The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona is in full swing, and we’re seeing all sorts of tech being showcased at the show. We brought you a lot of content thus far, and are still rolling. Google’s Senior Vice President, Sundar Pichai, has held a speech at MWC today, and we’re here to tell what he talked about during the speech, courtesy of The Verge. Anyhow, let’s get started.
After some introductory remarks and mentions of the show itself, Sundar started his speech. “Search was a very very simple application. All you needed was a computer and an internet connection. And it worked. Now it serves billions of people around the world. We’ve always wanted to work on problems like that,” said Sundar. He then continued to talk about Gmail. Maps, Chrome and Android, mentioning the number of users using those services. He said that over a billion translations are processed each day by Google Translate, and that people spend omre than 10 million hours on their smartphones a month, which sounds staggering when you put it into perspective. Mr. Pichai also mentioned that 40% of all transactions were done on mobile during the Black Friday, which is quite an interesting piece of information.
Interestingly enough, Sundar Pichai took out Samsung’s newly-released Galaxy S6 Edge handset at one point during his speech, and made a few quick remarks about the device. He also added the following: “We’re working on Android beyond phones and tablets, watches, televisions, cars. VR is going to be a hugely important area that’s using Android as its foundation. We work with over a thousand partners to work closely on Android. It’s the openness and diversity of Android that makes it what it is today.” Mr. Pichai also mentioned that there are over 4 billion people worldwide which don’t have access to connectivity, and that Google is trying to change that through various projects. Along with that, he mentioned three different approaches that the company is using. Urban Areas are served by Google Fiber, actually that’s the goal, to continue rolling out Google’s extremely fast internet connection further. Project Loon was Pichai’s second mention, this experiment started 4 years ago, I’m sure you remember Google’s interesting project in which the company is trying to provide internet connection in non-accessible areas by sending balloons in the sky to act as floating cell towers. The third, and final mention, that Pichai mentioned, has to do with airplanes which work with Google’s cell balloons (Project Titan). These are the three approaches whose goal is to solve global connecitivty problems once and for all.
Sundar Pichai was also interviewed after his speech by Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek. During his interview, mr. Pichai mentioned that Google would love to offer Google services in China, though did mention that it’s a complex area and that there’s a lot of malware there. He also mentioned that it’s very important for Google to partner with Android manufacturers through the Nexus project and various other tech-related projects. The importance of mobile payments was also mentioned, and there was also some talk about Google Wallet and Android Wear. It was mentioned that this will be a big year for wearables, and that it will be interesting to see what happens when Apple enters the arena. Mr. Pichai also mentioned Google+ by saying the following: “For us, Google+ was always two things, a stream and a social layer. The stream has a passionnate community of users, but the second goal was larger for us. We’re at a point where things like photos and communications are very important, we’re reorganizing around that. Hangouts will still exist.” Google’s Senior VP also confirmed that the company will launch Apple Pay competitor, called Android Pay, by saying the following: “Mobile payments are very big this year, it makes sense, your phone is always with you. We’re addressing that with Android, it’s a platform approach. We’re doing something called Android Pay, it’s an API layer in Android.”
That’s it as far as Sundar Pichai’s speech and interview go. Let us know what you think in the comments, do you see Google’s “Project Loon” succeeding in the future? What about Google Fiber, do you think it will be rolled out globally at some point?