One of Google’s umm Larry Page’s Flying Cars Spotted ! Here come Airbus and others…

Picture Credit: San Francisco Chronicle

Waaay back in July 19, 2010, Google assigned a “priority date” to its July 19, 2011 filing (WO2012012474 A3) and a subsequent one on February 13, 2013 patent filing (US20130214086 A1) for  “a personal aircraft (that is) a safe, quiet, easy to control, efficient, and compact aircraft configuration is enabled through the combination of multiple vertical lift rotors, tandem wings, and forward thrust propellers. Then in January 2012, bicyclist Thomas Shepard notices something odd: “2700 Broderick Way in Mountain View is a completely unmarked building, the home of Aero Zee. http://www.zee.aero/ Can you say stealth? The web site talks about vehicle autonomy, advanced aerodynamics, and electric propulsion.  Vehicle autonomy and intelligent control have to do with the world of sensors, robotics, computational reasoning, Darpa,” Then, in November 2013, The San Francisco Chronicle spotted the Zee Aero 1 on a tarmac close to (the then) Google’s HQ and crowed, “Forget self-driving cars. How about flying ones? Reports have emerged of what appears to be a mysterious airborne vehicle being developed by a stealth company operating near Google’s Mountain View headquarters.”

Almost four years on, Zee Aero is hiring manufacturing and control systems engineers for Google co-founder Larry Page’s pet project:

Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Zee is developing a revolutionary new form of transportation. Working at the intersection of aerodynamics, advanced manufacturing, and electric propulsion, we provide a stimulating environment where creative employees can explore new challenges. If you have expertise in aircraft design, electric power systems, active control, machine learning, aeroacoustics, composite structures, or systems integration, let’s talk.

Source: Zee Aero- A sketch from one of Zee.Aero’s patent filings of a personal flying aircraft

Competitor TerraFugia seeking funding at IndieGoGo for a “roadable aircraft” prototyped in 2009, and you can “reserve” a Transition for a $10K refundable deposit: “Terrafugia’s mission is to create practical flying cars that enable a new dimension of personal freedom. Terrafugia (ter-ra-FOO-gee-ah) is derived from the Latin for “Escape the Earth”. We’re Driven to Fly.™”Here’s a video of the exciting craft.

The Zee Aero personal car is a battery powered, vertical lift vehicle that fits into a conventional parking space.  The Chronicle continued, “Zee.Aero was founded in 2010, according to Delaware corporation records, and Ilan Kroo, a noted professor of aeronautics, has been on partial leave from Stanford since 2011 to run the company. He holds the aforementioned patent, among others, and has worked for NASA.” And in November 2013, Professor Kroo stated, “As you gathered, I am working on some interesting transportation ideas at an early stage start-up company in Mt. View (near Google and other tech companies, but not affiliated with them).” There are a gaggle of Google filed patents, however…

On Saturday, The Mercury News reported the Zee Areo VL vehicle was spotted (picture will not load). Google co-founder Larry Page was acknowledged as personally funding a pair of startups devoted to creating flying cars, according to Bloomberg Businessweek in June 2016 (Zee Aero in 2010 at a $100M cost so far and Kitty Hawk started in 2015 by Google X founder Sebastian Thurn). Here’s what is known:

• Zee.Aero now employs close to 150 people. Its operations have expanded to an airport hangar in Hollister, about a 70-minute drive south from Mountain View, where a pair of prototype aircraft takes regular test flights. The company also has a manufacturing facility on NASA’s Ames Research Center campus at the edge of Mountain View.

• Kitty Hawk, began operations and registered its headquarters to a two-story office building on the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half-mile away from Zee’s offices. Kitty Hawk’s staffers, sequestered from the Zee.Aero team, are working on a competing design. Its president, according to 2015 business filings, was Sebastian Thrun, th­e godfather of Google’s self-driving car program and the founder of research division Google X.

Picture Credit: Airbus A3’s Vahana

The Verge reported recently that an Uber-like air taxi is being deployed by a big competitor, according to CNN Money:

The European aerospace giant Airbus recently unveiled its secret flying-car project dubbed Vahana — a single-manned, autonomously piloted aircraft that can take off and land vertically. The concept drawing of Vahana should look familiar to anyone who follows the tiny-but-passionate flying car movement. The aircraft has eight rotors on two sets of wings, both of which tilt depending on whether the car’s flying vertically or horizontally. There’s room for a single passenger under a canopy that retracts like a visor. The project launched in early 2016 as one of the first pursuits of A³ (pronounced A-cubed), the Silicon Valley arm of Airbus, according to the startup’s CEO Rodin Lyasoff. Vahana is a Sanskrit word that refers to the vehicle or mount of a god.

