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Google CEO Sundar Pichai in India: Free Wi-Fi at railway stations, new campus for Hyderabad announced

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday underlined the search giant’s intention to push for more internet adoption in India

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Mumbai Central will the first of the 100 railway stations, getting Wi-Fi connectivity by December 2016.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday underlined the search giant’s intention to push for more internet adoption in India, announcing free Wi-Fi in 100 railway stations as promised to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his visit to Silicon Valley earlier this year.

At a large-scale event of the company in New Delhi, Pichai, who was accompanied by other top executives of the company, announced plans to launch a “huge new” campus in Hyderabad and to recruit more Indians for business development too.

Pichai said Mumbai Central will the first of the 100 railway stations, getting Wi-Fi connectivity by December 2016.

The India-born CEO said the company wanted to connect Indians in their own languages and Android — the most popular mobile operating system in India — was already supporting up to 11 local languages. He said YouTube and Google Maps were already available offline in the country, while the “search team in India has made pages lighter and they now load faster”.

Google Search VP Tamara Yehoshua said 50 per cent of Indian internet users were on 2G networks, while those on 3G were complaining of 2G-like speeds. “Google plans to fix that with Google AMP pages,” she said, about the new product that is being rolled out in India. “We need to make sure our products work across Indian languages and that search works across 2G networks,” she said, reiterating how it was “inspiring” to give access to all those who have never experienced Internet before. She said Google will launch improved versions of live cricket scores and replays on search early next year.

Google will introduce a pause buffer feature allowing users to pause video, leave it to buffer, even leave the app or site and let it continue buffering, said Eyal Manor, Vice-President of Engineering for YouTube. He said content uploaded on YouTube from India has also doubled and time spent was growing at 150 per cent ahead of global figures.

Google Maps VP Jen Fitzpatrick said India ranks third in terms of local guides on Google Maps.

Rajan Anandan, Vice President of Google in India and Southeast Asia, said by 2018, more than 500 million users will be online in India from 29 states speaking over 23 languages. “But in 2020, over 30 per cent of mobile internet will still be from 2G connections. Google has been on a long journey in India to build products that connect more people, regardless of cost, connectivity, language, gender, or location,” Anandan said.

Google also confirmed that its Asus Chromebit will be available in India for Rs 7999. The Chromebit lets users upgrade their old PCs and desktops to get a faster, Chromebook like experience.

Source: The Indian Express dated December 17, 2015 (Online)

Google just got more serious about India

Pichai is in India along with eight Google vice-presidents, including those for Search, YouTube, Maps, and Android among others. (Sanjeev Verma/ HT Photo)

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After days of anticipation, the real reason of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s visit to India has come to the fore. Fortunately, it was not about one single thing, but about many small initiatives that go to show that, Google just became more serious about India.

Sundar Pichai took the stage to explain in detail, and piece together, the announcements made in the course of last few months and their relevance to India. Real time cricket scores and videos by early next year, an expansive new campus in Hyderabad and an aggressive ramping up of recruitment in India were among a host of initiatives.

The tech giant also unveiled two new projects to boost its penetration into India’s vast rural and semi-urban hinterland.

The first is Project Loon -- a network of high-altitude, internet-beaming balloons that will help connect towns and villages with no access to cables or an optic fibre grid – which has already ruffled regulatory feathers in India. Although Loon ran into regulatory issues, Google’s spirit seems indomitable in connecting rural India to the Internet.

“We run two separate initiatives in India to get more people online. We have a programme named ‘Internet Sathi’ where we partner with Intel and Tata Trust to help women with bicycles who in turn go and educate other women in many villages. This project is running as a pilot in 1,000 villages in three states,” Pichai said.

The Mountain View-based company runs also runs another initiative which helps more women get online -- Helping Women Get Online. “The pilot project is now going national where we are aiming to get women online in 300,000 villages in three years which is half of Indian villages,” added Pichai.

The second is an upgraded translation service called Tap to Translate, which provides real-time translation into almost a dozen Indian languages as you type, and works across all applications on Android devices.

The tech giant is also working to make search easier by incorporating multiple Indian languages in its voice recognition software, making it work for slower networks typically found in India and tailoring search for local interests like cricket and Bollywood.

“When I joined google in 2004, we had only 2 offices in India. Today, we have 4 offices and 1500 people. We are hiring both in Bangalore and Hyderabad,” said the company’s Chennai-born CEO Sundar Pichai, delivering the keynote address at the Google for India event.

“What inspired me to join Google was the fact that Google search worked the same whether you were a Stanford professor or a poor kid in a small Indian city. This country has given me and Google so much that I hope we can give back much more to India in the months and years ahead.”

Pichai -- who became Google’s top boss in August after the company became part of a larger firm known as Alphabet Inc -- also pointed out that the company was focusing on the next billion people to come online, enumerating the company’s drive in including Indic languages in its software and enabling 400 railway stations with WiFi.

After decades of lagging behind the Digital revolution, India has now emerged as a hot destination for global software majors due to its lucrative market of middle-class professionals and a billion people still off the web, many of whom have logged online in recent years due to a mobile phone boom.

“In October, searches from mobile overtook desktop for the first time globally. But in India, they crossed the desktop in May 2013 because you guys are way ahead on mobile,” said Tamar Yehoshua, vice-president of Search.

The company also focused heavily on increasing its web footprint in India and across the world, over half of whose population is still off the internet grid.

“We are working to hopefully bring Project Loon to India in rural communities where there are very few people connected to the internet. We want people who come on to this network to not just take small leaps but soar,” said Marion Croak, vice-president of Access.

“The solutions that are born in India are going to revolutionise the way we solve problems around the world, because it’s such a challenging country to work in.”

The 43-year-old alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, is the latest tech leader to visit India over the last 12 months after Alibaba’s chairperson Jack Ma, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Pichai is in India along with eight Google vice-presidents, including those for Search, YouTube, Maps, and Android among others. He is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, finance minister Arun Jaitley and telecommunications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday and will interact with students at the Sri Ram College of Commerce on Thursday.

Last year, Pichai visited India to launch Android One, a program in which the world’s largest search engine partnered with Indian handset makers Spice, Micromax and Karbonn (and later Lava) to sell low-cost $100 devices that ran the latest version of Android.

The Android One phones supported seven Indian languages out of the box, including for dictation and voice commands. They also feature local news publications and magazines in the Google Play Newsstand.

Android One eventually rolled out in 11 countries, but it never really took off. Google sold about three million Android One phones in all but negligible compared to the growth of Android around the world. Google, however, is tight-lipped about plans to reboot Android One.

The Mountain View-based company has also been silent on net neutrality, a polarising issue that has been the subject of fierce debate in India this year. Google supports net neutrality in the United States but it has not said that publicly in India.

A report in the Economic Times said that the company was planning to roll out its own Free Basics-like zero-rated service in India but put on the back-burner after seeing the backlash against Facebook’s Internet.org.

Source: The Hindustan Times dated 17 December, 2015