Saturating the western market may be enough for some companies, but Google is by no means “some companies.” Moving on in their quest for world domination, the Internet giant announced yesterday that it would be building an engineering team in Singapore, with hopes of bringing more of the human population online. The Southeast Asian market, one that remains relatively untapped despite its massive potential for the tech industry, is going to be getting a lot of attention from Google in the next few years, as Google outlined a number of steps aimed at getting “the next billion users … online” and developing appropriate products for this new audience.
The new team will be spearheaded by the employees at Pie.co, a recently acquired Singapore-based startup, and Google is also actively seeking technically minded folks to join their growing enterprise. In fact, the Silicon Valley firm hopes to recruit up to The tech giant is looking to train up to 100,000 Indonesian developers whose main focus will be on native language content development. Students are also encouraged to apply for internships so that the company can tap into the next generation of talent early on, and Google is also inviting native Singaporians who have since emigrated to other countries to return to their motherland to continue Google’s mission.
“In many ways, Singapore feels like the best place to [bring the next billion online],” writes Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google’s Next Billion Users team. “It is hyper-connected, with some of the fastest Internet speeds in the world. And, it sits at the center of a region with half of the world’s current Internet users, and more new Internet users coming online every day than anywhere else in the world.”
Google has been on a globalizing spree as of late, and Sengupta points out that the company has recently worked on initiatives like high-speed Wi-Fi in railway stations across India, search that works faster while using less data, and offline Google Maps and YouTube use.
“These are still early days, but we’re excited about the progress we’re making on this journey,” the Sengupta concludes. “We look forward to sharing more with you in the months and years ahead.”
