Facebook Is Supposedly In Talks With Titan Aerospace For An Acquisition

While Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg expressed doubt that his company would look to acquire another company  in the light of its massive acquisition of Whatsapp two weeks ago, there seem to be rumors that the company is currently in talks with Titan Aerospace, which makes solar powered drones. At first glance, this would probably seem ridiculous but when you look at Facebook’s big strategy over the next few years, it does make sense. Facebook wants to compete with Google and build its own Project Loon!

Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, which has been setup with the sole purpose of bringing the Internet to all corners of the world, must be the reason behind these talks. Titan Aerospace has managed to develop solar powered crafts which can stay up in the sky for 5 years at a time, using only solar energy. They can also carry a payload of 32 kgs and can reach an altitude of 20000 kms.

Here’s a video showing their Solara 60 model,

Now, this could be very interesting in terms of Facebook’s future efforts. The company has been working on data compression techniques after it acquired Onavo, so that data transfer speeds and amounts are lessened. They have been making use of this in their mobile apps and it could be improved even more. These drones could serve as Wifi signal transmitters in the sky and allow access to Facebook, Whatsapp etc. for anyone with a phone and a signal receiver. This would effectively make Facebook, Whatsapp (this is the internet for most people in emerging and underdeveloped markets) available to just about anyone. Whatsapp’s acquisition now makes much more sense. The company is soon going to roll out voice calling and if the compression techniques get even more advanced, there would be no need to rely on network operators to place calls. This is a huge change in how the internet ecosystem will function. Network operators are going to see a huge disruption in their business models unless they adapt to the fast moving world of the Internet.

What are your thoughts on drones providing Internet access? Share them with us.

Source | Techcrunch

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