldened by the results, Alphabet's Team X then looked for other areas where it could apply the tech behind Project Loon.
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Bateman was in second grade when she first heard the haunting call of the common loon on a lake in Wisconsin.
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Loon, however, remains one of the rare Alphabet companies now plotting a clear path toward becoming a viable, self-sustaining venture.
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"As we develop a capability — some intellectual property or some tech applicable outside Loon — we will make a determination," he says.
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The company behind the effort, Loon, says its balloons will reach Kenya in the coming weeks for its first commercial trial.
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The company behind the effort, Loon says its balloons will reach Kenya in the coming weeks for its first commercial trial.
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Hervé Suquet, chief technology and information officer for Orange Middle East and Africa, said Loon needs to prove itself in Kenya.
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Gizmodo reached out to see if Google and Project Loon knew anything about the UFOs, but they said it wasn't theirs.
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Lee's piri moans like a heartbroken loon, while the deep, bold-voiced geomungo acts as both a melodic and percussive instrument.
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That's why Loon uses machine learning and mountains of wind-pattern data—to figure out which air currents are headed where.
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Whether Alphabet will ever be able (or willing) to turn Loon into a fully fledged internet service remains to be seen.
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Each Loon balloon can provide coverage over nearly 2,000 square miles, using an assortment of solar panels, antennas, and varied electronics.
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To deliver signal to people's devices, Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner's network — the balloons can't do it alone.
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The emergency experiment worked: The head of project Loon, Alastair Westgarth, wrote that tens of thousands of Peruvians were provided internet.
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"Loon's mission is to connect people everywhere by inventing and integrating audacious technologies," said Alastair Westgarth, the chief executive of Loon.
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That is, other than the UFC's resident loon Connor McGregor for some reason declaring that he'd "slap the head off" Ronaldo.
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I related them to the [1966] novel Song of the Loon, which is about a settler's erotic adventures with indigenous bodies.
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Another player is Telesat, which is partnering with Alphabet's Loon, to launch a next-generation satellite-powered broadband service in 2022.
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As a result, he came up with Project Loon, which sends balloons into the stratosphere to bring internet access to everyone.
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The Loon balloons now also adjust how they fly as needed using artificial intelligence software, instead of a set navigation plan.
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"There are always two guys there showing off their muscles — wanting to be seen," Ms. van Loon said with a laugh.
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Loon, spun out from Alphabet's business incubator in July, carries the gear with a long balloon, while HAPSMobile uses a drone.
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Alphabet's AI-piloted Loon balloons are still experimental, but they illustrate the international clout of big tech companies and their infrastructure.
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She told me that the pale crescent at the base of the fingernail was called the lunula, the loon -ya-la.
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Alphabet's other new unit, called Loon, is building high-altitude balloons that deliver internet connections to rural or disaster-stricken areas.
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Team members have been reassigned to Project Loon, which uses balloons for broadband access, and Project Wing, a drone delivery initiative.
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Google, which is an investor in SpaceX, also has Project Loon, a plan to connect the world using hot air balloons.
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Providing connectivity to areas affected by natural disasters has been one of the core missions of Loon since its inception in 2011.
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This was the first time Project Loon used its new machine-learning-powered algorithms, which helped keep balloons clustered over Puerto Rico.
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Teller says this should shorten the timeline for using Project Loon to provide balloon-powered internet for remote areas around the world.
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Google, through its Project Loon, aims to use a constellation of balloons to beam down wireless signals to places that lack connectivity.
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At X, DeVaul had been a co-founder of Project Loon, an attempt to use high-altitude balloons to deliver Internet access.
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They went over various ideas: Iantorno suggested floating Wi-Fi rigged balloons over the city, an idea cribbed from Google's Project Loon.
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"The Loon," a new piece from Witness Relocation, is dance theater, not musical theater, but it has a kind of overture anyway.
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Google parent Alphabet has rolled back its Titan internet drone program, although it still has Project Loon, which relies on large balloons.
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"We are glad to hear the arrest has been made and await what's next," Debbie Van Loon, James Butler's sister, told WMUR.
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A network carrier, like AT&T, communicates from the ground with the nearest Loon balloon and the balloons communicate with each other.
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"It's called Loon because it's that unusual and we were all worried that you would think it was that crazy," he said.
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Loon, meanwhile, was one of the first projects to go after the idea of air-based connectivity with a launch in 2013.
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He didn't issue "cry of the loon" writing, however, to borrow an old New Yorker magazine put-down of overwrought nature prose.
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Go to the Hague earlier in the day, go out with people in the hostel to Shelter, and avoid van Loon Museum.
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DeVaul had been at the company for more than seven years and worked on "moonshot" projects like the Loon internet-connectivity balloon.
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Loon works with local telecommunications companies to improve cell service on the ground, acting as a sort of floating, temporary cell tower.
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In a statement on its Dutch website, Shell Netherlands Chief Executive Marjan van Loon said the company pays all taxes it owes.
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Like Aquila, Loon is an airborne internet network — except, instead of drones, it uses balloons filled with helium that float in the stratosphere.
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Loon and Wing, which respectively launched in 2013 and 2014, have both seen substantial progress from the moonshot ideas they were proposed as.
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One of Google's Loon balloons crashed into a mint field in Yakima, Washington, a couple years back, managing to cause a power outage.
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Some Android devices from Samsung and others should be compatible with Band 8 LTE, but all LTE devices are compatible with Project Loon.
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If it loses, Loon would pay jury-determined damages to Chandler, Arizona-based Space Data, which sells communications balloons to the U.S. military.
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Loon staff that year canceled an Indonesian trip over concerns about rising anti-Google sentiment, according to two people familiar with the plans.
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Loon will continue to work on using balloons to bring internet to people around the world, and Wing will keep building delivery drones.
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That marks a change the new company will have to embrace, as will Loon: Graduation from X means a different relationship with failure.
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This narrative—which Democrats hope will help cast Donald Trump as an unhinged loon—is also, it's gotta be said, a bit boring.
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It'll likely be an overview of the projects that X is currently running — including self-driving cars, Project Loon, Project Wing, and Makani.
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At Google X he worked on futuristic projects like Loon, a network of balloons that's setting out to provide a more extensive internet.
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In a presentation, the company said the fishout would only affect one bird — a single loon that has been observed on the lake.
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Just like in Peru, Project Loon can't simply send high-altitude balloons to the region without first establishing a connection to telecommunication providers.
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Earlier this week, Google's parent company, Alphabet, reached a deal with the Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments to go forward with Project Loon.
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Marjan van Loon had initially declined the invitation, saying it made more sense for the Netherlands' business association to represent all taxpaying companies.
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He renamed the club Minnesota United F.C. in 2013, with a local branding firm incorporating Minnesota's state bird, the loon, into its logo.
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Loon, for example, deployed balloons to bring internet and text messaging services to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria damaged the island's communication infrastructure.
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Now in its fourth year, the engineers at Loon say their new machine learning techniques significantly shorten their timeline for launching the project.
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The first Newbery Medal was awarded to "The Story of Mankind," a history of the world for children by Hendrik Willem van Loon.
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State birds like the Minnesota common loon, New Jersey goldfinch, and California quail topped the Audubon&aposs list of birds with shrinking habitats.
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Loon began in 2011 inside X. Its balloons have since traveled more than 18 million miles, delivering internet from Brazil to New Zealand.
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This year, Ms. van Loon is on a bill that includes the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and the British legend Lord Richard Rogers.
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Alphabet is still evaluating if Project Loon will be able to help Puerto Rico, and it hasn't released a schedule for providing service.
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"To deliver signal to people's devices, Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner's network — the balloons can't do it alone," the spokesperson explains.
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There's also Project Loon, which aspires to beam internet to hard-to-reach areas that aren't served by existing wireless or wireline broadband connections.
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Get Him a Bar of Soap: Star actor and liberal loon Robert De Niro kicked off the week with four letters the left loves.
