We recently asked members of our global Google Business Group (GBG) community of entrepreneurs who use Google to share how tech allows them to do extraordinary things. We received hundreds of submissions from GBG members around the world.

Out of 9 global finalists, 5 stories began in Asia. Now it’s your turn. Tell us which story inspires you most, and we’ll reward whomever gets the most votes with some fantastic prizes.

From an online platform that helps protect and empower women to speak out against harassment in public, to the first app in Nepal to connect restaurants and food-lovers, and by doing so, is also helping bring more businesses online, check out the five Asian stories below. Then vote for your favorite by giving them a thumbs-up in the upper-right of the video. Votes must be made by December 1 and stay tuned as we announce the winners on December 15.

Essmart, India




Mogo Reader, Sri Lanka




Peakawoo, Philippines

Safecity, India

Yellow Nepal, Nepal



Posted by Erica Hanson, Developer Relations Program Manager, Google Southeast Asia
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“Wondering if the teacher could go a bit slower…”
“Wish you could picturize what is being taught…”
These are just a few of the challenges kids face in day to day learning.

Give your kids the best of technology to make learning easy and fun.
The “YT-Edu India” Channel has:
  • India specific curriculum
  • 1-12th standard videos at a single destination
  • Subject and class specific sections

A group of tech savvy teachers and GEG India community (Google Educator Group) with considerable classroom experience, have explored the impact of technology on student learning and curated videos for various subjects, keeping in mind the challenges faced during day to day learning.

And we’re delighted to introduce, “YT-Edu India” Channel that has been created by educators to make discovery of curated videos, easier. The channel’s playlists have also been optimised and made user-friendly by creating subject specific sections and easy to access channels for all classes. The GEG community and teachers are continuously engaged in the process of improving the current playlists by adding new videos and replacing existing ones with better videos.
We invite you to explore the videos that make learning much more simple and entertaining.

Posted by Bani Paintal Dhawan, Country Head - EDU Outreach Programs
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IXth grader Vaidehi Reddy from Pune

With more than a million entries from over 2100 schools across 50 cities we finally have this year’s India Doodle4Google (D4G) winner! IXth grader Vaidehi Reddy’s doodle will be featured on the Google India homepage on November 14th to celebrate Children’s Day.

Vaidehi Reddy, who attends Army Public School, Pune, submitted her Doodle around this year’s theme, ‘A place in India I wish to visit’. Vaidehi’s doodle artfully depicts Assam, where she would like to go because it is rich in both, natural beauty and culture.

This year’s jury, Political cartoonist Ajit Ninan, Art Director Children's Publishing at ACK Media Savio Mascarenhas and Google Doodle team lead Ryan Germick along with the Google Doodle team had a mammoth task at hand - to choose the national winner.

We are overwhelmed to see great participation from young children and schools year-on-year since 2009. The designs for this year’s theme “A place in India I wish to visit” were incredibly creative across all grade groups. In addition to selecting Vaidehi Reddy as the national winner, public votes helped us determine the three group winners:

We announced the winners today in a fun-filled event at Delhi, where all the finalists were treated to a unique Google experience as they gathered around to crown and cheer the winners.

Thanks to all of you who voted and helped us select this year’s winner. And a bigger thank you to the students and parents from across India who submitted doodles. We’ll be back in 2015; till then, keep doodling - who knows, your child could be the next winner!

Posted by Sandeep Menon, Director of Marketing, Google India


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According to READAlliance, many primary school-age children in India have low literacy rates. In one survey of children ages 5-16 in rural India, nearly half couldn’t form words from individual letters. In another survey of fifth grade children, two-thirds were unable to identify the main theme of a passage they read.
To help address this, we recently partnered with READAlliance, USAID, the Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS) and 10,000 Startups India to pilot the Chrome App Developer Challenge for Education. Run by the Google India Developer Relations team, the program encouraged developers to build Chrome apps for India’s primary school children with the goal of improving their reading skills and getting on a path of lifelong learning.
On July 5, thirty top developer teams came together at our Bangalore office and remotely via Google Hangouts to kick off the eight-week challenge. The developers, selected from hundreds of applicants based on their success in past hackathons, worked with mentors over the course of eight weeks to build and publish their apps. Content providers including Pratham Books and the educational cartoon series Chotta Bheem contributed relevant open-source content for the apps.


These 30 apps are now available for free on the Chrome Web Store. They represent a variety of fun learning experiences including interactive stories, reading comprehension quizzes, timed word-matching games, and a racing app that involves building complex words from alphabet tiles.
We announced the three winning apps — selected by educators based on the quality of their content as well as technical merits — on October 28. We’ll also feature them on the Chrome Web Store for three months in the hopes that even more teachers, parents and students will be able to access them. USAID and CKS plan to extend the reach of the apps by introducing them to schools for lower income children in India this year.
Visit the +Google for Education page on Monday November 3rd at 10:00 am GMT (or 3:30 pm India Time) to join the live Hangout on Air featuring the three winning apps. Education expert and TED Prize winner Dr. Sugata Mitra, will be joining the Hangout. Known for the seminal “Hole in the Wall” learning experiments, Dr. Mitra won the 2013 TED Prize to build a new kind of School in the Cloud where children can explore on their own and learn from one another using online resources.  

Congratulations and thanks to all who participated in the pilot challenge, and we hope to see the rest of you on Monday’s hangout.

Posted by Sunil Rao, India Developer Relations, and Suhair Khan, Chrome & Education Partnerships and Strategy.
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Today in India, every person online speaks English. However, most of the next web users will not be English speakers and we are committed to bring to each and everyone of them the best possible internet experience. This is why our teams are working hard to improve Google Translate for many languages, including Hindi. 

 Would you like to apply your knowledge of both Hindi and English to help us build a better translate product ? Between Nov. 6th and Nov. 21st 2014, help us translate as many words and short sentences as you can on the Google Translate Community.
In return, the 101 most active translators will win Android One phones*

In the quest to get the next 300 millions Indian users online, this is an important step. We hope you take it with us :)
Register and participate here : http://translate.google.com/community/hindi

 *Terms and conditions apply : http://goo.gl/vHmy1y
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