Named after | 100% of time on 20% Projects |
---|---|
Formation | March 2016 |
Key people | Bradley Horowitz, Gabor Cselle |
Parent organization | |
Website | area120 |
Area 120 is Google's in-house incubator in which employees work on 20% Project product ideas 100% of the time.[1]
Google's concept of 20% projects has led to many of the company's successes such as Gmail, AdSense, Google News, and Google Cardboard. The Area 120 division was created by Sundar Pichai in March 2016 and has since spawned over 50 projects.[2][1] The objective for the Area 120 program is to incubate products that "graduate" back to Google, where they can become the next billion-user or billion-dollar-revenue products.[1]
In November 2021, the division was reorganized under a new division called Google Labs (unrelated to the defunct service of the same name) along with Google's AR and VR efforts and Project Starline.[3]
The program has funded more than 50 different ideas from Google employees. Notable product experiments which have emerged from Area 120 include:
The Byteboard project was spun out from Google into a separate company in Oct 2021.[16] The reason given was that the Byteboard platform used Google employees as human evaluators of candidates for Google competitors, which raised ethical issues.