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Meanwhile, Loon and Wing, Google X's internet balloon and delivery drone projects, have graduated from "moonshots" to independent companies under the Alphabet corporate umbrella.
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Using balloons, Project Loon&aposs latest success was beaming internet access to over 100,000 users in hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico in November last year.
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Going forward, Westgarth says Loon will continue to push more of its technology into the commercial space and telecom sectors, as it sees fit.
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Enter Alphabet's Project Loon, which on October 20 announced that it had officially switched on its balloon-powered internet for some Puerto Rican residents.
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In the wake of an earthquake in Peru last weekend, Alphabet's Loon unit was able to quickly restore temporary internet access using its balloons.
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Loon is based on a simple idea—replace ground-based cell towers with high-flying balloons—which concealed a beguiling series of technical problems.
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According to an article in the Economic Times, the company is in discussions with BSNL and other companies to pilot Project Loon in India.
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Alphabet's Loon is gearing up for its first big commercial trial later this year, but it's also breaking records in terms of pure performance.
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The company announced today in a Medium post that its internet-delivery balloon project Loon and delivery drone project Wing will become independent companies.
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Apple is issuing a cellular settings update that will allow iPhones to activate the currently unused Band 8 to access the Loon-based service.
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There's also reason to think that Google's top executives knew about Space Data's work during the period that Loon was being conceived and launched.
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Unlike Project Loon or Facebook Aquila, SuperTower aerostats remain fixed to the ground with conductive tethers, which also provide electricity for high-capacity radio.
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Project Loon, pictured above, a scheme to beam internet from high-altitude balloons (sounds familiar) and Project Wing, which would use drones for deliveries.
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Loon claims its balloons have flown more than 30 million kms and provided internet access for "hundreds of thousands" of people across the world.
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Dr. Van Loon, their daughter-in-law, said Dr. Joan Steitz and their son Jon were at Dr. Steitz's side there when he died.
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Alphabet's Project Loon has attempted to do this using stratospheric helium balloons, while Facebook has experimented with solar-powered internet drones in the past.
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Castillo's rural community had been visited by a giant helium Loon balloon developed by Alphabet's X lab as an alternative to conventional cell towers.
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Although Loon and Wing are now stand-alone units inside Alphabet, it still may be years before they become full-fledged businesses, if ever.
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It's unclear to what extent Loon will cover Puerto Rico or parts of the Virgin Islands, or how many balloons the team plans to deploy.
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And when Google hired him, he slipped into a group of researchers building a similar system for the wildly ambitious balloon experiment called Project Loon.
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Sources had previously described most of X's public projects, which include Project Loon, drones, robotics and wind energy kites, as rudderless, Recode reported in August.
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He also heads X's Project Loon, the balloon-based beaming internet project; Google's self-driving car project; and Makani, X's kite-based wind power initiative.
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Alastair's vision for Project Loon aligns with X's philosophy of approaching huge problems, at scale, to improve the lives of millions or billions of people.
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One of the architects, Ellen van Loon of OMA, says that they tried to relate the building to the rapidly changing built environment of Qatar.
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And, with many cell towers down, people will also still be able to connect to Google's Project Loon balloons that are deployed in Puerto Rico.
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Many people from the Titan team are now using their expertise as part of other high flying projects at X, including Loon and Project Wing.
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Alphabet has announced that Loon and Wing — two of its X moonshot projects — are "graduating" today to become full companies underneath the Alphabet corporate umbrella.
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Plenty of people took to Twitter yesterday to speculate that they might be anything from internet balloons for Google's Project Loon to slimy green aliens.
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Loon was part of Google X, the arm of the search company that fostered audacious projects applying emerging technologies to stubborn problems in novel ways.
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The agreement is an outgrowth of X's Project Loon, which on several occasions has beamed cellphone service to Earth from a network of large balloons.
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AT&T and Alphabet said late Friday that they have begun to offer limited mobile Internet service using the Google parent company's Project Loon balloons.
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Space Data currently offers two products — SkySat and SkySite — both of which aim to provide balloon-based connectivity in a similar way to Project Loon.
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Son's SoftBank (SFTBF) said Thursday that one of its subsidiaries, HAPSMobile, has formed a strategic partnership with Loon and invested $125 million in the company.
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Unfortunately, I was not able to honor my dying father's request to have his ashes scattered over Loon Lake, where he fished all his life.
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"Most of my work is meticulous and calculated, [and] I'm inclined to try and make the media behave in a certain way," van Loon explains.
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The other problem for Clinton is that while the Foreign Policy Establishment tends to already see Trump as a dangerous loon, voters don't necessarily agree.
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Earlier this year, Westgarth — the former CEO of cellular antenna company Quintel —led Project Loon in connecting tens of thousands of residents in flood-ravaged Peru.
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Photo: ilitephoto/FlickrProject Loon has provided mobile data to more than 100,000 people in Puerto Rico, according to Google parent company Alphabet, which operates the enterprise.
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"They could be used to handle urban densification, to work with satellites and different generation of Loon balloons, high-altitude solar gliders or airships," he says.
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When I asked Maguire about Google's project Loon, which uses balloons instead of drones, he noted that his team is cheering for Google to succeed, too.
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Alphabet is changing the course of Project Loon, its plan to cover the Earth with a "continuous stream" of balloons that beam internet to the ground.
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The original plan for Loon looked like a reversal of the way our phones connect to cellular towers as we move around in our daily lives.
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Last month, Loon announced its first deal with the satellite industry, which will involve licensing a proprietary next-gen networking technology to Canadian telecommunications company Telesat.
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Until Loon, Aquila, and Musk's space internet take off widely, it's hard to tell just how much they're going to change people's lives around the world.
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As things stand, the iconic common loon could lose nearly 97% of the range it can occupy in the lower 48 states during the summer months.
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Loon deployed balloons in late October in what was its fastest-ever deployment in an effort to help residents get back online as soon as possible.
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It holds FCC licenses to provide wireless access in places like Alaska, but Project Loon has flown balloons over Australia, Indonesia and, most recently, Sri Lanka.
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Loon Pond, in Acton, Maine, is said to be home to a ghostly, three-legged "Husky-type" dog with a phosphorescent glow, who appears around midnight.
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Those companies, including Telkom Indonesia, Vodafone New Zealand and French giant Orange SA, say Loon must demonstrate its technology is reliable, safe and profitable for carriers.
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In partnership with multiple telecom companies, Loon plans to fly packs of balloons all over the world—spreading the gospel of connectivity from 60,000 feet up.
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Today, X is marking a major step forward in that mission by announcing that Loon is "graduating"—becoming a stand-alone company under the Alphabet umbrella.
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Loon balloons are designed to "ride the wind" to get to a destination and are super-pressurized to withstand for over 100 days in the stratosphere.
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Softbank invested in low-altitude satellite company OneWeb, Google's Project Loon is exploring communications balloons and Facebook is pushing solar-powered telecom drones for remote regions.
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This year, Google plans to set up free Wi-Fi in 100 railway stations and bring low-cost Internet connectivity to country's villages through Project Loon.
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It'll be interesting to see where Wing and Loon go next, since X has moonshot around a dozen projects that have had varying degrees of success.
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Project Loon seems like a particularly encouraging solution because this balloon technology was successfully deployed when extreme flooding knocked out communications in Peru, back in May.
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Note: Project Loon, headed by Google's parent company Alphabet, is also providing cell service to Puerto Ricans by sending wireless connectivity through a network of balloon.
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The Loon service uses balloons, which are powered by an on-board solar panel, to provide fourth generation (4G) coverage to areas with lower population densities.
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Directed by Dan Safer at Abrons Arts Center, "The Loon" is a meditation on middle age that doesn't want to go gentle, thank you very much.
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As a loon called from the river and mice scurried unseen, I perused the large topo map on the wall to plan the next day's adventure.
