Google’s parent company Alphabet has today announced that two of their moonshot projects – Loon and Wing – have been spun off to become their own, fully fledged companies.
Google’s Project Loon, a project for delivering internet almost anywhere on the planet via ballon, and Project Wing, their drone delivery service, have become full subsidiary companies under Alphabet, the company created by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in August 2015.
Google announced on their blog, that Project Loon, or Loon as it will now be known will be led by Alastair Westgarth as the new CEO, while James Ryan Burgess will head up Wing as CEOin partnership with CTO Adam Woodworth.
We’ve had brushes with both Loon and Wing here in Australia, with Project Loon – just plain Loon now – balloons flying in our airspace, while Project Wing, or Wing as it will now be known as, currently conducting tests in the Australian Capital Territory in partnership with Chemist Warehouse and Guzman y Gomez.
Wing and Loon are the fourth and fifth companies spun out of Google’s ‘X’ moonshot factory, with Waymo, Chronicle and Verily graduating to full companies before them. In his post announcing the move, X CEO Astro Teller said that their ‘job is to create radical new technologies and build a bridge from an idea to a proven concept. Now that the foundational technology for these projects is built, Loon and Wing are ready to take their products into the world; this is work best done outside of the prototyping-focused environment of X’
X has more work to do, with Teller saying that the move leaves X free to pursue future projects including work in robotics, free-space optics and Glass.
