Google has opened new Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, housing 1000 staff. Announcing the move on a Google blog, Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google's Next Billion User team, said: 'We need room for 1,000 googlers working on new products and projects across Asia for our users, customers and partners. And we also want more room for the community around us '” the kind of place that's useful for gatherings of developers, students, founders, and kids to connect with googlers and, sometimes, even prime ministers and ministers of trade.
'Googlers here are focused on many areas, industries and countries in the region. We have a growing engineering team and googlers working across sales, partnerships, marketing, people operations and many more.'
He added: 'We wanted our office to reflect that diversity and regional range, and built it in a way that enables everyone to work together effortlessly.' He said the new facility had been designed to 'inspire googlers to perform at their best every day. '¦ Googlers are empowered to choose the kind of workspace that best suits their working style and the tasks they need to focus on for the day. There are open spaces for collaboration and more quiet spaces for individual work.'
Google to train 3,000 school kids
Sengupta also announced a Google initiative '˜Code in the Community' to provide IT training to 3,000 young Singaporeans from less well-to-do backgrounds. 'It's a multi-year, multi-level computer science and computational thinking course to get even more Singaporean kids excited about the potential of technology,' he said.
'We're partnering with Singapore's four ethnic self-help groups '” the Chinese Development Assistance Council, Singapore Indian Development Association, The Eurasian Association and Yayasan Mendaki '” to hold weekend classes for kids aged 8 to 15, with an equal mix of boys and girls.
'The program, which starts in early 2017, will be run by 21C Girls and Saturday Kids at four community centers around the island for three years. Each batch of participants and their parents will start off with a visit to our new office where they will hear from googlers about how they started their careers and what a technical job really has to offer.'
He added: 'We will also be engaging with the community through a series of tech talks, meet-ups and interview workshops that we hope will give Singaporeans aspiring to pursue a career in tech a head start.'
