Yahoo! bullish on India growth

Yahoo! is going big to tap opportunities in the Indian market. As a part of its global reorganisation plan, the Sunnyvale (US)-headquartered company has termed India as the 'next big opportunity' and put it in the list of its top emerging market.

The company has also reshuffled its top level management by promoting Yahoo! India CEO Venkat Panchapakesan as the executive vice president responsible for audience group engineering for Yahoo! globally. At the same time, the company has announced former corporate vice president, product operations and general manager for India of Symantec, Sharad Sharma, as the CEO of Yahoo! India Research & Development. Besides, Jawahar Malhotra, who was earlier working as the senior director of the Yahoo! Technology Group in the US, as the chief technology officer for Yahoo!India R&D.

The company has announced that the India R&D centre to be the centre of excellence for the product engineering works of the company for 'emerging markets'. In line of its strategy to expand the R&D works in Bangalore, the company has announced the opening of a new R&D centre in Bangalore.

"The Bangalore Development Centre continues to grow rapidly and has crossed 1,000 mark in headcount. I am confident that the team will provide technology leadership, innovation and proficiency in handling the engineering operations for the emerging markets group," said David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!

To tap the opportunities in the Indian market, Yahoo! India has launched Yahoo! India Our City, which at present profiles 20 Indian cities. The new portal provides editorial and user generated content including news, photos and maps of each individual cities in English as well as local languages. Using the portal, users would be able to find photos, videos,maps, podcasts, event information, blogs of each of these 20 cities, which will be gradually increased, said George Zacharias, managing director, Yahoo! India.

The company has also launched Yahoo! India Maps, a portal that provides street level search functionality along with street map and satellite map. Detailed search like street name, locality, city, districts and important services like hospitals, ATMs, chemists and petrol pumps could be located using this.

Zacharias said that the company targets the $60 million online advertisement market in India, with the launch of both these products. It is estimated that India has roughly about 25 million unique Internet users every month.