CHRISTINE HONG: Hi my name is Christine Hong.
I'm part of international engineering
operations team at Google.
We helped to set up and expand engineering centers worldwide.
EDWARD CHANG: Good evening, everyone.
I'm doing a presentation on behalf of Kai-Fu Lee.
He's the president of China.
He cannot be here this week and basically I am one of the
directors in China responsible for research.
I'll give you a very quick tour of our China operation.
These are some sample pictures of our offices in Beijing.
The office setting is pretty similar to the office setting
in Mountain View headquarters and people have a lot of fun.
And we are also exploring some other areas, like client side
applications.
And in addition to developing products, we also have are
heavily trying to do a
partnership with local companies.
So one way of doing a partnership is to do a content
acquisition.
And we acquire a lot of content from local vendors.
One example is we acquire books from Tsinghua
Publishers.
And the second way of partnership is distribution.
We destribute our services to other vendors.
One example is we have a partnership relationship with
China Mobile.
And the third way of partnership is syndication.
Syndication basically other service providers, maybe using
our search tool.
And one example is Sina.
Sina has been a good partner with Google.
With all these challenges and our policy or strategy in
China, according to our CEO Eric, we will take a long term
view to win in China.
That Chinese has 5000 years of history and Google also has
5000 years of patience.
And with this, the following is our strategy.
In 2006, basically we built our foundation.
I don't want to get into details, so last year was a
foundation building year.
And this year we'd like to demonstrate our growth--
through new products, through partnership.
And we like to make the market share, hopefully, it would
just follow our endeavors.
And hopefully, after patiently executing our strategy for
5000 years and in 7006, we can accomplish the following,
organizing all the information in China effectively.
LEE-FENG CHIEN: Who knows which Google office is the
tallest office?
[LAUGHTER]
We are located, so far still the tallest
building in the world.
It's Taipei 101.
The iGoogle page is quite different from iGoogle of the
global market.
Because, I just mentioned, users in the market, that they
have different user behavior and that information need
specially some people are not really familiar with typing.
So we like to have more links for them.
We have speciality features of Google map and we published
two very interesting [? method ?]
One is provide real time highway video, because in
Taiwan the government support webcams in every junction.
And the real time data is open, can be accessed.
So we can launch this kind of gadgets is very easy to--
on the map easy to take a look at the real time highway
information.
Also in Taipei City the government provides real time
parking lot information.
It's so important.
I think, it's important in Mountain View.
So you know where and the parking lot information.
It's more easy.
So this is a kind of errors very special feature.
And so we have a small team that we work on for--
on niched content and know better to best meet the local
users interest.
ARVIND JAIN: Welcome everyone.
My name is Arvind and I'm a software
engineer at Google India.
I would like to tell you today a little bit about Google's
R&D operation in India--
our goals, what we've been up to and also show some of the
recent products that we launched
from our lab in India.
I would also like to show you some of the recent launches
that we did from Bangalore.
This is Google news in Hindi.
The interesting thing about this is that it was built by
one of our engineers in his 20% time.
You must have all heard about 20% time by now, which is one
of the reasons why Google is able to innovate so much and
build great new products.
But this was launched earlier this year.
And personally, I actually use it a lot.
I like to read entertainment news here more than on our
English edition.
This is maps, that we launched recently and are making
constant improvements trying to get more
data into the property.
A few years back, if you ask anybody, nobody would have
thought that you could have online maps for India.
It was a big challenge.
Nobody ever actually tried to collect all of this data.
Forget about being online, even offline data was very
very sparse.
So we've been working hard on this problem, looking at a
unique and innovative ways of how we can actually get more
data created so that people can get access to this some
important geo information.
Lastly, this is another interesting product that we
recently launched.
One of the big challenges in India is that we just don't
have any local language keyboard.
So just like China or in other countries, data entry is
actually very difficult, if you want to author any content
in local languages, or communicate with your friends
in local languages.
So the tool that we recently--
we built this technology called transliteration, which
allows you to type Hindi text right now in
using an English keyboard.
You type it phonetically.
I'm pretty sure most of you actually do it while you're
communicating to others on IM or on email.
TED CHO: Hi, my name is Ted Cho.
I'm the engineering site director for Korea.
If I asked people, what are you--
what comes to mind when you would think of Korea, they all
give me different answers.
Some say kimchi, North Korea, nuclear weapons.
But nowadays, there more high tech stuff like broadband, or
internet print penetration or, let's see, online games--
a lot of cool stuff-- gadgets.
And so there's a lot of different ways to describe
Korea, but probably the only way to describe it is that
it's very unique.
It's very different and I'm going to show you
why they are different.
So some facts about the Google Korea office.
We have a very tall building, not as tall
as the Taiwan office--
I think it's around 60 something.
Where we are at the 22 floor.
It's both sales and engineering office.
And like I said, this sales office open in 2004 and is
located in Gangnam, which is the new
downtown area of Seoul.
