The Indian-born CEO said plans of the company at the Google For India event wherein he highlighted that Google is looking at hiring people for Bangalore and Hyderabad. Interestingly, this was Pichai’s first visit to India – and his first overseas trip – after taking over as CEO of the restructured Google Inc. earlier this year. Google has also announced the opening of a massive campus in Hyderabad, which will offer more opportunities for Indian Googlers.
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Google is set to launch its free Wi-Fi service in Mumbai Central railway station in January 2016.
While on free Wi-Fi at railway station, he said, “We also want to improve web connectivity in rural areas under Project Balloon”.
“And we are testing these high altitude balloons which literally act as nearly like floating cell towers…to connect people in hard to reach regions that are scarcely populated and we are working to hopefully bring Project Loon to India in rural communities that have very few people connected to the Internet”, she said. This is in partnership with RailTel, the telecom wing of Indian Railways. Google isn’t the only tech company that has planned internet expansion in India. This will be done to ramp up Google’s engineering presence and business in the country.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google Inc., said “Google is barely getting started in India”.
“We are doing many products to bring connectivity”.
In his speech today at the event, Sundar Pichai made a prediction that India is going to have more Android users as of United States of America in the coming year of 2016. The Google CEO will attend a banquet hosted by President Pranab Mukherjee at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on Thursday evening. But in 2020, over 30 percent of mobile Internet will still be from 2G connections.
Only 1.2 million units of Android One-based devices were shipped to India during its first year (September 2014 to September 2015) in the country, making up only 3.5% of the $50-100 phone market, the segment which sells the most phones, according to Counterpoint, which also said that only 3 million devices have been shipped in the 19 countries.
As Google works on to “bring the next billion Indians” on the Internet, it is also focussing on relevant products for Indian market and content-creation in regional languages.
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A new virtual keyboard allows users to type in 11 Indic languages including Assamese and Punjabi, while voice searches recognise both Hindi and “Hinglish” – a mix of Hindi and English heard in many parts of the country. With Tap To Translate feature, the user can copy text anywhere on Android phone and instantly get the translation, without ever leaving the app.
