Google has acquired Singapore-based startup Pie.co, a slack like chat platform. The move behind this acquisition is to bring good engineers from Asia-pacific into Google.
In its blog Google said, According to the UN, 300 million people came online for the first time last year. Put another way, in 2015, there were more people using the Internet for the first time than there were Americans using the Internet already.
But the computing experience for most of these first-timers, coming online in places like India, Indonesia and the Philippines, is very different from the one many of us grew up with – and not the one that most of Google’s services were originally designed for. Their main (and in most cases, only) “computer” is a low-cost smartphone.
Connectivity is expensive in relation to incomes, and frequently patchy – websites, maps and especially videos can take minutes to load and often time out. And for many, there is just not enough relevant content available in their language.
These aren’t easy problems to fix, but we’d like to do a better job of addressing them. That’s why we’re building a new engineering team in Singapore – to get closer to the next billion users coming online and to develop products that will work for them.
The VP of Google’s Next Billion Team, Caesar Sengupta also said that- “As our CEO, Sundar, and I spoke about in India back in December, we’ve been working on this in a number of ways for some time now. To bring fast and affordable access to more people around the world, we’ve been working on things like high-speed Wi-Fi in railway stations across India. To help people access the info they need, even when their data is limited, we’ve made Search work faster with less data usage, and enabled Google Maps and YouTube for offline use. And to help people shape the Internet, and make it their own, we’ve made sure our platforms like YouTube work across 76 languages, allowing people to create, upload and engage in their own language, through their own eyes and culture”.
On the other side, Team Pie Thanking its users in a message
For the last three years, Pie has been on a mission to make the messaging software you use at work fun, fast and exciting. We helped teams collaborate, share cat pics and invent new memes during office hours. And we empowered an incredible group of young, old, creative and smart businesses across the world.
Today, we’re excited to share that the Pie team is joining Google (read more here)! In order to focus on our new adventure, Pie will be shut down on March 2, 2016, and will remain independent until then. We’ve released a newDownload your Data option in your settings screen (only available on Web) that will help you download all of your chats, files and contacts for safekeeping.
To our Pie users, thank you for embracing our product.