Offers technology that combines a large amount of storage and
computing to ventures that study Earth and simulate cities
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.
Source: THE HINDU-22nd May,2017