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After initially dismissing him as a loon, they eventually come to believe him and make plans to meet up at the Los Angeles airport for evacuation.
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Project Wing, its drone delivery system, and Project Loon, which makes internet-delivery balloons, both "graduated" from Alphabet's X research division to become separate, independent businesses.
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X is known for its "moonshots," or big ideas intended to change the world, including self-driving car company Waymo and "Project Loon" Wi-Fi balloons.
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The setup looks somewhat similar to Neil Jordan's forthcoming shocker "Greta," but it should be fun to see Spencer show her range as a dangerous loon.
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"The Project Loon team at X is exploring if it's possible to bring emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico," the X lab's official Twitter account wrote this afternoon.
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It has already secured special permission from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico, where the Hurricane Maria-ravaged territory still lacks telecom services.
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More From PCmag Facebook Will Tell You if Russian Trolls Slide Into Your DMs Alphabet's Project Loon, Wing Leave the Nest Did Your Twitter Follower Count Drop?
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The Project Loon team was able to launch its balloons from Puerto Rico and direct them towards Peru, where they stayed for as long as three months.
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In the aftermath of this fall's Hurricane Maria, Project Loon rapidly deployed its balloons over Puerto Rico to give 100,000 residents access to internet and text messages.
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And as financial goals become more demanding, many of its high-profile moonshots, including Google Glass, Project Loon, Project Wing, and Google Fiber have lost key executives.
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To connect the balloons together in any given deployment area, Loon needs to set up a communication link between a ground station and one of its vehicles.
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One high-altitude solution that's much closer to its goal is Project Loon, which is a part of X, Alphabet's "moonshot factory" (formerly known as "Google X").
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"To deliver signal to people's devices, Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner's network — the balloons can't do it alone," a spokesperson said in a statement.
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As of early October, when the FCC first gave Loon the green light to operate in Puerto Rico, nearly 83 percent of cell towers were still down.
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Google's hoping that its plans to roll out free gigabit internet to public housing projects—and long term, things like Project Loon—will fill those gaps. [Recode]
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The "Project Loon" balloon project is delivering limited internet connectivity to LTE enabled phones in the hardest-hit areas of Puerto Rico and Alphabet said on Nov.
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Project Loon, the aerial internet endeavor from the X innovation lab, was given FCC permission and began launching its LTE-beaming balloons over the island last month.
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Sadly, because so many different groups fall under "other bets," we still don't know how much Alphabet spends on self-driving cars and Project Loon, for example.
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Cassidy, whose most recent tenure at Google found him heading up the company balloon-based internet initiative Project Loon, has been quietly working on launching Apollo Fusion.
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When Google first announced its plan for a balloon-based Wi-Fi system called Project Loon, it was unlike anything most of the world had ever heard.
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If you want to check where Loon balloons are flying right now, take a look at a flight radar map and search for the call sign HBAL.
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Mike Cassidy, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has run Loon since early 2012, will remain at the company's X lab to develop new research projects.
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The planes would be easier to maneuver than, say, balloons — a method embraced by Google, which has embarked on its own global connectivity crusade with Project Loon.
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"I thought it would result in every loon on the planet telephoning me as soon as it was published," he said in a 2014 article in Nature.
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The agreement includes an option for Loon to make a reciprocal $125 million investment in HAPSMobile and it includes co-operation plans, details of which are below.
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Loon played a role in connecting those affected by flooding in Peru in 2017 and it assisted those devastated by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year.
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Founded by a long-time Googler who started its Project Loon internet-beaming weather balloons, it's now signing up e-commerce, retail, rideshare, restaurant and event businesses.
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Waymo, X and Loon may be "moonshot" companies trying to change the world, but that doesn't give them the right to eat for free at Google's cafeterias.
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But Ms. van Loon, the only woman among the studio's eight other partners, is more interested in grand public commissions than having her name over the door.
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Alphabet's Project Loon just passed a big test in its plan to beam internet to Earth from giant balloons, successfully pinging data across a 1,000-kilometer span.
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Project Loon makes internet-delivery balloons to provide access in remote locations, and "graduated" from Alphabet's X research division to become its own independent business in July.
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On Saturday, the Federal Communications Commission gave Alphabet an experimental license to use its balloon-powered internet service, called Project Loon, to restore service in Puerto Rico.
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A Loon balloon being launched in Nevada ahead of going online over Puerto Rico A Loon balloon being launched in Nevada ahead of going online over Puerto Rico A one-time setup cost, perhaps in the tens of thousands, for a mesh network (goTenna or not) could provide an entire city and much of the surrounding area with basic text communication, one of the most critical capabilities following a natural disaster.
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EE's approach is similar to Alphabet's Project Loon, which recently received FCC approval to deliver LTE signal via balloon to Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria.
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Project Loon, an effort from Google's X "moonshot" development program, is a network of balloons that will provide high speed Internet access to remote areas of the globe.
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In the wake of Hurricane Maria devastation, Project Loon procured an emergency license from the FCC to send its balloons to Puerto Rica on the US Virgin Islands.
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The Telesat partnership is the second commercial deal for Loon, after the company announced plans to help expand mobile networks for smartphone users in Kenya earlier this year.
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Then she launches into a tale that is so fantastical it is difficult to discern whether she is a prophet from another dimension or a bona fide loon.
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But early last year, the Loon team noticed a odd tendency in some of the balloons: they lingered in one area instead of drifting away on the winds.
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"Loon balloons float 20 km up in the stratosphere, and so have the potential to extend connectivity to where it's needed regardless of what's happening below," Westgarth wrote.
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Tom Moore, who joined Loon last August, will remain on the project as an adviser for the next few months, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the story.
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Mo Gawdat, a business development veteran at Google, joined Loon in 2013 and now leads a team (X wouldn't say how large) working across all the X projects.
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According to Ms van Loon "the client realised as soon as they saw the building that it should be a public building," and a national one to boot.
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By comparison, at this stage the economics and technical feasibility of Project Loon present a much more promising way to connect rural and remote parts of the world.
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Along with Wing, another X effort that delivers goods with autonomous drones, Loon will start building out staff and putting together its own HR and public relations teams.
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This week, Loon (the company's bid to spread internet connectivity via hot-air balloon) and Wing (its autonomous-drone-delivery effort) spin off to become their own entities.
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Google is currently talking with several Indian telecoms to help launch Project Loon, which uses balloons instead of cellular towers to provide affordable Internet access in remote areas.
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First: the SuperTower blimp is fixed to one spot, where as the Project Loon balloons are constantly in motion, riding wind currents to provide coverage to the area.
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There's also Project Loon, an experimental initiative under Google's X lab responsible for trying to deliver Wi-Fi to remote areas of the Earth using hot air balloons.
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Turkey has provided and operated Bayraktar drones for the Tripoli government, while the LNA uses Chinese-made Wing Loon drones operated by the UAE, analysts and diplomats say.
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The Loon Copter's design could not only be copied to make consumer quadcopters safer to fly over water, it could also be adapted for search and rescue applications.
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"If you're going to hold a grudge against them, that's not right," said Mahoney, 56, an owner of the Loon Cafe, a popular Vikings bar in downtown Minneapolis.
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Alphabet also has a wide range of so-called "Other Bets," including its Waymo self-driving car company and Loon, a service to provide cellular connectivity using balloons.
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When about 50,000 people voted in the magazine's online poll, the gray jay finished third, behind the loon, which adorns Canada's one-dollar coin, and the snowy owl.
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Mr. Obama would "probably try to negotiate an end to hostilities, and while seeking a middle ground, some loon would get the better of him," Mr. Micks writes.
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Alphabet engineers currently on loan to Verb hail from Project Loon, Google's project that involves using balloons to spread Internet access, YouTube, Google Apps, Google Fiber and more.
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Google is also in talks with telecom providers to collaborate on Project Loon, using high-altitude balloons to beam high-speed Wi-Fi to remote areas in India.
