Yahoo! aims to ramp up its India centre by hiring aggressively as it attempts to develop more products locally,both for the market in India and overseas. The company currently has around 2,000 employees in Bangalore,the largest centre outside its headquarters in Sunnyvale,California,and expects the staff strength to grow in double digit this year,said Shouvick Mukherjee,vice-president and CEO of Yahoo! India R&D. We are expecting to grow this centre and we are hiring as fast as we can to ramp up. We have pretty big hiring goals for this year, said Mukherjee,without revealing how many they would recruit. We want to make a strategic impact sitting here in India. The way we can make that is with innovation and execution of the products we are working on. In recent months,the India centre has created products such as Predictopus,an online game of predictions for the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup,besides launching India-specific initiatives which include a website providing content exclusively on education. While it has independently built around 20 products,the Bangalore centre's output in terms of intellectual property is increasing at a rate of 50%-60% every year,Mukherjee said. Currently,we are in a phase where a lot of the thought leadership and the direction in the product and technology is coming from this place, he said,adding that they were looking at launching multiple products developed in India on a global scale. Yahoo! is currently in an investment mode as part of the effort,over the past couple of years,to revamp and position itself as a digital media company,said N Kamalanand,associate director,business advisory services at Ernst & Young. They want to get into mobile based delivery and be a leader in emerging markets, said Kamalanand. So,their new roadmap in India will be on mobile platform and,secondly,content for this part of the geography will also be done from here. At least half of Yahoo! s estimated 650 million users are from the emerging markets,including India. Local language-based content,video content and cricket will be among the growth drivers in India while mobile phones would be the key challenge,said Ramkumar Narayanan,Vice President Global Product Management (Search and Marketplaces and Emerging Markets) at Yahoo! Inc.
