Yahoo co-founder sees the future in India and mobiles Aug 12, 2006
BANGALORE: Computers made Yahoo an internet giant. Now the company wants to take the next step with mobile phones and India is at the centre of this big move - both as a market and a talent base. David Filo, the co-founder of Yahoo, told DNA in an interview, "In the last 10 to 12 years, we got pretty good at building applications for browsers and PCs and obviously in a market like this (India) and just in general across the world, people are moving to mobile, PDAs, and set top boxes." Filo was in Bangalore, where Yahoo has a team of 700 researchers working to optimise search and find new ways of communicating on the internet and on mobile devices. "Mobile is definitely a very interesting area for us and we have to figure out how to take all the applications, services we have been providing over the last many years and convert these into applications for mobile devices. Also come out with new applications that didn't really make sense in the PC world," said Filo, who started Yahoo with co-founder Jeff Yang in 1995, when he was a student at Stanford University. India has a mobile subscriber base of 111 million, next only to China, and Yahoo is betting on both markets for growth in the new segment. "Yahoo looks around the world and Asia is a key place for growth in the next 10-15 years and India is obviously at the heart of that chart," Filo said. The challenge before the company now is to make staff that built web applications and browsers for computers shift to the smaller screen of mobile phones. "It (mobile) is changing the way some of these people are thinking and we continue to hire people all the time and lot of those who are coming into the company are thinking mobile from day one. So that helps a lot," Filo said. The 39-year-old has another big challenge ahead of him: to focus on the money-spinning 'search-engine market' in which rival Google is the leader, and to attempt to take web search a step further, but giving it the 'human touch'. By which he means, search with social context, relevant to the individual and his community. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1046971 Vikas Kapoor, MSN ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype ID: dl_vikas Mobile: (+91) 9891098137. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
