Technology giant Google Inc will open a merchant account in Bangladesh to take on board the tech-savvy Bangladeshi youths and facilitate their freelance work.
State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak received the assurance from the world’s leading technology firm at a meeting in the US recently.
The Information and Communication Technology Division issued a media statement on Sunday on his visit.
Palak flew to Silicon Valley in California and held separate meetings with the University of California, Berkeley, Facebook Inc, Nuance Communications, and PayPal-Zoom between Mar 31 and Apr 2.
At a meeting with the Google executives, Palak pointed out that Bangladeshi youths have made their mark by developing the technology sector, but they cannot transfer their money for not having a merchant account in Bangladesh.
Google’s Public Policy Senior Council Wilson L White promised to take steps to open the merchant account.
The media statement quoted White as saying that they were keen to work with the ICT Division of Bangladesh to start ‘Google Launchpad’ and ‘Google for Entrepreneur’ programmes.
Both teams agreed to provide technical support to each other in the project ‘Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Academy’ to enable Bangladeshi start-ups to use Google start-up tools free of cost.
Facebook’s Vice-President Ime Archibong said they were working on ‘Facebook and Billing’ banking channel.
Facebook authorities promised to verify accounts of Bangladeshi opinion leaders, start Facebook workspace at government offices, create opportunity for elected local start-ups at the Facebook developers' conference, and cooperate about the ‘social media expo’ to be held in Bangladesh in May.
Palak also met Nuance Communications Chairman and CEO Paul Richie and urged him to work on natural language processing, screen reading, speech-to-next, text-to-speech and Bangla corpus.
The statement said Richie showed interest to work with the ICT Division in those areas.
Nuance Communications is a software developer that also works as a language research affiliate of Apple Inc and Samsung.
Online money transfer platform PayPal-Xoom said they would start operations in Bangladesh soon, when Palak asked them.
Palak started for Argentina on Apr 2 to take part in the Young Global Leader Alumni Summit and returned to Bangladesh on Apr 6.
