Google has unveil what it's calling its "latest moonshot" out of the Google X labs. It's called "Project Loon," and as reported last month, it involved sending up a huge number of giant balloons to beam down internet access to remote regions around the globe. Google says that balloons make sense for this purpose — they're cheap to deploy and can provide wireless coverage in areas that would otherwise be difficult to serve due to geography.

Like Google's driverless cars, Project Loon is very much an experiment that's in "very early days." Google says that it has already built the system, however, carrying balloon at 60,000 feet, providing internet speeds "similar to today's 3G networks or faster." Balloons drift, of course, so Google says it's using "complex algorithms and lots of computing power" to ensure that the balloons can move where they're needed using a combination of wind and solar power — potentially floating around the entire globe at stratospheric heights. Google says that the balloons communicate with "specialized antennas," that only work with Project Loon — so it's not using traditional cellular or Wi-Fi tech. On the ground, internet providers can take the signal and move it to the last mile to users.

At Wired, Steven Levy reports that the project started "a little under two years ago." Each balloon starts as an "envelope" that contains the polyethylene balloons and a 22-pound "payload" that contains all the computers and electronics.

There's already a pilot program in New Zealand with 50 testers — Google launched 30 balloons just this week. Google hopes to set up more experiments "over time."

Source: The Verge

Today I came across this blog post with infographics.

If you were to guess whether world’s top 100 richest people got their money from someone else or made money themselves – you would be right to guess that most of them made their own money. But you might think that even the self-made had advantages you don’t have.

After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s father is a dentist. Maybe it did not help him become a billionaire. After all a dentist couldn’t be much help with hacking. But you also might think that having a dentist dad makes it easier to not worry about what you are going to eat tomorrow.

There is no denying that Sergey Brin is a self-made man, but you might think that his father and grandfather, both mathematicians, had something to do with him studying math in the first place.

So if your father is a cab driver or if you have no father at all, is it still possible to become a billionaire? Apparently, it is. Researching the top 100 richest people in the world, all of whom are billionaires of course, we found 8 that were from absolute humble backgrounds. In fact even worse than the average. On top of that, they never got a college degree.

(Roman Abramovich, Russian billionaire and owner of football club Chelsea would be number 9 on the list, but he got a correspondence degree in law later in life. So technically he does have a degree. But otherwise he was poor, an orphan and qualified.)

Source: Funders & Founders