Incubator for Google products
Area 120 is Google's in-house incubator in which employees work on 20% Project product ideas. It has helped develop Gmail, AdSense, Google News, and Google Cardboard.[1]
The Area 120 division was created by Sundar Pichai in March 2016 and has since spawned over 50 projects.[1][2] The objective for the Area 120 program is to incubate products that "graduate" back to Google.[1]
In November 2021, the division was reorganized under a new division called Google Labs (unrelated to the defunct service of the same name).[3]
Area 120 was significantly reduced as part of Google's January 2023 layoffs.[4]
Notable products
The program has funded more than 50 different ideas from Google employees. Notable product experiments which have emerged from Area 120 include:
- Tables – a collaborative database program comparable to Airtable. Graduated to Google Cloud.[5]
- Reply – an Android app which allowed users to insert pre-defined replies (called "Smart Replies") into conversations on messaging apps on their phone.[6]
- Stack – an Android app that digitizes personal documents and extracts key information.[7]
- Gamesnacks – an HTML5 games platform for mobile websites.[8]
- Keen – a competitor to Pinterest.[9]
- Byteboard – a product that interviews software engineering candidates.[10] Spun out into a separate company in Oct 2021.[11]
- ThreadIt – a short-form video communication service.[12]
- Orion Wifi – a product letting businesses sell Wi-Fi capacity to wireless carriers.[13]
- Shoploop – a video shopping platform.[14]
- Touring Bird – a search tool for experiences in major cities.[15] Graduated into Google Travel.[16]
- Tangi – a short-form video site.[17]
- AdVR – a product providing advertisements in VR.[18]
- Chatbase – a conversational AI platform for building and analyzing customer service chatbots.[19] Graduated into Google Cloud.
- AdLingo – a marketing platform for bringing conversational assistants into display advertising.[20] Graduated into Google Workspace.
Byteboard spinout
The Byteboard project was spun out from Google into a separate company in Oct 2021,[21] due to Byteboard using Google employees as human evaluators of candidates for Google competitors, which raised ethical issues.
