First there was the Amazon delivery drone and now reported talks between Facebook and drone-maker Titan Aerospace say the social network giant will buy the latter firm for $60 million.
Rumors of the deal popped up last night, but one source said the deal is a go, but this has not been confirmed by either company.
The first question one might ask is exactly how much more privacy does Facebook expect its users to give up? However, Mark Zuckerberg appears to be less interested in what his customers are doing in their backyards than in furthering one of his pet projects. Expanding the availability of Internet service to everyone on the planet.
Zuckerberg supposedly plans to accomplish this by purchasing drone maker Titan Aerospace.
Titan Aerospace makes solar-powered atmospheric satellites, ie: drones. The company currently has two models the Solara 50 and Solara 60. The former can lug a 70-pound payload into atmospheric orbit and the latter 250 pounds. Atmospheric orbit is considered at about 60,000 to 70,000 thousand feet. One report states the drones can stay aloft for up to five years.
According to one story Facebook would commission Solara to build 11,000 Solara drones which would then cruise around at about 65,000 feet. The beauty of the plan is the drone can carry out many of the same functions as an orbiting satellite, but at a fraction of the cost. Each drone equipped with a communications relay system can cover an 18-mile radius and deliver 1GBps of voice data transmission, Titan Aerospace said.
Zuckerberg has mentioned is dream of cheap Internet access for the globe. Last August he formed the group Internet.org with Samsung, Nokia and Qualcomm with the goal of making the Internet available to the 5 billion people who currently remain offline.
However, not everyone considers giving everyone Facebook access a priority.
Microsoft Founder Bill Gates last year called Zuckerberg's plan a joke.
"As a priority? It's a joke," Gates told CNBC in an interview. "I certainly love the IT thing. But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition. Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I'm thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that's great. I don't."
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given billions of dollars in an attempt to eradicate disease and hunger throughout the world.
Facebook is not the first company to come up with such a plan. Google has launched Project Loon. Project Loon replaces solar-powered drones with balloons that would sail up to and float at around the same height as a Solara 60. Software algorithms would then determine how to best position the balloons to give the best possible Internet coverage.