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And it incorrectly identified a man it called a "far-left loon" as the shooter in Las Vegas who killed dozens of people attending a country music concert.
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In developing the software, Loon discovered that the product could be especially useful to satellite companies that are expanding into low Earth orbit, where satellites shift around in space.
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Loon and HAPSMobile say their communications technology can provide connections between devices as far as 700 km (435 miles) apart, with data transfer speeds reaching as high as 1Gpbs.
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A: Representative Cris Dush (that's his real name, he's not a Pynchon character) is widely regarded in Harrisburg as a loon so don't take anything he says too seriously.
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The Loon project is part of an innovation lab within Alphabet that the company calls X, previously known as Google X. Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Tom Brown
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"The Loon team are still working out contracts and hopefully once that is done, we can be able to see almost every part of the country covered," he said.
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The idea for initiative came after X used FSOC to deliver information for its Loon connectivity project which uses hot air balloons to deliver internet connectivity in remote areas.
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Illustrations by Alicia Cocchi Since 2011, Loon—which started as a Google X project—has been figuring out how to use gigantic balloons to replace networks of cell towers.
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To launch the balloon, Loon fills its inner chamber with helium, turning something that looks like a molted snakeskin into something that looks more like an ice cream cone.
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With all these tools, the Loon team is learning: The company can launch a balloon every half hour and keep them in the air for six months or more.
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"In order to deliver a signal to people's devices, Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner's network — the balloons can't do it alone," an X spokesperson told Mashable.
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The Loon project is part of an innovation lab within Alphabet that the company calls X, previously known as Google X. (Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Tom Brown)
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Other Bets, which includes things like Google Fiber, Project Loon, driverless cars, and other moonshots, continued to slowly improve its financial state, but still isn't anywhere close to profitable.
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Vast majority of cell antennas are still knocked out The FCC just gave Google an experimental license to fly its "Loon" balloons over Puerto Rico to help with service.
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Project Loon, Google's high-profile effort to put broadband-emitting balloons into the stratosphere over remote parts of the world, is getting a new leader with practical industry experience.
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The world needs fresh approaches like Project Loon, which can help overcome terrestrial obstacles like mountains and jungles, and has made far more progress than anyone would have expected.
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Upset that a potential booty call turned out to be a loon, Ben prays for "some light in this darkness," but he gets no such miracle the following day.
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Transitioning back to airborne flight is as easy as bringing the Loon Copter back to the surface, pumping out all that water ballast and taking to the skies again.
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Loon, which is owned by Google (GOOGL) parent company Alphabet, aims to use a network of high-flying balloons to provide internet access in remote areas around the world.
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Nacho, Tuco's partner in drug dealing, wants him dead because Tuco is a homicidal loon — a fact that will not come as news to anyone familiar with his history.
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Loon has already developed fleet management technology because of the nature of its service, which is delivered by a collection of balloons, and that will be optimized for HAPSMobile.
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"The 'loon' connotation also implies crazy or deranged and misses the fact that rational planning often occurs in the presence of a mental disorder," the West Point researchers wrote.
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Indeed, he argues that one of the problems with Google X, and especially big moonshot projects like Loon and self-driving cars, was that they weren't really resource-constrained.
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And two, should you not win the acquisitive affections of the Alphabet CEO: Go through Google X. Projects: Self-driving car, Loon, Wing, Robotics, Makani Wind Key execs: Astro Teller, "Captain of Moonshots"; Mike Cassidy, VP, Project Loon; Rich DeVaul, director of rapid evaluation; Obi Felten, head of Foundry The five-year-old experimental lab marked Google's first significant excursion from software and first investment in futuristic pipe-dream projects, its moonshots.
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The efforts in Peru show that Project Loon could be a model for relief during future natural disasters, with the potential to increase connectivity and communication when it's needed most.
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Last month, the company closed its solar-powered drone project in favor of putting more resources toward its air balloon Wi-Fi initiative Loon and the Project Wing drone unit.
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As my grandpops used to say: 'If a piece of baloney hasn't blown your face off you're winning because you're not dead yet so stop whining ya cream-faced loon!
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Loon decided to partner with carriers, three former Google executives said, after finding that operating its own network risked blowback from telecom companies, shareholders and activists wary of Google's influence.
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Google's chief executive officer Sundar Pichai has met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other government officials, however, and that may help pave the way for Project Loon to succeed.
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Loon isn't the only company aiming to turn stratospheric balloons into commercial success — startup World View intends to offer clients high-altitude balloons for a range of potential commercial services.
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Watson's influence on Stay Low can't be understated; it's nearly ubiquitous and one of the record's veiled clues into what Kent Loon values when he's outside of the vocal booth.
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Information about the secret project, which is part of the Google Access team that includes Project Loon, was gleaned from documents that were obtained in accordance with public record laws.
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Software developed by Loon guides the balloons into favorable winds, which allows them to remain over land for longer and transmit broadband internet access directly to mobile phone handsets below.
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When the cylinder is full of air, the Loon Copter can land and float on the surface of water and continue to use its spinning blades to propel it around.
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A kingfisher flew over the shallows, and out in the center of the pond, a loon and a chick were snorkeling — scanning with their heads underwater — and diving for fish.
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James Butler's sister Deborah van Loon told KZTV this week that she spoke to her brother on the 16th and he asked her to show his house to prospective buyers.
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Alphabet has been investing in Loon to make it work, but whether the balloons will be cheaper than building infrastructure in remote areas that lack connectivity remains to be seen.
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The license extends from October 6th until April 4th, 2018, and it was granted to Ben Wojtowicz, a software engineer and member of Alphabet's X lab who works on Project Loon.
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Alphabet (Google's parent company) announced that its Internet-connected balloon project, Project Loon is "graduating" from the experimental X program and spinning off into its own independent business (still under Alphabet).
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Google's Project Loon is also hoping to use balloons to provide internet coverage from high in the sky, claiming it can keep its vehicles afloat for between 100 and 200 days.
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X projects Loon and Wing have left the nest and graduated to independent companies under Google's parent company Alphabet, X Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller, wrote in a Medium post yesterday.
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Hatched in 20163, Loon aims to bring connectivity to remote parts of the world by floating solar-powered networking gear over areas where cell towers would be too expensive to build.
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The category now houses the Waymo self-driving car unit and the experimental tech lab X, which oversees the balloon Wi-Fi initiative Project Loon and drone delivery unit Project Wing.
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Hatched in 2011, Loon aims to bring connectivity to remote parts of the world by floating solar-powered networking gear over areas where cell towers would be too expensive to build.
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Google's Project Loon—the audacious plan to provide LTE internet to remote regions via a network of hot air balloons—has resulted in numerous crashes and a serious patent infringement suit.
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By launching Loon and Wing into the world, X will soon discover whether it can effectively hatch new Googles—and put Alphabet at the head of industries that don't yet exist.
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The executives involved signed non-disclosure agreements before the visit, and Space Data is now alleging that the subsequent rise of Project Loon is reason to think those agreements were broken.
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Everyone will laugh at the sight of an octopus driving a truck, a wild-eyed loon flying with a bucket of angelfish in her beak and the other slapstick set pieces.
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The Loon balloons are designed to provide internet connectivity for rural areas and operate, more or less, as unmoored cell-towers, floating in the stratosphere and staying aloft for six months.
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The Loon balloons that will be deployed to provide service essentially act as very high-altitude cell towers, receiving LTE connections and redistributing those directly to consumer devices on the ground.
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"FCC issues experimental license to Google to provide emergency cellular service in Puerto Rico through Project Loon balloons," Matthew Berry, chief of staff to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, wrote on Twitter.
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Google abandoned its own efforts to build an internet drone, and the company is now experimenting with using high-altitude balloons to send internet signals, a project it has called Loon.
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Tom Moore, a senior VP at the broadband satellite company ViaSat, is taking the reins at Project Loon, the ambitious effort to string high-altitude balloons into a global internet network.
