Yahoo launches India Maps, India Our City

Bangalore, Apr 25: Moving in to a new premises to accommodate itsexpanding operations, Yahoo India today announced the launch of two newproducts for the domestic market.

The products India Our City and India Maps have been extensively designed and developed locally.

Yahoo India Our city was a innovative next generation Web2.0 meshapplication. This was the direct outcome of the internal hack day eventorganised at Yahoo India Research and Development where the idea wasconceived and productised.

Our city, covering 20 cities across the country provided aninteresting, rich and dynamically updated perspective of a city as seenand experienced by people at large. The cities covered by Our Cityincluded Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai among Tier I cities and Bhubaneswar,Bhopal, Madurai, Chandigarh, Jaipur and many more that did not have anynoteworthy city portals.

Yahoo India Maps covered 170 cities, 4785 towns and 220 villages across the country.

Yahoo India managing Director George Zacharias said the twoproducts were examples of the innovations carried out by Yahoo toenhance the end user experience.

Yahoo Cofounder David Filo acknowledging the contribution made bythe India Development Centre for Yahoo globally said that the team inBangalore ranked on the top of the table compared to other centres intechnological development. Nearly 20 per cent of the engineering inputsfor Yahoo came from here, he said. Keeping in tune with the growth, theCentre, currently having nearly 1000 developers would now beenaccomodated into a new facility covering an area of 220,000 sq ft toaccomodate 1600 staff, he said.

He said the Bangalore centre would also be catering to therequirements of Yahoo's penetration in other emerging markets both inAsia and elsewhere.

Mr Zacharias said that Yahoo India's internet portal tripled itsrevenue last year. However, he did not give out the numbers. He saidthat the Internet penetration is growing significantly in the country.Referring to advertisement revenue, he said that the Indianadvertisement market was around three billion dollars and was growingby 20 per cent annually. The online market which was around 600 dollarswas expected to grow by 50 per cent and Yahoo aimed to get asignificant percentage of it.

UNI