Google announced on Thursday that it has launched an engineering team based in Singapore that will cater to the needs of the Southeast Asian market. The move is part of the company's efforts to expand its presence in the region.
Aside from creating an engineering team, Google said that it will also train 100,000 Indonesia-based developers within four years in order to provide more online Web content for the country through the use of the local language.
Internet Use In Southeast Asia
For the past few years, Google has been limited in its efforts to expand in Southeast Asia. Many people in Indonesia, India and the Philippines who log on to the Internet for the first time often face slow network connections, severely affecting their user experience. There aren't enough useful content available in their local languages as well.
Google hopes that by creating an engineering team dedicated to the region, it can provide meaningful solutions to many of these issues.
In an article posed on the Google Asia Pacific blog, Caesar Sengupta, Google's vice president for the Next Billion Users team, points out why the Internet company chose Singapore as the base for its engineering team.
"In many ways, Singapore feels like the best place to do this. It is hyper-connected, with some of the fastest Internet speeds in the world," Sengupta writes. "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."
Sengupta added that through the efforts of the new Google engineering team in Southeast Asia as well as those in other countries, they hope to continue their work in organizing information from around the world and make it more useful and accessible to everyone.
As part of its Southeast Asian expansion, Google purchased Pie.co, a Singapore-based mobile workplace chat system that has been compared to Slack. The Internet company is also offering various programs for students and full-fledged engineers alike.
Students who wish to become part of the company as engineers are invited to take part in an internship program based in Australia that will run for 12 weeks.
Meanwhile, existing engineers from other countries who have connections within Singapore are given the chance by Google to work in the country.