It's a gorgeous new office and somebody secretly told me that
it's the Googliest office outside of Mountain View.
So I hope you don't get upset, but it is truly one of the
best outside of Mountain View.
Some fun facts, so we just moved into the new office like
six weeks ago.
And right now, because the engineers, we just started
like eight months ago, we're seriously outnumbered by
non-engineers.
And definitely it is my mission to change that in the
near future.
And males are seriously out numbered by females and I'm
not initially wanting to change that one.
[LAUGHTER]
And we have all the other Googly stuff like, massage
chairs, pool tables, Foosball, we have a traditional Korean
style tea room and Nintendo wii consoles and unicycles and
many more to play with.
And yes we have free catered food every day.
We have it catered from the hotels.
Every day, we have lunch.
It's just gorgeous.
Ed also said that Eric Schmidt has 5000 years of patience for
China and Korea actually also has 5000 years of history.
And when Eric was visiting several weeks back he told me
that he will allocate the same amount of patience for Korea.
So we are definitely taking the long term approach.
This was a very special project for Google Korea and
Google, in general, because--
it was launched, by the way, about a month ago, less than a
month ago, about three weeks ago, when actually Eric
Schmidt was visiting Korea.
And why this is important is because this is the first time
in Google's history that of all the 158 domains that we're
serving, that we actually changed the home page.
It was a first in Korea.
And although it was a minor change, it had a very special
meaning for our team and Google and also the Korean
users in that--
first of all, this is our first Korean engineer-driven
projects, so we-- for the first time, our Korean
engineer started and finished the project and it was a home
page change, so it was obviously one of the most
challenging projects.
And second, for the public, in Korea, there was this
pessimism as to whether Google can really do something
differently in Korea.
Because Google has such a strong culture, Korea has such
a strong culture and they're very different.
So when we launched this new home page, we were sending out
a strong message to the public that we are actually willing
to make changes for the Korean market.
And I think it was very well accepted.
So we are excited and very proud of this project.
MALE SPEAKER 1: This is an extraordinary time, I think,
for us as venture capitalists, looking at technology trends
because not only are there interesting investments and
technology going on in Asia, we're increasingly learning a
lot from Asia for investing in the US.
Because I think they're leading a lot of the
technology innovation and adoption overseas.
I'm excited to be here tonight with some of the thought
leaders in Google that are actually pioneering
some of this work.
Plus, if I wasn't here I'd be still on line at the Apple
store waiting for my iPhone.
If you guys had to guess the number of venture firms that
was raised--
the number of funds that was raised in China in the last
eighteen months.
And the amount of money, is the bonus
question, that was raised.
The number of venture firms have started in China in the
last 18 months A hundred's a little high.
There's not that much money out there.
[OVERLAPPING VOICES]
She got it--
61 venture funds in the last eighteen months, just in China
and that's $6.4 billion was raised.
The other interesting stat, across Asia--
private equity, early stage, later stage $14.2 billion was
raised in 2006 alone.
So this hopefully sets the context and there's hopefully
going to be much more innovation and potentially
more competition for Google in the years to come.
I guess the question I have is, is the cost structure
really lower in these regions.
You always hear, like oh yeah, you know, go to India or go to
China, it's cheaper.
And then you run the numbers, like, holy crap, that's
actually pretty expensive over there.
So what's been your experience launching in these regions?
MALE SPEAKER 2: So I mean, I think all of these economies
are growing rapidly and I think companies that go there
because they think they're going to save money on
individual costs are going there for the wrong reason.
We're going there for the talent.
I mean I'm seeing compensation is escalating rapidly all
throughout Asia.
And partly it's partly your fault by the way.
[LAUGHTER]
MALE SPEAKER 1: We blame it on you guys for paying too much
and we have to pay our starters more.
MALE SPEAKER 2: But you should be there for the talent and
the market, not for not for outsourcing.
If you're there for that reason you're there for the
wrong reason.
It's very common now for projects to be between two
different offices or three different offices that are not
Mountain View.
So we have a very distributed model at this stage.
MALE SPEAKER 2: Just one last question
for the country heads.
Name your favorite start up, domestic start up, in each of
your regions.
EDWARD CHANG: A cool company, I think, one company Google
invested on.
This is [? Tangshin. ?]
They have this product called QQ which is really
flourishing in China.
I think it's a very cool product.
TED CHO: My favorite is a company
called Tatter and Companies.
They are basically a blog hosting, blog solution company
and it's based on open source, like the model, and the people
are very [? Googly ?]
and the approach is very successful as well.
ARVIND JAIN: My favorite is Shadi.com.
Shadi is the word for marriage.
This is an online portal which--
it's a matchmaking site.
Lots of people in India are getting married.
It's one of the more successful start ups.
It's actually not fair to call it a start up anymore.
LEE-FENG CHIEN: My favourite company's name is Media Tech
because most of the talented people we actually work with
are at Media Tech.
In some senses, it features some technology
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
is very easy to convert into hardware.
So it has a great potential.