Area 120 is

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's in-house incubator in which employees work on 20% Project product ideas. It has helped develop

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, Google News, and

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. The Area 120 division was created by

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in March 2016 and has since spawned over 50 projects. The objective for the Area 120 program is to incubate products that "graduate" back to Google. In November 2021, the division was reorganized under a new division called Google Labs (unrelated to the defunct service of the same name). Area 120 was significantly reduced as part of Google's January 2023 layoffs.

Notable products

The program has funded more than 50 different ideas from Google employees. Notable product experiments which have emerged from Area 120 include: *

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– a collaborative database program comparable to

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. Graduated to Google Cloud. * Reply – an Android app which allowed users to insert pre-defined replies (called "Smart Replies") into conversations on messaging apps on their phone. * Stack – an Android app that digitizes personal documents and extracts key information. * Gamesnacks – an

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games platform for mobile websites. * Keen – a competitor to

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. * Byteboard – a product that interviews software engineering candidates. Spun out into a separate company in Oct 2021. * ThreadIt – a short-form video communication service. * Orion Wifi – a product letting businesses sell

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capacity to wireless carriers. * Shoploop – a video shopping platform. * Touring Bird – a search tool for experiences in major cities. Graduated into Google Travel. * Tangi – a short-form video site. * AdVR – a product providing

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in VR. * Chatbase – a conversational AI platform for building and analyzing customer service chatbots. Graduated into

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Byteboard spinout

The Byteboard project was spun out from Google into a separate company in Oct 2021, due to Byteboard using Google employees as human evaluators of candidates for Google competitors, which raised ethical issues.

References

External links

* {{Google LLC Google