lapse: Landsat Satellite Images of Climate Change, via Google Earth Engine TIME and Space | By Jeffrey Kluger Editors note:On Nov. 29, 2016, Google released a major update expanding the data from 2012 to 2016. Read about the update here. Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. Chapter 1: Satellite Story | By Jeffrey Kluger But in 1966, Udall and his staff had an idea. 1 of 20 Aaron Vincent Elkaim / Boreal Collective
Project Loon in Puerto Rico serving 100,000 customers Navigation In a Medium post, Alphabet-owned X has thanked its partners for helping Project Loon execute its shortest roll-out in Puerto Rico. Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. The Team at X (@Theteamatx) November 9, 2017 An accompanying tweet indicates that the experimental balloon-based internet distribution system has 100,000 customers in the storm-ravaged island. AT&T and T-Mobile users are able to connect to the balloons, which are circulating around the region by machine-taught navigation. The FCC granted Project Loon an experimental license on the Band 8 frequencies for LTE. About The Author Jules Wang Jules Wang is News Editor for Pocketnow and one of the hosts of the Pocketnow Weekly Podcast.
Oracle VM VirtualBox Microsoft is interesting again — very Microsoft has been largely dead to Silicon Valley because for the past decade they struggled in — or completely missed — the last five major technology movements. Those five movements, and who they lost to are: 1/open source (to Linux, MySQL, etc.) 2/search (to Google) 3/mobile (to Apple) 4/social (to Facebook) 5/cloud (to Amazon) In this piece: why MSFT failed (dividends), why they’re back (Satya) & what 7 things they can do to be as important to the future as Apple, Google, and Facebook. [ Click to Tweet (can edit before sending): ] Why Microsoft “Failed” When I came into the industry in 1990, Microsoft was Apple and Bill Gates was Elon Musk. Steve lost the 80s and 90s to Gates, but he won the new century — before losing his life. [ Total aside, how much do we miss that guy? Microsoft failed to be a major player in social, open source, search, mobile, and cloud because Steve Ballmer optimized Microsoft around sales and a bizarre financial innovation called ‘a dividend.’
Project Loon You climb 170 steps up a series of dusty wooden ladders to reach the top of Hangar Two at Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California. The vast, dimly lit shed was built in 1942 to house airships during a war that saw the U.S. grow into a technological superpower. A perch high in the rafters is the best way to appreciate the strangeness of something in the works at Google—a part of the latest incarnation of American technical dominance. Project Loon Breakthrough A reliable and cost-effective way to beam Internet service from the sky to places lacking it. Why It Matters Internet access could expand educational and economic opportunities for the 4.3 billion people who are offline. On the floor far below are Google employees who look tiny as they tend to a pair of balloons, 15 meters across, that resemble giant white pumpkins. It is odd for a large public company to build out infrastructure aimed at helping the world’s poorest people. Balloon revolution Good signals
TechCrunch Space-age entrepreneur|Business Updated: 2015-01-30 08:42 By Cecily Liu(China Daily Europe) Oxford University graduate is turning space agency's technologies into commercial baby-care products Chen Fujia, 30, recalls that while she wanted to be a scientist as a young PhD student at the University of Oxford, she had never really planned out her life "systematically". "I just take on new opportunities as they come," Chen says. That time would come in 2012, when the European Space Agency held an academic competition that allowed participants to transform its technology into commercial products. Chen used one of the agency's ultra lightweight materials to create a user-friendly baby cot called the SpaceCot that she says can be deployed and retracted in seconds. In 2013, she then parlayed that technology into co-establishing Oxford Space Structures, which specializes in the use of space technologies to produce baby-care products. "China has great capability and talent pools for these activities," she says.
Project Loon