Facebook Creates Team to ‘Beam’ Internet Everywhere on Earth

April 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Mar 27, 2014

Facebook Creates Team to ‘Beam’ Internet Everywhere on Earth

REED ALBERGOTTI

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is launching a Connectivity Lab, a team of scientists tasked with bringing the Internet to remote places on the planet using new techniques, including beaming it down from the sky.

Zuckerberg said the team of about a dozen people includes scientists in the field of aeronautics and communications. Facebook has hired new employees from organizations like NASA, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Facebook also said it hired five people from Ascenta, a UK-based company that developed the world’s longest-flying unmanned solar aircraft.

The Connectivity Lab is part of Zuckerberg’s previously announced Internet.orginitiative, which aims to bring connections to parts of the planet where the Web is unavailable. He said achieving that goal will mean inventing new technologies, and said the lab will work with drones, satellites and lasers.

Earlier this month, Facebook was in advanced talks to buy Titan, a New Mexico-based maker of solar-powered drones that might one day be able to beam the Internet down to the planet’s surface, allowing access in remote places on the planet.

A video posted on the Internet.org website Thursday shows an aerial view that looks as if it were taken from the cockpit on a plane.

A voiceover asks viewers to imagine when the entire planet gets the Internet. “It doesn’t get twice as good, it gets, like, a bazillion times as good,” it says. Then, a solar-powered plane appears in the bottom of the screen, evidently beaming the Internet down to what looks like a mountainous landscape.

The plan, according to a post on the Internet.org site, is to transmit an Internet connection by sending infrared light beams to the earth, using satellites for rural areas and solar powered aircraft for more suburban areas that lack Internet connections.

The Connectivity Lab, a completely in-house effort, stands in contrast to recent acquisitions Facebook has made. On Tuesday, the company said it had agreed to Acquire Oculus VR, a maker of virtual reality goggles, for $2 billion. And in February, it announced a $19 billion deal to acquire WhatsApp, a mobile messaging service.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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