After a long run full of successes and failures, Google announced on Wednesday that it will axe its Labs. Google Labs was a place where the company's employees were encouraged to release early-stage projects that they developed under Google's policy of allowing the use of up to 20 percent of a work week for innovation.

We rounded up a few notable Google products that either had humble beginnings in the Labs initiative or are currently still a part of Labs. Let's start with Gmail.

Read: Losing Google Labs Is the Price for a More Focused Google