Google is wooing some of the world’s hottest start-ups to sell its cloud computing technology.
These include ventures that send satellites into the space to study the changing earth, firms that convert traditional manufacturing plants into smart factories and start-ups that are simulating entire cities.
Google is offering cloud technology that combines a large amount of storage and computing. It then sells it to customers who may want to enhance or set up new data centres.
Planet Labs, Inc, a start-up which is on a mission to image the entire Earth every day, and make the global change visible said that it has switched to Google Cloud to host its imagery and do data processing.
“There are a handful of companies that can offer storage and processing, we are really impressed by Google Cloud’s core technology,” said Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet Labs, at Google Cloud Next conference held recently in San Francisco.
Natural disasters
Founded in 2010 by a team of ex-NASA scientists, Planet Labs operates the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. These satellites are collecting a new data set with real-world applications such as tracking natural resources, quantifying agricultural yields and assisting first responders after natural disasters.
To image the whole of Earth every day means preparing for 7 to 10 terabytes of data daily. Google Cloud now hosts this growing photography repository and the data processing for Planet Labs.
“We have the capacity to image every point on the earth every single day and the sea changes that happens. We see every port, every city, every farm and every forest,” said Mr. Marshall.
In February, with the help from Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO), the California-based firm successfully launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit.
This is the largest satellite constellation ever to reach orbit. These satellites rode aboard ISRO’s workhorse — the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV rocket) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
Planet Labs has now introduced a tool called ‘Planet Explorer Beta’ that aims to provide data to individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, developers and researchers around the globe.
Simulating cities
Google also provides its cloud platform to Improbable, a London-based start-up co-founded by Indian-origin entrepreneur Herman Narula.
It is dedicated to building technology to enable powerful virtual worlds and simulations designed to help solve previously stubborn problems. In gaming and entertainment, this enables the creation of richer and more immersive virtual worlds. For instance, top studios are building their products on Improbable’s distributed operating system, SpatialOS. These include top video games like Worlds Adrift, Rebel Horizons and Chronicles of Elyria.
Improbable has now taken a huge leap of simulating entire cities that could impact everything ranging from city planning to healthcare.
At the Google Cloud conference, Mr. Narula said that Improbable has built a complete simulation of an entire British City, in conjunction with a public sector partner. This includes its telco and transport network, power grid, sewage systems, housing demographics and even the way in which people move around and interact with the city.
“This is the largest simulation of its kind, ever created,” said Mr. Narula, chief executive at Improbable. The company intends to foster a community where developers can share code, framework and build and create new services and businesses.
Mr.Narula said the age of closed systems and trying, in effect, developers into committing to a closed ecosystem were over. “We can’t succeed unless you succeed and I think Google recognises that,” he said.
Smart factories
Manufacturing is one of the most important sectors of the U.S. economy. The gross output of U.S. manufacturing industries was $6.2 trillion in 2015, about 36% of U.S. gross domestic product. But these industries have less access to the new technological advancements in the information technology sector, according to Oden Technologies, a leading industrial Internet of Things venture.
The New York-based firm is betting big on changing this and it runs its entire platform on the Google cloud platform. Using a combination of IoT — a technology where devices communicate with each other intelligently, wireless connectivity, and big data, Oden is helping manufacturers enhance production efficiency.
“We probably wouldn’t be comfortable scaling up to thousands and thousands of factories, ten and thousands of machines, all streaming data, if we didn’t know we had the infrastructure of Google to allow us to do that,” said Willem Sundblad, founder and chief executive of Oden Technologies.
For example, Google’s cloud platform provides the base for obtaining and storing data collated by Oden’s wireless devices. It captures and stores about 10 million metrics on each manufacturing line per day. This includes highly granular details, such as melt profile of the materials and measure of power moving to the machines.
The environmental insights like temperature and humidity are also obtained. This way manufacturers can find if there are weather-related impacts on their manufacturing efficiency.
In March, Mountain View, California-based Google also acquired Kaggle, a community platform for data scientists. The Kaggle community has used machine learning to grade high school essays, diagnose heart failure and increase the discovery significance of the Higgs-Boson, an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics.
Making Google Cloud technology available to its community will allow it to offer access to powerful infrastructure and the capability to store and query large data sets. “We are going to enable our community to do far more powerful things,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive of Kaggle.
Published - May 21, 2017 08:41 pm IST
