Yahoo bets big on India; working on tie-ups

BANGALORE, INDIA: Internet major Yahoo, which has been undergoing a tough time, is now planning to expand its operations in India. Without giving details of the plan, a company executive today said that the portal is working on some partnerships at the local level to provide search content.

Speaking to CIOL on the sidelines of NASSCOM BPO Strategy Summit 2010 here today, Jeff Russakow, executive vice president, Customer Advocacy, Yahoo said that the latest tie-ups the company has entered into would help it further strengthen its position in the market.

Earlier this week, Yahoo announced that it has expanded its one-year old partnership with Facebook, and that it would introduce features that would give its users even more access to updates from the social networking site.

Also it refreshed Yahoo! Profiles, which was launched in October 2008. The service allows people to manage their identity and activities across Yahoo! from a central location.

After refreshing it, to enhance the user experience and to make its privacy settings easier to use, Yahoo also renamed Yahoo! Profiles to Yahoo! Pulse.

“Our aim is to give our users maximum facilities at one spot. We have tie-ups with companies like Facebook, Twitter and many more,” Russakow said.

Globally Yahoo has over 600 million users and an annual revenue of $7 billion, he added.

Russakow said that the company has hiring plans in India but would not disclose details as he is not authorized to.

Speaking about the opportunities of BPOs on digital space, Russakow said that there was a bright future for BPOs in the space in terms of processing user generated content and focusing on third party software implementation space.