Company has plans to make India a product hub
Global search engine player Yahoo said it would like to focus on Pune to build a sound ecosystem and leverage its platforms to start-ups and entrepreneurs and that it will soon launch a centre of excellence in Bangalore.
The Internet giant said it will look at Pune to primarily stress on Internet and technology based entrepreneurial ventures to make available to them, mentor-ship opportunities apart from a series of platforms for building applications.
The company already has an up-and-running Bangalore-based research and development (R&D) centre since ten-odd years and it said it will soon launch a new centre of excellence at the same location to focus on cutting edge areas to develop and evolve research on cloud and to build content for personalisation.
A small team flew down to meet up with some city-based entrepreneurs to explore opportunities and to also meet with educational institutes to collaborate with them for letting them use Yahoo’s clouds and considering partnering with them.
Yahoo India research and development already has an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB), to provide access to a cluster of servers running Yahoo’s open source Hadoop software, and web data.
At present, Yahoo! India has a partnership with publishing house Dainik Jagran for offering content in Hindi and the team came to the city also to explore partnerships for content in Marathi. Yahoo said it wants to work on offering content in more regional languages.
“We want to make India a product hub and shape our India growth story that way. We want to concentrate on building an ecosystem. Our focus will also be on content in regional and local languages. We currently host content in two languages (Hindi and English) and we will expand to six by end of 2011.
Yahoo is concentrating our product around answers and not links-- relevance and simplicity being our India strategy,” Shouvick Mukherjee, vice president and chief executive officer, Yahoo! India R&D told Business Standard.
To further stress on the spotlight the company wants on the city, this year onwards Yahoo has decided to bring its quarterly event--Big Thinkers Series to Pune. Started in 2007, the Yahoo!
Big Thinkers India Series is a well-established quarterly lecture on topics ranging from science, technology and the Internet.
Pune will host one lecture out of the series on April 08, 2011 where Yoelle Maarek, senior director of Yahoo! Research, Israel will speak on ‘Web Retrieval: the surprising role of users’.