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Project Loon, the initiative of Alphabet's X lab to deliver internet using air balloons, is looking into deploying Wi-Fi balloons to help alleviate the crisis in Puerto Rico, the company confirmed.
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The Federal Communications Commission yesterday granted Alphabet-owned Project Loon an experimental license to operate in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands for the purpose of helping the islands regain connectivity.
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Though more testing needs to be done - and there's still no news on when Project Loon will officially be in use - this method is more cost effective and less work to manage.
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As a result of its successful work around the globe, and in helping bring Puerto Rico back online after Hurricane Maria, Loon has become increasingly focused on becoming a proper business, too.
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The gambit made headlines after Google got permission from the Federal Communications Commission to use its experimental balloons, a moonshot project with the company known as Project Loon, to beam down connectivity.
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Google is happy to keep sending its Project Loon internet balloons into the sky, announcing a breakthrough in deployment today, but it's suddenly less committed to laying more cables in the ground.
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Surely this was just the ramblings of one of the internet's many conspiracists—a freckled loon with cornflakes in his beard and too much time on his hands cooking up wild theories.
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"Loon is another technology that is being introduced that the licensed operators hopefully can be able to use," Mucheru said, adding it would help the government meet its goal of reaching everyone.
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Madrid-based Telefonica, which declined to comment but has held deal talks with Loon for years, has tested alternatives such as relying on solar power to reduce the costs of remote towers.
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The Federal Communications Commission has granted Project Loon, which is headed by Google's parent company Alphabet, an experimental license to provide cell service to Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
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The Lungi (pronounced LOON-gee) dance, which is not an actual style of dance in India (sorry Vin Diesel), is a song featured in the 2013 Indian romantic action film Chennai Express.
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An obvious question is what advantages does SuperTower offer over Google's Project Loon and Facebook Aquila, which use high-altitude balloons and solar-powered planes, respectively, to provide low-cost broadband coverage?
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What's next: Alphabet continues its research and says it has shifted its focus on Project Loon—a similar attempt using high-altitude balloons—and Project Wing, which is experimenting with drone deliveries.
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If we were patient, across the lake's untroubled sheen came the voice of the loon, the peace we had traveled far to find, a flash of fireflies as his eyes met mine.
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Loon, a project run by Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL), has been developing tennis-court sized balloons that fly 12 miles high, capable of serving the internet within a 25-mile radius.
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Loon and HAPSMobile said at a Tokyo news conference on Wednesday that they needed to collaborate to win over customers and were discussing sharing technology, standardizing gear and cooperating in regulatory talks.
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The Federal Communications Commission recently granted Google special permission to try to use Loon to help restore internet access in Puerto Rico after the island's telecommunications infrastructure was crippled by Hurricane Maria.
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Project Loon, a former X "moonshot" that is now an independent business, has a mission to bring web access to two-thirds of the world's population using internet-beaming hot air balloons.
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Below are tucked six canisters of spices, five of them — loon (salt), jeera (cumin), dhania (coriander), lal mirch (red chile) and amchur (mango powder) — arranged like petals around haldi (turmeric) at the center.
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For Loon, this is a significant expansion of their current operating model, providing another path to revenue that includes adapting their communications technology for use on different types of aircraft and delivery models.
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DeVaul has been an employee of Alphabet since August 2011, when he joined the X lab's Project Loon, an initiative to deliver wireless internet using high-altitude balloons, as a chief technical architect.
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When Google launched Project Loon a few years ago, the plan was to provide internet access to underserved areas with the help of a series of balloons that would constantly circumnavigate the earth.
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Like the high-altitude balloons that Alphabet is using to blanket the world with internet access as part of an initiative called Project Loon, its startup projects will either fly high or crash.
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Comparisons between Project Loon and Facebook's Free Basics are inevitable because both projects were launched by American tech giants in order to bring Internet access to rural or underserved areas around the world.
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Loon plans to bring high-speed internet to about half the world that still doesn't have it by deploying balloons to the edge of space to increase the area of where signals reach.
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Second, while Project Loon can achieve speeds sufficient enough for emergency situations—enough to text a loved one, or check your email, for example—it's not a substitute for true high speed internet.
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Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, the Yang to Trebek's Yin, is an outspoken conservative, as is Sajak's predecessor Chuck Woolery, who is not just right-wing but a raving loon on Twitter.
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"We will work very hard with Loon, to deliver the first commercial mobile service, as quickly as possible, using Loon's balloon-powered Internet in Africa," said Aldo Mareuse, the chief executive of Telkom.
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" Mr. Frontenac asks, and Felix leaves with him Back at the park, Donnie and Helena are busy loon-calling one another, which is charming and fun until Helena gives the call for "emergency.
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"The candy trays were a popular treat in family gatherings from as far back as the Ming Dynasty in 1567," says Fan Zhang of Loon Fong, an Asian supermarket with branches across London.
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Alphabet-owned Loon, the high-altitude balloon company that is using its stratospheric technology to provide internet connectivity on Earth, has signed a new commercial agreement with Telefonica-owned Internet para Todos (IpT).
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By the end of the day, we'd spotted 25 species of birds including some not often seen in Central Park, like a red-throated loon, the yellow-crowned night heron, and a summer tanager.
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He's into the final year of his contract and, after years of scrimping and saving in the aftermath of the move to The Emirates, he should be throwing readies about like an absolute loon.
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Alphabet is looking toward the sky for other innovations, too: Its subsidiary Loon provides internet access via balloons to remote areas, and it's helping a partner operate satellites, another increasingly hot area of investment.
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Back in September of last year, Loon announced it was able to string one such connection across seven balloons spanning 621 miles, a feat that would have been impossible without the aid of Minkowski.
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Throughout 2016, the Loon team tested the new methods in Peruvian airspace and found their hunch was correct: some of the balloons stuck around in the same place for as long as three months.
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The dual graduation of Loon and Wing—both big, ambitious, projects—marks a watershed for X and perhaps the moment when the secretive research and design division starts to make good on its mission.
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X will keep an eye on the fledgling Loon and Wing as they try to make it for real, but it will soon turn its attention to finding new moonshots to take their place.
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And Business Insider has previously reported that Alphabet could be planning to expand testing of the balloons across the US. Here's an up close look at Project Loon that Alphabet published earlier this year:
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"We've actually made so much progress that we think our timeline for when we can provide useful internet service to people is much, much sooner," said Sal Candido, an engineer on the Loon project.
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Loon, which has tested balloons for nearly a decade and expects to hold its first commercial trial in Kenya by mid-year, has not ruled out raising additional funding, Chief Executive Alastair Westgarth said.
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Ms. van Loon will focus on cultural projects, including a daringly flexible exhibition space for the Galeries Lafayette Foundation in Paris that leaves little doubt of her drive to push projects to their limits.
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His work is aligned with projects like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library, which represents birds such as Wyoming's greater sage-grouse under threat by energy development, and the pollution-susceptible common loon.
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Alphabet's Loon subsidiary, which aims to blanket the Earth in high-speed broadband internet connectivity, has passed the 1 million-hour mark in terms of total time spent in Earth's stratosphere across all its flights.
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Project Loon also released a video of Pedro Emmanuelli, a "launch specialist" from Puerto Rico, explaining how the operation releases balloons from a launch site in Winnemucca, Nevada, that end up hovering above Puerto Rico.
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A key Loon patent involving balloon navigation was also canceled by the US Patent and Trademark Office, after a company called Space Data filed a lawsuit claiming it had come up with the idea first.
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Wing became a full company underneath the Alphabet corporate umbrella last year, alongside the likes of self-driving company Waymo and internet balloon startup Loon, after having previously been classed as an X moonshot project.
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Earlier this month, Alphabet's Project Loon deployed a series of LTE balloons in Puerto Rico, working with AT&T to help bring connectivity back to the island following widespread devastation from Hurricane Maria in September.
