Google scrapping barge project: reports

After setting off much speculation over the barges, it had got built last year, Google, seems to be abandoning the project, at least on the East coast (See: Google barges to sport innovative architecture).

According CNET, a report in a local paper in Portland, Maine, yesterday said the search giant had sold the unfinished barge project and the barge would be scrapped.

The barges built at a huge hangar in San Francisco Bay and in New London, Connecticut, in 2013, were intended to serve as play and demonstration spaces where VIPs, and one day the public, could check out the latest projects from Google X, the lab working on big-idea projects like Google Glass and self-driving cars. The barge project seems to have proved a non-starter as neither the one in Maine nor the one now housed in Stockton, California, had opened.

CNET quoted Horace Dediu, an independent technology-industry analyst as saying technical projects and ideas like the barges, required a good taste of what people wanted.

CNET was first last year to link Google to the mysterious barge project moored alongside Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. Later, it linked the company to a second, almost identical structure that had showed up a couple of weeks earlier in Portland, Maine.

The Portland Press Herald reported that the 250-foot Google barge that had been sitting in Portland Harbour since last October was now being sold and the container building sitting on it would be scrapped, according to a report in 9to5Google.

A tugboat on Wednesday, towed the barge from Rickers Wharf Marine Facility in Portland and deposited it at Turner's Island Cargo Terminal in South Portland. According to Roger Hale, owner of the terminal, the structure had been purchased by an unnamed ''international barging company'' and was being prepared to leave Portland for an ocean voyage to an undisclosed location.

The purpose of the mysterious barges had been speculated variously as floating data centres to retail showrooms.

A number of issues cropped up with various official agencies, and the US Coast Guard demanded design changes while the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission stated that the company had not yet obtained permits for construction or permission to dock it in the Bay.

The commission insisted on Google moving the barge to a new location, away from Treasure Island.