A3 is clearly dedicated to disruptive innovation as it declares in its mission: “We believe that the future is created through episodic disruption with intervening periods of incremental innovation. Our mission is to build the future of flight now, by disrupting Airbus Group and its competitors before someone else does.”  This is getting interesting, Boy Elroy! (Jetsons hat tip video here)

 

Atlantic Charges that Big Business is Killing Innovation

Picture Credit: The Atlantic, October 2016

It’s interesting to see The Atlantic criticize big business for failing to innovate. The article cites low new business formation and the lack of dynamism in the U.S. economy as key symptoms for our economic stagnation.

Botanists define a rheophyte as an aquatic plant that thrives in swift-moving water. Coming from the Greek word rhéos, meaning a flow or stream, the term describes plants with wide roots and flexible stalks, well adapted to strong currents rather than a pond’s or pasture’s stillness. For most of the 20th century, U.S. lawmakers worked to maintain just these sorts of conditions for the U.S. economy—a dynamic system, briskly flowing, that forced firms to adapt to the unpredictable currents of the free market or be washed away. In the past few decades, however, the economy has come to resemble something more like a stagnant pool. Entrepreneurship, as measured by the rate of new-business formation, has declined in each decade since the 1970s, and adults under 35 (a k a Millennials) are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation on record. This decline in dynamism has coincided with the rise of extraordinarily large and profitable firms that look discomfortingly like the monopolies and oligopolies of the 19th century.

In fact, investment bankers have been busy inking deals to merge big firms together without any fear of regulatory intervention. And highly valued internet firms like Google and Amazon such up AI players and other social media firms with barely a stop at their stock share printing press. Derek Thomson argues that,”antitrust law shifted over the course of the 20th century from principally protecting competition to principally protecting consumers. Today many reformers are calling for the pendulum to swing back.”

Frankly, the disturbing stories of corruption and deceit at big banks makes one wonder why the Federal Reserve continues to pile on the national debt to nearly $20 Trillion. Look at the CEO of Deutsche Bank featured in a Zero Hedge article which has benefited from the largess of the European Central Bank.

Picture Credit: Deutsche Bank’s CEO John Cryan praying

Zero Hedge points out the extensive market manipulation behind the story, “Following the seemingly endless procession of short-squeeze-fueling trial balloons last week – from settlement rumors to German blue-chip bailouts to Qatari investors – Germany’s Bild newspaper confirms the rumors that sparked weakness on Friday: Deutsche bank CEO John Cryan has failed to reach an agreement with the US Justice Department. His arsenal of strawmen include: denials of bailouts, blaming speculators, rumors of informal capital raising talks with Wall Street firms, rumors of capital injections from Germany’s blue-chip corporations, rumors (denied) of Qatari sovereign wealth fund investments, and the sale of key assets and elimination of thousands of jobs.

The Atlantic laments there is an issue with Bigness overall.

The technology sector presents a thorny problem for antitrust reformers. Between too-big-to-fail banks and seemingly incompetent cable companies, there may be popular support for action against consolidated market power. But many of the companies in Warren’s crosshairs are beloved. The three most admired American companies are Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon, according to Fortune; Facebook is in the top 15 and rising fast. Our attention seems to be ever more focused on our phones, and Apple owns 40 percent of the U.S. smartphone market; between them, Google and Facebook collect more than half of all mobile-display advertising revenues. If mobile phones, software, and social networks eat the world, who decides how big the portions can be?

Google Guns after the $400B Mobile Phone Market- And ALL YOUR DATA

Picture Credit: Google, the Android Open Source stack

So Alphabet released the Pixel and Pixel XL smart phones today, in competition with fellow Android open source operating system suppliers LG Electronics and Samsung, but IAI decided that further investigation could show the motivation. Google used to operate in a fully outsourced hardware model under the Nexus Program, which DigiTrends lays out in great detail covering the release of 14 devices since 2010. Here is the hardware

A). Apple Threat: “Google is now the seller of record of this phone,” said Rick Osterloh, chief of the company’s new hardware division, crowed on Bloomberg – identifying this as a direct threat to Apple.  With the AI aide “Assistant” to compete against Apple’s “Siri”, “The goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google. First, the here’s the G or Gravity featureset and Google’s role which does not leave much of a foodchain (see an overview of Porter’s seminal value chain):

• First mobile phone conceptualized, designed, engineered and tested in-house,
• The Pixel phones feature a Siri-like virtual Google Assistant,
• A high resolution 12.3 Mega Pixel camera with picture quality correction features,
• Employs Android’s new Nougat 7.1 operating system,
• Unlimited Google Cloud storage,
• Expect Pixel-branded smartphones, Google Home, a new Chromecast, Daydream VR,
• Google now managing inventory, building relationships with carriers, sourcing components, making supply chain deals and managing distribution, and
• Google is making accessories, including cases and cables.

