From recode:
Ten years ago today, Google Inc. went public in an offering that raised nearly $1.7 billion and valued the young Internet company at around $27 billion. The Mountain View, Calif., startup quickly put that money to work, transforming itself into much more than an online search company.
By the end of 2004, it had acquired the companies that would form Google Maps and Google Earth. It was already pushing beyond the confines of the Internet, scanning physical books to make them searchable, too. And the company launched Google.org, which, among many other projects, would seek to develop ultra-efficient vehicles, confront global poverty and analyze data to predict real-world events like flu outbreaks.
In 2006, Google picked up YouTube. In 2007, it announced Android. And in 2008, it introduced the Chrome browser.
Along the way, Google has continually expanded what online search meant, even as it pushed into areas further and further beyond its core business. In 2010, it launched Google X, which has plumbed the depths of science fiction for ideas ever since.
Here, then, is a list of 10 of the biggest, most ambitious or zaniest projects that Google has explored in its decade as a public company, most of which occurred since the launch of its secretive research division.
Self-driving cars: In late 2010, Google took the wraps off a secret effort to develop self-driving cars, aiming to turn that staple of futuristic films into a consumer reality. Specifically, the company revealed its autonomous vehicles — Toyota Prii equipped with lasers, sensors and computers — which had already logged thousands of miles along San Francisco Bay Area highways.
The company had hired several leading researchers to push the field forward, including Sebastian Thrun, who led the Stanford team that won the 2005 DARPA autonomous driving challenge. More recently, at Re/code’s Code conference in May, Google unveiled a new car built from the ground up to operate under robot control, eliminating the wheel, gas pedal and brake altogether.
Project Loon: Last summer, Google began conducting experimental trials of Project Loon in New Zealand, an effort to move more of the developing world onto the Internet through a series of connected balloons floating in the stratosphere.
As Google explained: “Loon balloons go where they’re needed by rising or descending into a layer of wind blowing in the desired direction of travel. People can connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from this antenna up to the balloon network, and then down to the global Internet on Earth.”...MORE
