Yahoo! looks to buy mobile technology companies

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Nasdaq-listed digital media company Yahoo!, which is moving forward with a ‘mobile-first’ strategy, is looking at acquisitions that will help grow its presence in mobile technologies, according to Hari Vasudev, vice president and head, Yahoo! India R&D.

“We have acquired 11 companies, including micro-blogging site Tumblr, in the last 12 months. And, most of them have mobile technologies. We will acquire companies that have strong mobile talent,” he told Business Standard.

Yahoo! had launched the revamped version of its search engine in the US last month. The company is incorporating content from Shrine, its property that focuses on lifestyle, home living and cooking, as direct displays. The direct display features not just shows 10 blue links but also makes the content available on the page directly.

“We are in the process of rolling it out (revamped search version) internationally as well in a phased manner. Though we don’t share exact time lines, our emphasis and focus is on launching products when they are perfect for the market that we want to go into,” Vasudev said.

Stating that a lot of these products’ bucket-testing (a methodology for gauging the impact of different product designs on a website’s metrics) happens here in India, he said these would come to India also as it happened to be one of the most important markets for them.

Yahoo! had launched the iOS (iPhone operating system) version of its popular photo-sharing site Flickr in December 2012. Of the 80 million users globally, Flickr has over 2.5 million users in India.

Flickr is powered by new features including ‘delayed upload’, which integrates camera features into Flickr. Yahoo! is also now allocating one terabyte of free storage to Flickr users.

“If a user uploads a picture every hour, the storage will last for 65 years,” he added.