Just five months after joining Google, Java creator James Gosling chose to move on. His new employer is start-up company Liquid Robotics. What this means for the future of Google – and Oracle's lawsuit with the search company over Java technology in Google's Android operating system – is unclear.
According to Gosling's blog post on the subject, this was no easy decision. He has nothing but positive words to say about his experience at Google and the people there, “but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous,” which is why he's now working at the robotics company. What is Liquid Robotics doing that Gosling finds so inspiring?
Interestingly, the company seems to be doing the same kind of thing on the oceans that Google's mapping vehicles are doing on the ground. “They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that rove the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud,” Gosling wrote.
Unlike Google's mapping vehicles, however, these ocean-going vehicles – called “Wave Gliders” – are doing a lot more than just taking pictures. One set of autonomous robots, for example, is cruising around the Gulf of Mexico checking water chemistry. Fueled by the energy from ocean waves, moving at one to two knots, and able to stay out for years at a time, these little vessels can collect a lot of data.
Gosling's role at Liquid Robotics is as chief software architect. “I'll be involved in both the onboard software – sensing, navigation and autonomy – and in the datacenter, dealing with the in-rush of data,” he explained. It sounds exactly like the kind of challenge that someone of Gosling's skill and talent would find both exciting and hard to resist.
Gosling probably also appreciated the opportunity to see at least one familiar face. Liquid Robotics boasts Bill Vass as its CEO; Vass, like Gosling, worked at Sun. Vass believes that Gosling's addition to the team will help “revolutionize global oceanic knowledge on a scale and dimension unknown in history.” Data from Liquid Robotics is already being used by such respectable organizations as the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), among others. The company has also benefited from a $22 million round of financing earlier this year.
The move seems to be a positive one for both Gosling and Liquid Robotics. With Vass insisting that his company's vehicles can collect and transmit many, many different types of data – water temperature, wave heights, whale song, and chemical levels, just to name a few – this particular Silicon Valley start-up seems to have a bright future. Imagine thousands of Wave Gliders in the ocean at one time, all collecting data – data to which Liquid Robotics can sell access. This particular business plan could quickly make the company profitable. It's not hard to envision Liquid Robotics as a company that uses the profits gained from the bread-and-butter end of the business (paying customers) to help finance other, more open-source projects that take advantage of the data.
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