Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include search, cloud computing, software and online advertising technologies. Most of its profits derive from AdWords.
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its stake. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil". In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email, an office suite, and social networking. Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, and of the browser-only Google Chrome OS for a specialized type of netbook known as a Chromebook. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners major electronics manufacturers in production of its high-end Nexus series of devices, and acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012. A fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.
Silicon Valley is the southern region of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, in the United States. The region, whose name derives from the Santa Clara Valley in which it is centered, is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations as well as thousands of small startups. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector.
Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States and the world, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, accounting for one-third (1/3) of all of the venture capital investment in the United States. Geographically, Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula Valley, and the southern East Bay. However, with the rapid growth of technology jobs in the San Francisco metropolitan area, the traditional boundaries of Silicon Valley have expanded north to include the rest of San Mateo County and the City and County of San Francisco, as well as parts of Marin County.