Google’s global CEO, Sundar Pichai was in Nigeria to attend the Google For Nigeria event which was held at the Landmark Event Center, Victoria Island, Lagos During the event which was held last week, a couple of interesting announcements were made. Below is everything that was announced.
All Major Announcement at Google For Nigeria
Android One device called Freetell ICE 2 coming to Nigeria. According to Caesar Sengupta, Head of Google’s Next Billion Users Initiative, an Android One device known as Freetell ICE 2 will be launched in Nigeria around September this year. If you recall the first Android device (Infinix Hot 2) was launched in Nigeria by Infinix in partnership with Google. But the Freetell ICE 2 will be very affordable and will be sold for N13, 000 with a special data bundle from MTN.
Google Street View is now available in Nigeria and it will start first with Lagos. This is a great news for Nigeria and with Google Street View, you can access the most remote and amazing places you may never have the chance to visit in real life. All that you need are mobile device and internet connection. With a Virtual Reality device, for example, you could travel to the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to explore the facilities or the vibrant imageries of the beautiful city of Cape Town in South Africa.
Also, Suren Ruhela (Head of Google Maps for Emerging Countries) announced at Google For Nigeria that thousands of new addresses have been added to search across certain areas to improve address search experience. It is worthy to note that more than 100K Nigerian small and medium-scale businesses have also been added to Maps while the number of Google Maps users in Nigeria doubled in the last year. You can virtually drive along the Carter Bridge to the National Stadium or across the Eko Bridge, down to the Marina; all on your smartphone.
Gboard, Posts On Google, You Tube Go
GBoard, according to Sengupta now supports all major Nigerian languages (Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa). Gboard is a virtual keyboard app developed by Google for Android and iOS devices. It was first released on iOS in May 2016 before it was released on Android in December 2016. With Gboard, you can perform Google Search with easy searching and sharing of GIF and emoji content. You can download Gboard from Playstore here.
Posts On Google now available in Nigeria. Post On Google was first launched in Brazil followed by the US and Nigeria is the third country post on Google will be launched. Post On Google allows celebrities, musicians and organization to post Twitter-like status updates directly to Google’s search results pages for people to access.
YouTube Go will be released in Beta by the end of the year in Nigeria. YouTube Go is an official app from YouTube that lets you download videos to your Android. We all know that it is not possible to download videos directly from YouTube, as a result of this many internet having using third party apps to download videos from YouTube. The arrival of YouTube Go means you no longer have to waste your data when you want to watch a specific video, you can download the videos of choice and watch it later on your mobile device. The data friendly version of YouTube works area where internet connection is very poor. According to the data released by Akaima state of internet Report, Nigeria is one of the countries with the poorest internet speed in the world.
Google is banking on the new data-friendly YouTube Go to help local users navigate that problem. Nigeria will become the second country where the app been launched after a beta launch later this year. YouTube Go was first launched in India in April
According to VP, Product Management of YouTube, Johanna Wright, MarkAngel Comedy (Emmanuella) is the first Nigerian YouTube channel to hit one million subscribers. She also that Youtube is now very popular in Nigeria and the watch time in Nigeria has increased by over 120% over the past year.
Naira, Runtown — Mad over You and Anthony Joshua were the most searched keywords in recent times in Nigeria. This revelation was made known by Tamar Yehoshua (VP product management, Google Search.
Now over to you, what do you think about these announcements at Google For Nigeria and which of them are you really excited about,
