A year-and-a-half ago, Navneet Loiwal, a 23-year-old IIT Powai graduate, was chatting up his colleague A C Narendran, 36, at Google.
BANGALORE: A year-and-a-half ago, Navneet Loiwal, a 23-year-old IIT Powai graduate, was chatting up his colleague A C Narendran, 36, at the research & development centre of Google, the world’s most visited online search engine, in Bangalore.
Their yak during the “20% work time” - Google allows its scientists and engineers to devote 20% of their work time to invent products and concepts - led to the idea of a portal exclusively dedicated to financial news.
Loiwal and Narendran continued to finetune their concept and began to work on a demo. They presented it to the company and guess what, Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin gave the idea their go-ahead.
In doublequick time, the Loiwal-Narendran team was expanded to include scientists from Google’s headquarters in California and also from its New York facility. This week, the company officially launched the website, Google Finance (
http://finance.google.com/finance).
Both wizards didn’t have any background in the stock market or corporate-dom, if you may, but their brainchild has indeed led to one fine way of searching for companies. Incidentally, Google News is also an invention by an Indian — Krishna Bharat, principal scientist, who conceived and built the portal as part of yet another “20% work time” project.
Google Finance, which tracks firms in the US, informs a reader on why the stock of a particular firm moved in a particular way and highlights the news that could have triggered the movement.
It integrates with Google News to get news updates on a particular firm, besides giving a link to its website and what discussions are made by blogs on them.
“This is the first product from India that has been made public,” Google Bangalore R&D centre head Arvind Jain told DNA Money.
“You can either search using the company name or the ticker symbol,” Jain said, adding, a localised edition for India will also be launched over time.
“We have been able to hire smart engineers, many of them who want to work in India in the same environment as they would get in the US,” said Jain, who worked at Googleplex in Mountain View, California, before taking over as the Bangalore unit head in September last.
Online, in Finance St
Google Finance is the first product from India that has been made public
It integrates with Google News – another invention by an Indian — to spew updates
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