What we learnt at Google Launchpad, Mountain View

Background: We recently spent a couple of weeks at Google Mountain View as part of the Launchpad programme. It was a great experience to be part of the sessions and mentoring that Google had meticulously setup and also to meet other global startups who were part of the programme.

Writing this post on a three Google technologies, that I felt are must-haves for consumer tech companies:

1. Firebase: Firebase is going to become very important for all app developers. It might not be obvious now, but will soon be. It is a suite of tools that help product/mktg/dev teams do their jobs better. It includes user segmentation, notifications, analytics, A/B testing. We got a sneak peek into its roadmap and Google is building a lot of smartness into this platform. We have already deployed Firebase in our app and it has started to deliver.
2.  Google Vision API: Google has refined its machine learning (Tensor Flow) model for vision and made it available on the tap for developers. The API is brilliant in making sense of visual content. At magicpin, we have built on top of it to read bills that users submit and derive relevant patterns. The core API is very versatile and applicable to many more use cases.
3. : Even though Flipkart has already shown the way with their lite version, this is still worthy of a special mention. Try out magicpin’s (limited) PWA experience on a Chrome browser. Two key reasons why PWA is important, especially for India:

• Lets the discerning Indian user experience the product without committing to app download
• PWA is not a second grade experience: delivers very close to the native app on a Chrome browser

Magicpin was also featured in Google’s global developer programme |Video

Thoughts and questions are welcome!