Google's Project Loon to launch by 2016

Google's ambitious Project Loon will be commercially available by 2016. Under the Project Loon, Google plans to provide affordable Internet to everyone through Internet beaming helium balloons which will be travel 20km above the Earth's surface, in the stratosphere. Google also plans to launch the service in India as well. Speaking at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on Thursday, Mohammad Gawdat, vice-president of business innovation at Google X said, "Over 4.5 billion people today do not have Internet connectivity, and that is a problem not solved by incremental technology that ideally requires as many as 200,000 telecom towers in India alone." "By 2016, we believe we can start to launch on a commercial front, allowing us to offer Internet coverage on every square feet of planet earth at a very cheap cost. We are working very closely with telecom providers, and governments across the world, including in India to launch this commercially, and already we have got permission from bout half the Southern hemisphere's governments to commercially launch this," Gawdat added. Google, however, isn't online tech giant working on innovative ways to provide affordable Internet connectivity to everyone. Microsoft is exploring the option of 'White Space Tech', which uses unused spectrum between two TV channels, to provide free connectivity. Microsoft is also planning to try out the technology in India. Read: How White Space Tech can help bridge Digital Divide in India Facebook is developing drones, satellites and other technology in an effort to spread Internet to under-developed regions. The social networking giant stated that it has hired aerospace and communications experts from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and its Ames Research Center for its new "Connectivity Lab" project.

Temporal Data Types

Temporal databases allow one to associate a temporal extent with a real world phenomenon. These temporal extents may represent either events or states. Events correspond to phenomena occurring at a particular instant, for example the time when a car accident occurred. States represent phenomena that last over time, such as the duration of a project.

 

SimpleTime is a generic type that generalizes the Instant and Interval data types. It is an abstract type and thus, when a value associated to SimpleTime is created, the specific subtype (either Instant or Interval) must be specified. A SimpleTime can be used, for example, to represent the time (with a granularity of one day) at which an event such as a conference occurs, where one-day conferences are represented by an Instant and other conferences, spanning two or more days, are represented by an Interval.

An Instant denotes a single point in time according to a specific granularity. It has no duration. An instant can have a special value now, which is used for indicating the current time. Instants are used to represent events,

An Interval denotes a set of successive instants enclosed between two instants. Intervals are used to represent states, for example the duration of project A.

A ComplexTime denotes any heterogeneous set of temporal values that may include instants and intervals.

Finally, Time is the most generic temporal data type, meaning “this element has a temporal extent” without any commitment to a specific temporal data type. It is an abstract type that can be used, for example, to represent the lifespan of projects, where it may be either an Interval or an IntervalSet.