OAKLAND, Calif. — Google’s parent company Alphabet is shutting down Loon, a high-profile subsidiary spun out from its research labs that used hot-air balloons to deliver cellular connectivity from the stratosphere.

Nearly a decade after it began the project, Alphabet said on Thursday that it pulled the plug on Loon because it did not see a way to reduce costs to create a sustainable business. Along with the self-driving car unit Waymo, Loon was one of the most hyped “moonshot” technology projects to emerge from Alphabet’s research lab, X.

“The road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. So we’ve made the difficult decision to close down Loon,” Astro Teller, who heads X, wrote in a blog post. Alphabet said it expected to wind down operations in “the coming months” with the hope of finding other positions for Loon employees at Alphabet.

The idea behind Loon was to bring cellular connectivity to remote parts of the world where building a traditional mobile network would be too difficult and too costly. Alphabet promoted the technology as a potentially promising way to bring internet connectivity to not just the “next billion” consumers but the “last billion.”

The giant hot-air balloons, made from sheets of polyethylene, are the size of tennis courts. They were powered by solar panels and navigated by flight control software that used artificial intelligence to drift efficiently in the stratosphere. While up in the air, they act as “floating cell towers,” transmitting internet signals to ground stations and personal devices.

Google started working on Loon in 2011 and launched the project with a public test in 2013. Loon became a stand-alone subsidiary in 2018, a few years after Google became a holding company called Alphabet. In April 2019, it accepted a $125 million investment from a SoftBank unit called HAPSMobile to advance the use of “high-altitude vehicles” to deliver internet connectivity.

Last year, it announced the first commercial deployment of the technology with Telkom Kenya to provide a 4G LTE network connection to a nearly 31,000-square-mile area across central and western Kenya, including the capital, Nairobi. Before then, the balloons had been used only in emergency situations, such as after Hurricane Maria knocked out Puerto Rico’s cellular network.

However, Loon was starting to run out of money and had turned to Alphabet to keep its business solvent while it sought another investor in the project, according to a November report in The Information.

The decision to shut down Loon is another signal of Alphabet’s recent austerity toward its ambitious and costly technology projects. Under Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer since 2015, the company has kept a close watch over the finances of its so-called Other Bets, fledgling business ventures aimed at diversifying from its core advertising business.

Alphabet has aggressively pushed its “Other Bets” like Waymo and Verily, a life sciences unit, to accept outside investors and branch out on their own. Projects that failed to secure outside investment or show enough financial promise have been discarded, such as Makani, a project to produce wind energy kites that Alphabet shut down last year.

That austerity has been a notable change from a time when units like X, which had been a favored vanity project of Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had autonomy to spend freely to pursue ambitious technology projects even if the financial outlook remained unclear.

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We’ve noticed the web enlarge the most efficient and the worst of ourselves. Abdi Latif Dahir, who writes about East Africa for The New York Occasions, has coated probably the most excessive examples of each.

Governments within the area ceaselessly close down web get admission to or manipulate on-line conversations to keep an eye on dissent — Uganda did each forward of remaining week’s presidential vote. However electorate additionally use social media to show election manipulation and unfold feminist actions.

Our dialog highlighted an crucial query: Are we able to have the fantastic sides of connecting the arena on-line with out all the downsides?

Shira: Why did Uganda bring to a halt web get admission to?

Abdi: The federal government capitalized on Fb and Twitter taking down phony accounts that promoted the federal government of President Yoweri Museveni. It was once an excuse for an web blackout that many of us anticipated.

Are all of those harms offset by way of the great generated from other folks assembling on-line?

You’ll’t forget about the awful image, however we additionally shouldn’t underestimate how robust those applied sciences are.

In Tanzania, other folks used Twitter to acquire proof of vote tampering. Kenya’s Ultimate Court docket in 2017 ordered a brand new presidential election, and a few credit score is going to those that documented on-line the manipulation of election effects. The Kenyan author Nanjala Nyabola wrote a guide about Kenyans exercising energy in new tactics on-line, together with feminists flourishing on Twitter.

And I take a look at Kenyan Twitter very first thing every morning. It’s stuffed with humorous memes and energetic conversations.

Will have to Fb and Twitter do anything else in a different way to restrict the hurt?

The Uganda election was once probably the most few occasions — if now not the one time — that I’ve noticed Fb grasp an African executive in control of manipulating on-line conversations. Most commonly, as in many nations, East African activists have stated that Fb and Twitter aren’t devoting sufficient consideration to on-line incitements.

Teams in Ethiopia requested Fb to do so remaining 12 months towards posts that infected ethnic violence after the killing of a well-liked singer and activist, Hachalu Hundessa. Fb had installed position plans to display screen posts in African languages together with Oromo, however I don’t assume sufficient is being finished to mitigate the hurt.

(Fb described right here its reaction in Ethiopia.)

You’re describing injury from an excessive amount of restraint of the web in some instances, and too little restraint in others.

I do know. After I talked to buddies concerning the Ethiopian web shutdown all over the Tigray battle, a lot of them had been supportive of it given all the terrible issues that came about after Hundessa was once killed. It’s all sophisticated.

Amazon provides vaccine lend a hand. Just right. I feel?

Two conflicting concepts continuously rattle round in my mind about mammoth generation firms. I’m fearful about how a lot energy they’ve. I additionally need them to make use of that energy to save lots of us.

Amazon on Inauguration Day presented to lend a hand with President Biden’s plan to vaccinate 100 million American citizens towards Covid-19 all over his first 100 days in place of work. Amazon stated it would lend its “operations, data generation and communications features and experience,” with out being extra explicit.

Vaccinating masses of hundreds of thousands of American citizens is in part a logistics problem. Amazon is in point of fact excellent at logistics. So let’s hope that Amazon and different firms can lend a hand. However let’s additionally take into account that generation and giant industry want an efficient executive — and vice versa — to resolve advanced demanding situations like this.

Glance, the cynical a part of me instantly idea that Amazon was once simply seeking to make great with the Biden management. My colleagues on the DealBook e-newsletter additionally famous that Amazon and different firms providing to lend a hand state or federal governments with vaccinations could also be angling to get their staff moved up the concern checklist.

However cynical or now not, I’m again to the place I steadily am: part hoping and part fearing {that a} generation massive can interfere in an advanced drawback.

I felt that method when Google’s sister corporate appeared as though it will swoop in to coordinate coronavirus checking out. (Not anything a lot got here of that.) We noticed how Fb’s movements or inactiveness influenced ethnic violence in Ethiopia and affected what American citizens imagine about our election.

Find it irresistible or now not, what generation firms do has an enormous affect on our lives. In the event that they’re going to have such energy, they must be answerable for the use of that affect in useful tactics. (Assuming we will agree on what is beneficial.)

Ahead of we pass …

Hugs to this

A new child lamb bonds together with his mother — after 36 hours of work.

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