San Francisco/London: Google is spending half a billion dollars on a start-up that makes and launches satellites, in order to improve the accuracy of its mapping service and eventually expand Internet access around the world.
The acquisition of satellite company Skybox will give Google access to a huge new trove of data to add to its extensive mass of personal information. The deal is the latest of many recent moves by Silicon Valley to look towards the heavens for expansion.
Google already operates Project Loon, a network of high-altitude balloons designed to give Internet access to remote places around the world. In April the company also bought Titan Aerospace, a drone maker, shortly after Facebook bought Ascenta, a drone maker founded in the UK.
Skybox is one of several start-ups, including San Francisco’s Planet Labs, taking advantage of falling costs in building and launching satellites to bring new innovations to remote-earth imaging and monitoring. Traditional rivals’ satellites, such as Digital Globe, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but Skybox’s cost less than $9 million (Dh33.1 million) each, albeit surviving for a shorter lifespan.
Google said that for now Skybox’s technology would help it improve its maps. “We also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief,” Google said.
The push on Internet access could help the companies expand the number of potential consumers. Facebook is growing faster in many emerging markets than it is in the near-saturated US and Europe, but many people in sprawling countries such as Indonesia and India lack reliable connections.
Google is also investing closer to home in the high-speed Internet needed for tasks such as video streaming. Its Google Fiber programme is installing connections in cities including Portland in the northwest US that it says offer Internet up to 100 times faster than the broadband available to most consumers.
Five-year-old Skybox, which has 130 staff, launched its first satellite in November after raising $91m in venture-capital funding. SkySat-1 can capture photos and videos of any location on earth every three or four days.
Before the acquisition, Skybox had said it planned to launch a further 23 satellites within the next five years, including 13 by the end of 2016 — each generating a terabyte of data every day.
While its satellites can take images from space in stunning detail, Skybox’s co-founder and chief product officer Dan Berkenstock told the FT in an interview in April that the photos are like a “raw natural resource” that must be converted into data to be really useful.
“We see ourselves as a data platform company that just happens to be launching a fleet of imaging satellites,” he said.
“No other company in space has the scalable big-data know-how to combine the space stuff with the ground stuff,” he said. “In 10 to 15 years or less, you’re going to be able to get push alerts on your phone that say that something has happened in a place on earth that you care about, that you should do something about.”
Potential applications of its technology include estimating volumes of oil in specific containers by monitoring operations at facilities, monitoring sites of disasters or humanitarian crises, or tracking economic activity based on the number of planes flying in and out of selected airports.
Skybox currently sells its data for $10 per square kilometre.
Mr Berkenstock said that Skybox would have fresh images of “the top 10-20,000 most interesting points of economic activity on a daily basis in the long term”, including mines, factories, ports and transportation networks.
Asked about potential privacy concerns, Mr Berkenstock said: “If you had enough people with camera phones outside facilities you’d see these things.”
— Financial Times
