Google has announced that it’s opening up an engineering hub in Singapore to help it recreate its products for mobile-first Southeast Asian users – and it’s bought Slack-like messaging platform Pie to help it kickstart this effort.
Pie was built in and for a region where many people have low-end smartphones and patchy internet that’s expensive for what you get. There’s also not a great deal of relevant content in the language that you might want it in.
So Google is appealing to local engineers, student engineers and expat engineers to help it achieve its next mission.
The announcement was made by Caesar Sengupta, VP, Next Billion Users Team, which is his genuine title.
He highlighted previous changes made by Google to help in this area, including ensuring Maps and YouTube work offline, as well as improving Search so it uses less data and localizing YouTube into 76 languages.
➤ Building an engineering team in Singapore [Google via Re/code]
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