Yahoo! to tap India for 'open ideas'

If you are not a techie who can write software codes but still want to share ideas and see them being translated into applications that millions can use worldwide? Well, this whole idea could be a reality soon!

Digital media company Yahoo! is toying with the idea of floating a platform, which would accept valuable suggestions and ideas from commoners in India, and turn them into potential applications.

“We are working on a mechanism in India where people can actually share their ideas with Yahoo! this will be a more structured infrastructure … whether it will be an online platform or something else … it is too premature to disclose,” a company official told Business Standard.

Yahoo! already has a global initiative called Open Hack U, a platform for the student community to develop and build applications using Yahoo!’s open APIs (application programming interface), and Open Hack Day, an event where developers and techies meet up and build applications.

“Open Hack Day started as an internal event that brought Yahoo! developers together. Overtime, it has become a much-anticipated external event that is now held across Yahoo! offices around the globe. Most of the ideas that come from students turn out into small features like Photo Session, a service on Yahoo! which is now being used in the US,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategy officer, executive vice-president and head of Yahoo! Labs.

Over the last four years, Yahoo!’s Bangalore centre has yielded a 50 per cent average year-over-year increase in idea submissions for patent considerations, he added.