Two decades ago today, Google opened its first overseas office in Tokyo. The entire workspace was minimalistic as compared to today’s high-tech standards. However, founders had predicted that the Asia Pacific region would be central to Google’s mission of making information and resources universally accessible. They also believed that the company had a lot to learn in the coming years from this region.
Over the past twenty years, Google has been the answer to every question of millions of people all over the world including Asia. According to some estimate, over 2.5 billion people depend on Google for their day-to-day queries.
Here’s looking back to the journey of Google in Asia Pacific so far.
The first office in Asia: Tokyo
The first Asia Pacific headquarters of Google was at Shibuya, Tokyo. Fast forward to today, Google now has hundreds of offices across the region with the present headquarters at Singapore. Their employees in Tokyo did many groundbreaking jobs, one of the most noteworthy among them being introducing the world to the emoji culture.
The birth of Google Maps
In 2004, two Australians and two Danish persons collaborated in Sydney to develop a new kind of mapping technology for the internet users. In the following year in the month of February, Google Maps was born. As maps got more advanced, the Google developers in Asia Pacific went the extra mile to create Street view filming expeditions from Cambodia’s Angkor Wat to Australia’s Uluru.
Google Mapmaker and Google Pay: Game changers in technology
In 2008, two Indian engineers working in Google had an epiphany that there wasn’t enough commercial mapping data for India covering the entire nation’s landscape. This is when they invented a tool called Google Mapmaker allowing communities to make their own additions to the map. Later on, this avant-garde technology came in handy during several natural disasters especially during typhoons in Philippines. In addition to this, Indian Googlers launched a payment app called Google Pay (Tez) in 2015, that has ever since made the online payment world a lot more resourceful.
The rise of YouTube in Asia
In 2014, the entire internet community was taken by storm when Psy’s 2012 video ‘Gangnam style’ surpassed two billion views on YouTube. This led Korean K-pop artists to take help of YouTube to reach out to a global audience. Since then, the YouTube family has only got bigger and bigger with influencers uploading content every second. YouTube has not only allowed people to share their opinions with others but also has enabled earning opportunities for people worldwide.
Contribution in Artificial Intelligence
In 2016, Google collaborated with DeepMind to create AI AlphaGo. It’s a robot that defeated a master at a 3000-year-old game. In 2017, AlphaGo beat the former chess world-champion Lee Sedol by 4-1. Since then, although AlphaGo has retired, AI has practically reigned over the digital world. In fact, since the past few years, Google have joined hands with many technology firms all over Asia (From HTC in Taiwan to Reliance Jio in India) and made significant investments to create cutting-edge software, hardware, and affordable new-age gadgets.