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The high-flying drone producer seemingly had a lot to offer the tech giant, including the potential to expand Project Loon, its balloon-based plan to develop low-cost internet access to remote rural areas.
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There's still much work to begun to bring Puerto Rico back up to full strength, so hopefully, special projects like Loon can continue to serve as a temporary reprieve as larger recovery efforts are undertaken.
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However, before AT&T iPhone owners (iPhone 5c and above running iOS 10 and higher) can connect to Alphabet's Loon balloons, they need a crucial carrier update which will enable the 900 MHz Band 8.
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Operations lead Nick Kohli has been with Loon since 2012, when his job was to run around the world finding and collecting downed balloons from the Mojave Desert, rural Brazil, the coast of New Zealand.
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With Alphabet's help and resources, Kohli (who now runs flight operations) has seen Loon evolve past watching balloons fly hundreds of miles off course, to the point where a launch like today's is nothing special.
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Google is working on Project Loon, which aims to transmit LTE to remote regions of the world with hot air balloons, but it has run into numerous crashes, and is facing a major patent lawsuit.
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In general, Loon is designed to bring Interest service to remote and rural areas not easily served with cell service, though aid groups say they are excited to have more options for disaster relief efforts.
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As CTO of Loon, the Alphabet company that last summer spun out of X (née Google X), Candido is in charge of the balloons that bop through the stratosphere, beaming the internet to people below.
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While Google announced plans for balloon-powered connectivity through Project Loon, Facebook's plans to bring connectivity to Africa using satellite systems were left in tatters in 603 after the SpaceX rocket carrying its payload exploded.
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"They slightly miscalculated," Ms. van Loon said of the building's planning, which estimated that half the staff would be out of the office at any one time, and reduced the number of available desks accordingly.
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Alphabet's Loon announced today that it has signed a new commercial agreement with Internet Para Todos Perú to provide mobile internet connectivity to parts of the Amazon rainforest in Peru starting in 2020 (via TechCrunch).
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The X division — previously called Google X — launched the self-driving car company, Waymo, and currently contains projects like Wing, which is testing delivery drones in Australia, and Loon, which makes internet access-delivering balloons.
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Wing became a full company underneath the Alphabet corporate umbrella last year, alongside the likes of self-driving company Waymo and internet balloon startup Loon, after having previously been classed as an X Moonshot project.
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Breaking out Google from the as-yet-unprofitable "Other Bets," like the capital intensive health-care division Verily or new spin-offs like Loon, makes the company's financial reporting more palatable to bankers and analysts.
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Highlights of this year's lineup include Kate Benson's "[Porto]," Witness Relocation's "The Loon," Title:Point's "Chroma Key" and "The Last Class: A Jazzercize Play," in which select audience members can break a sweat with the cast.theexponentialfestival.
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If you haven't heard of Ms. van Loon, it is probably because she is a partner at the Dutch architecture firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), whose founder is the decidedly more famous Rem Koolhaas.
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"We've never deployed Project Loon connectivity from scratch at such a rapid pace, and we're grateful for the support of AT&T and the many other partners and organizations that have made this possible," Westgarth writes.
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Alphabet's Project Loon, which last month partnered with AT&T and T-Mobile to bring LTE connectivity to disaster-stricken Puerto Rico, says its helium air balloons have delivered internet to 100,000 residents on the island.
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Now, as 9to5Google notes, the Titan division has been shut down by the company, with its employees being reassigned to different Alphabet teams, including Projects Loon and Wing, a team dedicated to cracking drone-based deliveries.
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Now that Wing and Loon are on their way, X's blog post is already teasing where it could turn its attention to next: robotics, free-space optics, and Google's augmented reality specter from the past, Glass.
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The first prototype of the Loon Copter was tested in early 2015; a newer iteration is a semifinalist in the UAE Drones for Good Award, a competition whose finals are held in Dubai in early February.
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Percival is a dissolute loon who gets about 50 percent too much screen time, and he's more a help than a hindrance in Broughton's mission to recover a secret list of informers embedded within East Germany.
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Here's something interesting from Google's parent company, Alphabet: Its experimental balloon-based initiative to bring internet connectivity to remote parts of the world, called Project Loon, was spotted flying balloons over Yellowstone National Park last week.
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There's Fiber, a stalled effort to blanket the country with super-fast internet service; Loon, which uses giant balloons to beam internet to remote areas; and a partnership with Starbucks to provide Wi-Fi to customers.
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In fact, many of the Republicans in a faux swoon for the far-right loon don't really want to see him fly all the way to the White House — or, for that matter, to the nomination.
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So when the Republican candidate Pete Stauber first asked Larry Cuffe, the mayor of the small town of Virginia, for his support at the town's Land of Loon festival last summer, Mr. Cuffe turned him down.
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SINGAPORE, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Accounting firm EY has hired Mah Kah Loon, CIMB Bank's former co-head of wholesale banking, Singapore, as a partner for its Asia M&A team, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
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When the previous head of Google's Project Loon left in March after six months on the job, Alastair Westgarth took the helm, beaming balloon-powered internet to remote regions of the world — including some disaster recovery missions.
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And while there's a strong distinction between a sex toy and products related to women's menstruation, CES did name a "smart" menstrual cup called Loon an honoree this year in the wearables category of the Innovation Awards.
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For companies like Loon and Telesat, newer solutions ranging from satellites in low Earth orbit — a more cost-effective and lower latency portion of space — to stratospheric balloons and airships are necessary to begin bridging the gap.
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In February, Loon announced it had developed machine-learning navigation algorithms that allow it to send a much smaller fleet of balloons (dozens, instead of hundreds) to specific locations, making the project much cheaper than originally planned.
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However, with initiatives such as Digital India, Google's Project Loon, Microsoft's White Space tech and Facebook's drone project, internet could soon be a reality in hundreds of millions of homes in India over the next few years.
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A very different approach to reestablishing communication, Google's Loon project claims to have connected 100,000 people via balloons launched after the storms; but the balloons really act as a bridge between phones and distant, working cell networks.
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Project Loon aims to provide access not just in emergency response but also to rural and remote areas around the world, but tops out at speeds of 10mbps, far below the Federal Communications Commission's definition of broadband.
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The latter is assured but The Growlers—made up of Brooks, lead guitarist Matt Taylor, and keyboardist/guitarist Kyle Straka—say they're still working on getting every last person at the fest to dress like a loon.
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Google spin-out and now fellow member of the Alphabet family of companies Loon will get a big test in the coming months, as it begins its first commercial trial in Kenya in partnership with Telkom Kenya .
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A new industry alliance led by Alphabet's Loon high-altitude balloon technology company and SoftBank's HAPSMobile stratospheric glider subsidiary aims to work together on standards and tech related to deploying network connectivity using high-altitude delivery mechanisms.
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Google (or rather Alphabet, but they're looking more like the same company than ever before these days) is looking to provide similar connectivity services in hard to reach areas through its Loon high-atmosphere balloon project, too.
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Astro Teller, the head of the company's experimental wing, announced today that the Loon team has learned how to control the navigation of these internet balloons so well that they can now concentrate them in areas of need.
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So while Loon is certainly helping Puerto Rico's government get more residents online, there's a lot of infrastructure work to be done to get the entire island back online and in contact with the rest of the world.
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The head of Project Loon, an effort by Google parent company Alphabet to beam internet to remote regions of the world from balloons, has stepped down after only six months on the job, Alphabet's subsidiary X has confirmed.
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You don't need a VR headset to watch the video, but it does work better on a phone than a PC, because you can wave your handset around like a loon to see what's happening around you.[Facebook]
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Among other things, at the lower end of global warming, many state birds — including Minnesota's loon and New Hampshire's purple finch — would be more likely to maintain at least a fraction of their current range in their states.
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Loon, which was spun out of Google parent Alphabet Inc's business incubator, and HAPSMobile, a unit of SoftBank Group Corp's domestic telco, plan to deliver high speed internet to remote areas by flying network equipment at high altitudes.
