Google bus poised to empower Bengal SMBs

After making inroads across South and North-West India, the much awaited Google bus finally stopped in West Bengal with an extensive tour program across the state to empower the capital and upcountry regions with benefits of the internet revolution. Primarily with the objective of making people in the upcountry areas more internet savvy as well as increase its penetration across states thereby inducing a procedure of branding, Google will be focusing on south Bengal. The move for the bus service came into existence in 2009 with localized languages gaining importance and a large proportion of the internet users across India preferring to browse the internet in local languages. In this endeavor, Google has already introduced local search, language and the recently launched Indic keyboard tool which allows users not only to read but also write content in local languages. "After visiting the bus, we found that more than 20 lakh visitors have gone online. It ranges from mere multimedia content, to using educative projects as well as listen to expert speak and other utilities," said Vinay Goel, director, Google India.

Goel claimed that Google has made significant investments in India to make the internet more relevant as well as accessible. The company has tied-up with NIIT to provide internet training to its visitors for an hour. Also, the company has launched a nationwide initiative to help the SMB sector to become more online savvy and dole out a free website, personal domain and hosting ability, all free of cost for a year. "With this approach, we want to make SMBs to use the online mode in order to help them realize their potential by offering easy and free online tools and help them to set-up a website in the easiest way possible," added Goel. In this aspect, the company has partnered with HostGator with a target to get 5 lakh SMB companies to host their websites. As Google's bus is poised to help the company in realizing this goal, Goel stated that he is impressed with the response generated so far.