Yahoo launched its India Our City application on Wednesday to provide highly localised content from 20 cities across the country. Yahoo also launched its India Maps application that provides street, satellite and a mixture of street and satellite maps for over 170 cities, 4,785 towns and a score of villages across India.

On Thursday, America Online or AOL, a Time Warner company, announced the launch of its India portal, including a new e-mail service. It was AOL’s first portal launch outside the North America and Europe. Both Yahoo and AOL are showcasing technologies and applications being associated with Web 2.0 on their services — including social networking, picture sharing and superior video content and both companies foresee a big Internet market in India. “Yahoo sees India and emerging markets like Vietnam, the Philippines as the next big opportunity. The India team is well positioned to leverage this opportunity,” said Yahoo co-founder David Filo.

With penetration of personal computers increasing, Yahoo’s primary focus in the Indian market is Internet over computers. Internet access over mobile phones is currently the focus in the US market and technology for mobile television and videos are also being worked on, Filo said. “We have innovated to enhance the end user experience and the new applications are an example of this. The emergence of Web 2.0 and user generated content offer users a unique local offering,” Yahoo India MD George Zacharias said.

The Internet is seeing a 40 per cent increase in users every year in India and with more computers online and more people accessing the Net on mobile phones, advertising revenues are growing at almost 50 per cent per year, the Yahoo official said. “AOL has built one of the largest online communities, now we want to extend that to India,” AOL president and COO Ron Grant said.

AOL sees an Indian market of 45 million users at present and growing in double digits.