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It's unclear to what extent Loon may be able to assist the island, and if its technology is capable of doing so in a way as meaningful as the necessary financial and infrastructural aid the US government could provide.
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Last Friday, engineers on Google parent Alphabet's internet-by-balloon Project Loon tweeted that they hoped to bring emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and Maria left more than 90 percent of the island without cellphone coverage.
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Now that Loon, Waymo, and Wing are all separate businesses that have been spun out of X, costs for each of those companies may be increasing in the short-term as Alphabet encourages them to push toward commercial viability.
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The tech giant secured special permission to deploy its so-called Loon in Puerto Rico, during the cleanup after Hurricane Maria, and Republican lawmakers said they would explore new ways of bringing broadband to other, similar disaster-affected areas.
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Google parent company Alphabet did the same in January of last year, shutting down its solar-powered drone project in favor of its air balloon Wi-Fi initiative Project Loon and strategic investments in third-party satellite internet companies.
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The company is also in talks with the Indian government to provide Internet connectivity through its Project Loon, which uses high-altitude balloons to beam Wi-Fi to remote areas where last mile connectivity might not be financially viable.
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Photo: ilitephoto/FlickrProject Loon, the former Google X Lab enterprise to provide mobile data to rural areas and disaster zones via high-altitude weather balloons now run by Google's parent company Alphabet, may soon get another major test drive.
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Two futuristic projects are coming together to help increase global internet access after Loon, the Google spinout that uses a collection of floating balloons to bring connectivity to remote areas, announced it has raised money from a SoftBank initiative.
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This isn't the first time Loon has worked with Telefonica — the two joined forces to provide emergency internet connectivity following the 8.0 earthquake that hit Peru in May, and they've been collaborating on a number of projects for years.
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Clayton Kershaw, who overpowered the Astros for seven innings in Game 221, said he knew Turner could hit since they faced each other a decade ago in Class A; Kershaw was a Great Lakes Loon, Turner a Dayton Dragon.
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Loon, the balloon project that aims to deliver internet to parts of the world that lack reliable connectivity, announced today that due to advancements in the machine learning software, it can now deploy fewer balloons to provide greater connectivity.
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Trump in many respects got the national security advisor he wanted in 2017 in retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a loon whose dirty tricks helped whip the Trump base and achieve little else, other than his own federal prosecution.
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There is Loon Peak, Bungalow Rose, Laurel Foundry Modern Farmhouse, Winston Porter, Andover Mills, Brayden Studio, Breakwater Bay, Lark Manor, Millwood Pines, Gracie Oaks, and Beachcrest Home, all of which sound like they were created by a name generator.
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But something unexpected happened when the news of Project Loon broke: There was very little of the mocking or criticism you might expect from a plan so daft that its name was chosen in part to acknowledge its lunacy.
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Known as Alphabet's "Moonshot Factory", X is a research and development unit that acts as a nursery for the company's many offshoot projects, such as Waymo, Wing, Makani, Loon and others, helping them take root as viable separate entities.
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Chronicle is one of Alphabet's Other Bets, the group of Google's sister companies that are hoping to stumble on the next big thing in tech, such as self-driving cars (Waymo) or high-speed internet access in remote areas (Loon).
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Today, Loon is announcing a partnership with Canadian telecommunications company Telesat in a deal that will see Loon's custom software service for managing its LTE balloon fleet be put to use controlling Telesat's new constellation of low Earth orbit satellites.
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Loon's official LTE partner for the initiative is AT&T, which is helping Loon use its fleet of stratospheric helium balloons to bring functions like text messaging and minor web browsing access to Puerto Rico residents who have LTE-equipped smartphones.
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Instead of building and maintaining earthbound structures with a range of a just few miles, Loon plans to fly packs of antenna-outfitted balloons 60,000 feet above the ground, each one spreading the gospel of connectivity over nearly 2,000 square miles.
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NAIROBI (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Loon said on Thursday it would deploy its system of balloons to beam high-speed Internet access with Telkom Kenya from next year to cover rural and suburban populations, marking its first commercial deal in Africa.
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I like that the world has companies willing to invest (and sometimes fail) in their vision of the future, and Google has always been a leader in that respect, with such efforts as Google Fiber, Project Loon, and Project SkyBender.
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Google is not deploying its moonshot Project Loon to provide connectivity, instead, it is partnering with Nigerian fiber optic telecoms service provider 21st Century to roll out Wi-Fi spots at public places such as colleges, malls, markets and bus stations.
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For starters, they say they will make their crafts/balloons open to use for the other — so HAPSMobile can tap Loon balloons for connectivity and vice-versa — while, connected to that, they will jointly develop a communication payload across both services.
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It's hard to imagine a Minnesota summer without the sound of a loon, or the absence of the song of the brown thrasher in Georgia, but climate change is more likely to make that a reality, a new study found.
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"With this association with Loon, we will be partnering with a pioneer in the use of high-altitude balloons to provide LTE (4G) coverage across larger areas in Kenya," said Aldo Mareuse, Telkom Kenya's chief executive, in a press release.
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SoftBank's HAPSMobile, which has also been trying to fly networking equipment at high altitudes to provide high-speed internet to areas that are out of range of land towers, said it had invested in Loon, a unit of the Google owner.
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The company's search engine ads machine pumps out so much money that Alphabet can afford to spend on "other bets" that Page is passionate about, like building smarter home appliances, spreading internet through its Project Loon balloons, and extending human life.
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Chronicle is one of Alphabet's newest "Other Bets," the group of Google's sister companies that are hoping to stumble on the next big thing in tech, such as self-driving cars (Waymo) or high-speed internet access in remote areas (Loon).
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Taylor had just left Google and was working at Benchmark alongside Nirav Tolia, who later started Nextdoor, Mike Cassidy, who went on to lead Google's hot air balloon project called Loon, and the late Dave Goldberg, who became CEO of SurveyMonkey.
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X Known as Alphabet's "Moonshot Factory," X is a research and development unit that acts as a nursery for the company's many offshoot projects, such as Waymo, Wing, Makani, Loon and others, helping them take root as viable separate entities.
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"In times of crisis, being able to communicate with loved ones, emergency services and critical information is key," Project Loon project lead Alastair Westgarth, said in a statement shared with Gizmodo, thanking AT&T and T-Mobile, which the project collaborated with.
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The partnership will bring Loon a new line of revenue, turning its software for controlling non-stationary aerial networks into a viable product for the satellite industry, which is now eyeing the lower portion of Earth's atmosphere as a lucrative and untapped market.
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And Alphabet as a whole can only grow and continue thriving — and writing the healthy paychecks that keep the lights on at companies like Loon — if more internet users come online and start using ad-supported web services like Google search and Gmail.
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Last year, Alphabet, Google's parent company, killed Project Titan, its own effort to build internet-beaming drones, and said that the company would focus on Project Loon, which uses massive balloons that float in space and beam high-speed internet down to earth.
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Alphabet-owned Loon, the company that had been focused on delivering internet communications to remote areas via stratospheric balloons, has completed development work on a new payload for partner HAPSMobile, a subsidiary of SoftBank that's building high-altitude solar-powered uncrewed aircraft.
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SoftBank's year-old HAPSMobile and Alphabet's Loon, which spun out last July from the research incubator of the Google parent, separately have been trying to fly networking equipment at high altitudes to provide high-speed internet where ground-based towers are unreachable.
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"Now that the foundational technology for these projects is built, Loon and Wing are ready to take their products into the world; this is work best done outside of the prototyping-focused environment of X," said X CEO Astro Teller in the announcement.
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But some X projects do "graduate" and become Alphabet spin-off companies, like self-driving vehicle company Waymo (currently valued at $105 billion)the drone company Wing; and Loon, an attempt to use huge, floating balloons to provide internet connectivity to all.
