India will continue to be Yahoo's research and development (R&D) hub for catering to the global information technology market, a top company official said.
MUMBAI: India will continue to be Yahoo's research and development (R&D) hub for catering to the global information technology market, a top company official said.
"Our India operations namely Yahoo! India, has its R&D centre in Bangalore. It was set up for doing product innovations for not only India but also for the global market. This function of our R&D centre will continue and even grow in the future," Yahoo! Research Head Prabhakar Raghavan told here.
"India has the right atmosphere for catering to the global market by providing internet services, technological tools and marketing solutions for businesses, both in India and internationally. We have almost 1,500 employees in the Bangalore R&D centre itself, which is a huge number for any one centre. This shows the capability of the centre to be an international hub for IT related activities," Raghavan said.
The Yahoo! Research Head was here to attend a two-day summit on the IT sector called Infovision 2007.
On prospects of the convergence of mobile phone and internet application in India, Rahgavan said though India and China had many mobile devices, most of them were not data-rich phones, not fully digital.
"The challenge here is to create service and monetization models that would help serve the market in a better way. We have such programmes in the pipeline. The challenge is also to find a greater variety of services to appeal to a larger audience," he said.
Citing an example, Raghavan said: "India is a very challenging market with different tastes and a variety of languages. To deal with this problem, we have come out with portals in various Indian languages, the latest being in Kannada. Such innovations will be useful for larger market consolidation."
He also expressed confidence on growth in advertisements on internet search engines in India, which was still at a nascent stage.
"The US, Japan and Europe are way ahead. The Far East is also coming up. India has a distance to catch up, but eventually the massive purchasing power in India will ensure that this sector grows fast," Raghavan said.
"Multiple Indian languages along with declining costs of devices added with greater accessibility will result in more number of country-oriented advertisements being put up online," he added.
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