B). Cloud Services Proliferation:  In addition to the direct challenge to Apple, the new hardware division is clearly linked to the “G Services” and the exploitation of their “cloud services” which PC Magazine profiled on September 29, 2016 as all being subject to name changes for business-focused services, applications, technical infrastructure, and even its cloud.

Google’s cloud platform—”our user facing collaboration and productivity applications”—is now known as Google Cloud  spanning all the company’s cloud technologies and products: business productivity suite;  machine learning tools; application programming interfaces; enterprise maps APIs; and all Android phones, tablets, and Chromebooks that access the cloud. Google also announced new cloud technologies and machine intelligence capabilities, along with eight new Cloud Platform locations: Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland, and Frankfurt.

C). Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure for the “Internet of Things”: The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) map clearly points to a dramatic ramp in establishing the infrastructure for artificial intelligence deployments under the framework of the Internet of Things. A key focus of the Google push is “big data analytics”  In the new Oregon facility, Google claims to have achieved an 80% improvement in latency which improves application performance but especially in industrial sensors and IoT network performance. WirelessWeek goes deeper:

1. Managing and coordinating real-time performance in the IoT will pose a host of new challenges. First and foremost is the problem of scale: this will be a lot more data, coming from lots of different devices. IoT applications still must detect and react in close to real-time. This means that data must be collected and processed continuously and with controlled latency – batch processing models are ruled out.
2. Secondly, these applications are by definition highly distributed, which means you need to correlate information from many different places to understand what happened even within a single transaction. And the role of the networks that connect devices and systems together cannot be ignored. Distance-related network latency can be reduced by pushing data and processing closer to users where possible, but applications will remain susceptible to poor routing decisions and network congestion.
3. High-value IoT services will often involve systems from different firms and organizations working together to complete a task. Maintaining a system such as this involves collaboration between at least three IT teams in different firms (the parking utility, the bank and the advertiser network), each with its own ‘pool of visibility’ into one segment of the end-to-end application. Without effective data-sharing and cross-correlation, it’s all too easy for each team to conclude that it’s not their problem when things go wrong.

Well respected tech journalist Walt Mossberg explains in The Verge:

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote a column laying out five reasons it was time for Google to make its own hardware. I missed the AI angle. Google didn’t. The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, called AI “a seminal moment in computing” on a par with the personal computer, the web, and the smartphone going mainstream, at roughly 10-year intervals. “It’s clear to me,” he said, “that we are moving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.” But, even with AI merely in its infancy, Google’s move to becoming a full-fledged maker of the most important consumer tech hardware is a huge deal. It will finally give the search giant the chance to match the advantages long enjoyed by the champion of vertical integration, its arch-rival Apple.

Hold on, Google is talking about end-to-end control on its own GCP blog. CEO Eric Schmidt urges all businesses to move to real time analytics (RTA) relying on Google’s ETL (extract, transform and load) processes – that is full device control. InfoWeek explains the corporate RTA pitch: “Organizations need actionable insights faster than ever before to stay competitive, reduce risks, meet customer expectations, and capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities.” But, they counter, we accept a “multi-cloud world” – “Kubernetes, the open source container management system that we developed and open-sourced, reached version 1.4 in September 2016, and the Google Container Engine (GKE) to this new version (by year end).”

In the spring of 2015, the European Union charged Google with restraint of trade practices against consumers, but another suit emerged in 2016 requiring a mandate for hardware suppliers to commit to exclusive use of the Google search engine and other applications, but PCWeek pointed out that the complaint list was redacted (!) in the EU release provided to Reuters. “The European Union’s antitrust authority filed a so-called statement of objections against Google in April, accusing it of forcing smartphone makers to exclusively use its search engine if they want access to the Play Store, through which phone users can download and purchase other apps.”

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas details the real goal of Alphabet – ALL YOUR INFORMATION from A to Z (what 4th Amendment? – asks the Harvard Law Review). “At its hardware launch event in San Francisco, Alphabet showed the sweeping breadth of its ambition to own consumers’ personal data, as computing continues to accelerate away from static desktops and screens, coalescing into a cloud of connected devices with the potential to generate far more data — and data of a far more intimate nature — than ever before”

• Along with two new “Google designed” flagship Android smartphones (called Pixel), the first Androids to be preloaded with the company’s AI assistant (the Google Assistant) and also including fully unlimited cloud storage to suck users’ photos and videos into Google’s cloud.
• Then there were Google Wifi routers, designed to be bought in bundles to plug all those pesky in-home internet blackspots;
• The Google Home always listening connected speaker, which is voice-controlled via the Google Assistant and has limited support for third-party IoT devices (such as Philips Hue lightbulbs);
• An updated Chromecast (the Ultra) to ensure any legacy TV panels are internet-enabled; and
• Google’s less disposable mobile VR play, aka the soft-touch Daydream View headset — just in case consumer eyeballs seek to stray outside the data-mined smart home by escaping into virtual reality.