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Alphabet, which announced its Project Loon in 2013 to use solar-powered, high-altitude balloons to provide internet service in remote regions, said in an FCC filing it was working to "support licensed mobile carriers' restoration of limited communications capability" in Puerto Rico.
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The first, Robert Bork, was voted down for the good reason of being an extremist loon; the second, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew his own name from consideration for the hilarious reason that he smoked pot sometimes in his 20s and it was scandalous.
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Initially, engineers proposed that the Loon balloons would float around the globe and that they would have to find a way to keep the balloons a safe traveling distance apart and replace a balloon that drifted from an area that needed connectivity.
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"This signals a shift away from the more fringy efforts like Project Loon and more towards a company focused on technology that makes money," said Kim Caughey Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, referring to Alphabet's internet-by-balloons business.
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Loon started life as one of Google's moonshot projects, like the Waymo self-driving car program, but it was spun out into a standalone company under Alphabet last year, roughly a year and a half after Westgarth, a telecom industry veteran, took over as CEO.
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Without an overlord telling them when to rebel and when to go with the flow—or, perhaps, an Ivy League professor whispering in their ears—the electors seem singularly incapable of saving the nation from a loon, a fascist or an inveterate Twitter abuser.
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Google lost close to $1 billion from the division, which includes its X lab and the various other companies, like the Waymo self-driving unit and the Loon balloon internet service, that were born as so-called moonshot ideas and turned into full businesses.
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"We're grateful for the support of the FCC and the Puerto Rican authorities as we work hard to see if it's possible to use Loon balloons to bring emergency connectivity to the island during this time of need," Leahy told TechCrunch in a statement.
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Loon breaks its stratospheric balloon flight record with 223 days aloft This beats the Alphabet-owned company's previous record of 198 days in the air by nearly a month, and it's great news for its goal of delivering internet connectivity to hard-to-reach areas.
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Loon, a fleet of internet enabling balloons that patrol the skies to connect remote and technologically undeserved areas, played a role in connecting those affected by flooding in Peru last summer and assisted those devastated by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico this past fall.
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Loon and Wing will now join the ranks of X's four fellow graduates, including the self-driving car company Waymo and the cybersecurity analytics platform Chronicle, as well as competitors like SpaceX's prototyped system of internet satellites and Amazon's long discussed drone delivery system.
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He didn't get the grades for med school, so he trained as an emergency room technician—a background which, combined with his pilot's license and eight years of search-and-rescue operations in the Sierra Nevada, made him just what Loon was looking for.
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Its own record flights pale in comparison to Loon's, but it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, as Loon is aiming very specifically at high-flying network infrastructure and World View is targeting high-altitude imaging and other applications, including even potential stratospheric tourism.
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Watson, the rapper, producer, and reigning pharaoh of Nü Age Syndicate—a crew that includes himself, Kent Loon, producer Kanisono, and other young hip-hop artists based in South Florida—features on a quarter of the record's tracks and produced two-thirds of them.
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I grabbed a drink at Nest, the 3,500-square-foot rooftop bar and lounge, which offers stunning views (especially in the outdoor section, which also has warming fire pits) and solid cocktails, like the Pacific Loon, with Japanese Suntory Toki whiskey, orgeat, ginger and lemon.
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Abetting the efforts of big tech companies like Alphabet, which helped restore internet connectivity with its LTE-equipped Project Loon balloons, ad-hoc groups founded spontaneously in the wake of hurricanes Harvey and Irma have brought in tons of supplies by plane or ship.
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He was wearing his rollerblades on Thursday when he glided into a roomful of reporters to announce that Project Loon—Alphabet's wacky-sounding plan to deliver the internet to the world's farthest-flung places via giant balloons—is even closer to reality than the company previously thought.
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In a Medium blog post last month, Westgarth admitted, "Project Loon is still an experimental technology and we're not quite sure how well it will work, but we hope it helps get people the information and communication they need to get through this unimaginably difficult time."
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RIO DE JANEIRO, July 30 (Reuters) - Brazilian gas pipeline firm Nova Transportadora do Sudeste SA (NTS) is planning investments of almost 900 million reais ($237 million) over the next five years, the group's chief executive, Wong Loon, said at an event in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday.
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"We started looking for a way to make people aware of this problem [...] That's when the idea began to create a product people actually want from something no one cares about," a spokesperson for the collaboration, Jonathan Van Loon, said in an email to The Verge.
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For Loon, this is now the third commercial contract it has secured, including one with Telkom Kenya, which is also awaiting final regulatory sign-off, and an arrangement with Canadian company Telecast to develop a coordination system for a future planned low-Earth orbit satellite constellation.
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Loon has spent a majority of its existence as an Alphabet-funded project developing this software, and it's become an instrumental system for controlling the network traffic for Loon's LTE service in areas like Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere around the globe where the company has performed field tests.
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In a blog penned by Project Loon head Alastair Westgarth, the company says it's working with the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Authority, FEMA, and other cellular spectrum and aviation authorities to bring connectivity to parts of the island still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
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In the past few years, Alphabet has poured money into its self-driving car company, Waymo, the anti-aging project Calico, a life sciences division called Verily, an energy-kite company called Makani, balloon internet project called Project Loon, a drone delivery project called Project Wing, and more.
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A fix could soon be high-altitude concepts for beaming internet to disaster-stricken areas from the sky, but innovations such as X's Project Loon (X is an innovation lab within Google's parent company, Alphabet) are still in their R&D phase, and not yet ready to be deployed.
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In a complaint filed earlier this week in Northern California District Court, Space Data cites two patents that Loon allegedly infringes on — one dealing with providing connectivity through a network of balloons (filed in 1999) and another dealing with the termination and recovery of those balloons (filed in 2001).
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The IpT initiative, which is also backed in part by Facebook and the Development Bank of Latin America, aims to provide internet connectivity to users in remote locations across Latin America, and its deal with Loon will specifically connect users in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Peru.
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Vermont's outdoors is a salve and a muse for Mr. Mulherin, 25: His right arm is covered in tattoos of the state flower, the state fish, the state seal, the loon from the reservoir ("They don't know how hard I ride for them," he said, referring to the loons).
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Alphabet first came into existence in 2015 as "a collection of companies" that separates Google from "other bets" that aren't part of its core businesses, such as Waymo (self-driving cars), Verily (life sciences), Calico (biotech R&D), Sidewalk Labs (urban innovation) and Loon (rural internet access via balloon).
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But Google (or, if we're being precise about it, Alphabet's subsidiary X) also has its own global internet blueprints: Its Project Loon launches high-altitude internet balloons to the stratosphere, far below the realm of satellites, where the flaccid, floating jellyfish catch a ride on wind currents to their destinations.
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As a thoughtful introvert—more inclined to visit his hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida's Dali Museum than a Miami strip club—whose verses often find him deep in drug induced nihilism, or tangled in sheets stained with equal quantities of lean and strangers' DNA, Kent Loon is prepared to be misunderstood.
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According to Reuters, Loon still has work to do in terms of proving out that its novel model for delivering connectivity makes business sense for carrier partners, who seem to be skeptical of its ability to provide reliable service at a cost that still makes sense in terms of profitability.
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The backing is a vote of confidence in the technology after Alphabet this month shut down another of its big bets, Makani, which aimed to generate wind energy with kites, in a move widely seen as signalling pressure from CEO Sundar Pichai for unproven businesses like Loon to start delivering results.
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Many of Google parent company Alphabet's newest innovations come out of its secretive research-and-development company X. Ventures at X, which previously was known as Google [X], include global internet access division Project Loon, its self-driving car Waymo, smart glasses Google Glass, and its delivery drone service Project Wing.
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Commissioned by the band Explosions in the Sky and Temporary Residence Ltd for the Texas group's forthcoming album The Wilderness, the piece's process appears today in a new video, exclusively on The Creators Project, where directors Jeremy Bird and Jeremy deVine of Temporary Residence Ltd show van Loon at work.
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