Google, Facebook and Future

The technological advancements in various fields are taking us altogether to a new world where convenience and comfort are accompanied by opportunities and promises. Boost or boon, the lust for technological advancement seems nigh impossible to resist.

The new age industrial shares are slowly being taken over by the tech giants who are taking apparently big leaps to pave the path for future technologies. Two such tech giants Google and Facebook seem to be engaged in a track where they are competing with each other to reach the ultimate future where technology will simply dominate human life to a much more comprehensive extent.

The present post deals with some of the most advance future projects that these tech giants are planning for the near future.

Google’s Projects and Plans:

What started as a small corporation based in a Garage has become one of the leading tech giants yielding annual revenue over US $50 billion. Google has come through a lot since its incorporation in 1998. Following are its plans and projects for the near future to raise the wall of its achievements.

  

Google Fiber

Google Fiber: Google fiber facilitates “a connection that is up to 100 times faster than today's average broadband speeds”. It uses optic fiber instead of the conventional copper wire cables to transmit signals at such high speed. The new up to 1000 Mbps connection has already been set up in the Kansas City of U.S. With such a high speed internet connection, it will take only few seconds or a minute to download HD movies and big files of several Gigabytes. The plan to expand the project is already on its way.

Project Loon: ‘Loon for All’ as they say, is a project initiated by Google for the purpose of making internet available and accessible to All. Google research works are being carried out in secret labs of ‘Google X’ to make it possible using a network of balloons that will fly at an altitude of 20 km above earth surface, in the stratosphere zone. The solar powered balloons are intended to be controlled from a ground station by the help of the balloons network itself. Believe it or not, Google’s intention to provide internet access to every corner of the earth does look viable. 

Project Deep Mind: Yet another interesting venture of Google is its newly acquired DeepMind, a start up researching on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The 2010 start up, DeepMind, was reported to be acquired by Google recently for £500 millions. Google plans to implement it in its basic and oldest team of “search engine”. With advance AI algorithms, Google can improve its search experience to a much more satisfactory level for its users.

Recorded Future: Google has also invested in start up named Recorded Future that plans to predict future using complex analytical programs. The start up intends to analyse past and present Web data to predict possible future outcome. This could help in taking important trade decisions and predict stock market fluctuations or even terrorist attacks.

Apart from all these, Google is also working on projects like improving Green Energy, building Driverless Cars, Augmented Reality Glass, Space Elevator, and Home Automation system. It has invested a huge amount on building fossil fuel workaround using renewable energy resources. They claim that Google will be powered completely by renewable energy in the near future. The Home Automation System that Google proposed sometime back is meant to control home appliances such as washing machine, fridge, electric bulbs etc. with the help of android operated phones or tabs from anywhere outside the home.

Facebook’s Projects and Plans: Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zukerberg’s plan to connect people seems to have evolved and acquired a bigger picture to be realised in near future. With all new research programs and projects, Facebook delivers the biggest challenge to its ultimate competitor Google in the tech fight of Generation NeXt. Here are few of the projects Facebook has undertaken to accomplish in the time to come.

Drone for transmitting FSO internet signals on ground

Internet.Org: It is a partnership program between Facebook and six other telecom companies (including Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Qualcom, MediaTek and Opera Software). Just like Project Loon of Google, the project Internet.org aims at bringing cheap and affordable internet to the two-third part of the world which lacks internet connections at present. Facebook plans to use unmanned solar powered drone, Geo stationary satellites and low orbit satellites to transmit internet signals using Free Space Optics (FSO) laser technology.

 

Artificial Intelligence: The new Artificial Intelligence lab set by Facebook aims at improving the AI technology to serve the news feed and search a better result in Facebook and also implement the technology in other possible fields. Facebook has chosen one of the best men for the job. Yann LeCun, a professor of NY University who has contributed a lot in the development of AI will now lead the AI team in Facebook as the director.

Oculus Rift: After acquiring the 19 billion worth (??) app, WhatsApp, Facebook made it clear that it wants to stay ahead of everyone in the domain of mobile connectivity. However, it also strongly believes that the virtual reality head mounted display, Oculus Rift, is the next important computing platform. That being the reason, Facebook recently acquired Oculus Rift VR, the company which designed the virtual reality headset, for US$2 billion. Although, they haven’t revealed any future plans on how they are going to use Oculus Rift, it is quite clear that we have very few options or perhaps no option except Facebook, to remain virtually connected to our friends and family.

Oculus Rift

 

Facebook Creative Lab is yet another endeavor by Facebook to make it easier for people to connect and share. The new Facebook Paper is such an app designed with innovative purpose to render unique experience to the users. We can expect more such creative apps from the Lab in time to come.

 

Well, that brings us to the conclusion that these tech giants have equipped themselves with all shades and brushes to draw the bigger picture of Future Technology. With internet connecting the whole world and artificial intelligence deciding the way we stay connected, it’s only for time to tell what lies beyond.