Yahoo! CEO pitches for more local partnerships

Internet giant Yahoo! is looking at partnering with Indian entrepreneurs and firms to localise its products and firm up a strategy to compete with rivals like Google.

The company partners with Microsoft for search features, Facebook for social networking, Monster for jobs and Zynga for games. In India, Yahoo! has a content partnership with media group Dainik Jagran.

“I want to make a pitch here that we are very interested in becoming hyper local as we expand into many languages faster. Entrepreneurs who have ideas around content, audience, technology and science, we welcome them with open arms. Partnering with you, we can develop content so that when they get their revenue, we will our revenue as well,” Carol Bartz, CEO of the company said addressing the entrepreneurs at the Nasscom Product Conclave here today.

The Yahoo! India R&D unit that presently employs about 2,000 people is in the forefront of the innovations at Yahoo! globally. The India centre has developed about 20 end-to-end products that are used across the world. About one-third of the intellectual properties being filed by the company globally comes from its Indian centre.

The company also works with freelance software developers for specific application development, a Yahoo! India official said.

Bartz said strategic partnerships were core to businesses that were seeking to enhance value to their customers and looking for growth and better reach. She had however a word of caution. “You need to know how to be a good partner. Like marriage and dating, you have to work on it,” she said.

“You need to understand that you cannot build everything,” she said, adding that sometimes good ideas may originate in other places and instead of copying an idea, it would make better sense to partner for ideas.

Talking about the initiatives by Yahoo! to expand its user base, Bartz said the company was reaching out to the first time internet users to teach them about the Rs wonders of the products’ available and how to access it.

“We are trying that with a couple of Indian schools. We are having training sessions on how to use the internet in an efficient manner, how it helps the lives of kids of that age, family, and it is very rewarding,” she added.