Hari Vasudev, Vice-President, Connections, Yahoo! Inc is responsible to lead this newly-formed group out of Bangalore.
The group focuses on connecting the company’s 700 million customers to each other and to the content they love through products such as search, communications and social properties such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, and Answers.
Yahoo! is now gearing up to handle the mobile revolution. “There will certainly be an enhanced focus on mobile. Thus there will be applications particularly made for the mobile first before it is adapted for the desktop,” he told
Various researches say that by 2018-20 the mobile will be the primary device for people to access the Internet. How is Yahoo! geared up to handle the mobile revolution?
Mobile is the key area of focus for Yahoo! We are hiring the best and the brightest people to build mobile applications. Recently, we have also acquired companies like OnTheAir, Snip.it and Stamped. We have products to cater to people’s daily needs. This includes Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr Apps, Yahoo! Homepage and Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! India OMG. Yahoo! is well positioned to take advantage as these applications can be used on mobiles and are compatible with both desktops and mobiles.
Could you give an example?
Last year, we introduced Yahoo! Mail on 4 screens - Desktop, Android, iOS and Windows 8.
Does all this mean that you are moving from desktop to mobile?
There will be certainly an enhanced focus on mobile and thus there will be apps particularly made for the mobile first before it is adapted for the desktop – example Flickr, local searches (restaurants and cinemas). At the same time, the applications will again be on a case-to-case basis. If an application was to be intrinsic to a desktop then the focus will be more towards it.
How has R&D centre in Bangalore helped Yahoo! globally?
The India centre, which is the second largest R&D centre outside US, is strategic to Yahoo! globally. Idea submissions for patent review at the centre have seen an average rise of 40 per cent in the last three years. We are looking for domain experts in our focus area and hire the top one per cent to build a team consisting of engineers, architects, product managers and scientists. They get an opportunity to work on innovation, alongside some of the best minds in the industry.
Could you give some instances?
The team in Bangalore worked on email spam detection. Every month, we block 600 billion spam messages. Last quarter, we have reduced spam by an additional 18 per cent. Preventing spam is very important to us. The team also worked in preventing abusive registration and spam in the new Y! Mail. Re-imagines Yahoo! Multimedia Search developed here was heralded as the best visual search experience in the world. The Getty Images site was also conceived and executed from Yahoo! India R&D. Yahoo! Cricket site was also completely developed in India.
But, your competitors are growing fast in the areas that you have mentioned!
Some of our products are quite popular among users. These include Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Answers. For instance, Yahoo! Answers is the fifth largest social network on the Internet in the world. It has 250 million users worldwide compared to 165-175 million users of LinkedIn.
How has been the momentum at Yahoo! since Marissa Ann Mayer took over as CEO in July last?
She has done a lot for employees. There has been a major initiative every other week. These efforts have been executed with incredible speed and have already achieved tremendous transformation within the company.
But, her smartphone programme for the 17,000-plus global employees has attracted global attention, isn’t it?
Absolutely, she feels that the smartphone it is an essential tool for employees. The idea is that employees have to make applications, including those developed by Yahoo!, for mobile phones so they should make it a daily habit. By using the applications themselves, the employees step into the shoes of the consumer and will be able to understand consumers’ expectations and dilemmas. Each employee helps form the insights and understanding that they need to see innovative opportunities for our products. We will collect feedback from the employees and the information collected and collated could be put to crucial use.
Who decides on the choice of the device?
Each employee can decide on the choice of the phone, which can be an Android, iOS and Windows 8-based device. Employees are free to apply for any smartphone from the centralised portal irrespective of one’s position in the company.