Yahoo!, the global internet company, is focused on making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining by creating personalised experiences for its users.
The US-headquartered (Sunnyvale, California) company recently revamped its online photo management and sharing application Flickr, which has more than 80 million users and eight billion images, with more than 3.5 million photos uploaded daily.
The company, which has also revamped its e-mail, will continue to invest in and re-imagine other products, says Hari Vasudev, Vice-President – Connections Group (connecting 700 million users through products such as search, communications, mail, messenger, Flickr and Answers).
India is an important market for the company, Vasudev adds. Now, the number of ideas submitted from India for the global major’s patent portfolio is rising. Excerpts from an interview:
Yahoo! has been losing market share in India and other markets. How do you intend to bounce back?
E-mail is important to us. We recently revamped Yahoo! Mail for Web, Android and iOS (operating system), and Yahoo! Mail in India still has a high reach. Globally, it has about 105 million users using it on a daily basis, 30 billion e-mail messages every day. The homepage is important to us, while we will continue to focus on news, finance, sport, media sites, search and user-generated content such as Flickr, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Groups. With these products, we want to be part of the daily habits of our users.
How have the users taken to the revamped mail?
It’s early to say how the user addition is happening, because we had launched it at the end of last year. We need at least one quarter to gauge the impact.
What was the need for revamping Flickr? When is the Flickr launch for Windows 8 slated?
We had lots of ideas that we wanted to bring in, but still keeping the photos at the centre of the experience. The devices are becoming more and more powerful, and we wanted to revamp to keep up with that. In India, we have about 2.4 million Flickr users and the response has been fantastic. On the launch, we are working on it.
Yahoo! Messenger has announced plans to shut down the public chat rooms…
We are adapting to changing user patterns, but we are committed to Messenger. We continue to invest in product features, where should we really invest, and we will also look at de-emphasising. That’s part of the natural lifecycle and evolution of the product.
Are there any other revamps in the immediate pipeline?
You will see a focus on user-generated content-based products, and Flickr is one example.
Answers is another, Groups is another. We will continue to invest in and re-imagine. We want to inspire and entertain people.
Search is one of your biggest revenue earners. How is search changing in India?
Yahoo!’s stance is that search hasn’t changed. We believe that the majority of innovations on search are going to happen on user experience.
There is a shift towards offering richer search experiences, having all answers and not links.
I don’t think the Indian search market is very different from the global market.
Mobile as a platform has emerged. What are your plans?
Mobile is definitely a key priority and key investment area for us, while we will continue to innovate on desktops as well. In many countries, mobile is the primary channel of access for first-time Internet users.
Also, what we are seeing is a shift of usage from desktop to mobiles.
All the four screens – desktop-laptop, tablet, phone and television – are growing. Our emphasis is to build products for these screens.
Has the slowdown affected Yahoo! India? Are you still recruiting?
We have about 2,000 people. We continue to recruit in India, which is the second largest centre for Yahoo! No, there is no slowdown for us, we continue to grow.
What is India’s contribution to Yahoo!’s patent portfolio?
The number of ideas submitted from India for intellectual property has been growing at about 40 per cent year-over-year for the last three years. The India centre is playing its part. We can’t give separate figures, as we think of ourselves as Yahoo! and not Yahoo! India.