Google spares three Area 120 R&D projects

, including team working on a ‘Gen Z consumer product’.

March 11, 2020

Google has spared three of its Area 120 R&D projects, including a team working on a ‘Gen Z consumer product’, from the chopping block.

The search giant had previously announced that it would be shutting down its internal incubator for ‘moonshots’, but has now reversed course on three of the projects.

The three projects that have been given a reprieve are:

• Upswing, which is working on a ‘Gen Z consumer product’.
• Supersonic, which is developing a ‘next-generation messaging platform’.
• Surround 360, which is working on ‘3D-360 video capture and processing’.

The three teams will now be absorbed into other divisions within Google, with Upswing joining the team working on Google’s

Youtube Music product, Supersonic going to the Android Messages team, and Surround 360 joining Google’s hardware division.

The fate of the other seven projects that were in Area 120, including a team working on a ‘smart spoon’ for Parkinson’s patients, is still unclear.

Area 120

Google spares three Area 120 R&D projects, including team working on a ‘Gen Z consumer product’

Google has announced that it will be shutting down three of its Area 120 internal startups, as first reported by 9to5Google. The decision to shutter the projects comes as part of the ‘Area 120’ program’s yearly review process, which sees the company take a close look at all of the initiatives it’s running in order to make sure they’re aligned with the company’s overall strategy.

This year, Google has decided to axe three projects: ‘Supersonic’, which was working on a messaging app for Gen Z consumers; ‘Ursa Minor’, an app that provided shift workers with information about their shifts and workplace; and ‘Throughline’, a tool that helped people understand complex topics by breaking them down into a series of connected concepts.

The decision to kill off Supersonic is particularly interesting, as it would have been one of the first products from Area 120 to focus on Gen Z consumers – a demographic that Google has been target=”_blank”> increasingly turning its attention to in recent years. While the company hasn’t given any specific reasons for why Supersonic has been shuttered, it’s likely that the team wasn’t able to achieve the level of user growth that was needed to justify its continued existence.

The other two projects that have been shut down, Ursa Minor and Throughline, were both launched in 2018 and never really gained much traction. Ursa Minor was available in beta for a few months, but never really caught on with users. Throughline was picked apart by beta testers for being too “crowded and difficult to use, and it seems likely that these factors played a role in its eventual shutdown.

All three of the shuttered projects will be wound down over the next few months, and the team members will be given the opportunity to apply for other positions within Google. It’s not yet clear what the teams will be working on next, but Google has said that it’s “grateful” for their contributions to the company.