PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Global Reach
The R&D center opened in Bangalore in 2003, with Panchapakesan as CEO, to develop new
technologies and global product platforms for Yahoo!. Today the center employs more than
1,000 engineers, programmers and other employees in four basic groups:
• product engineering (global platforms and applications;
• technology research (high-value technologies that improve or change user behavior);
• market innovation (value propositions for technologies in user and business analysis); and
• content and end-user management services (engineering and business services).
Several factors have brought India front and center in Yahoo!’s global strategic planning in recent
years. India has evolved into Yahoo!’s base for development of products and services for
emerging markets. Over 2006–07 it rolled out successful search and portal features, developed
from inception in India and geared primarily toward mobile phone users. Some examples:
• screen reader software to make Yahoo! Mail accessible for visually impaired readers,
given the prevalence of untreated cataracts and glaucoma in rural areas;
• seven local Indian language portals (including Hindi, and a tie-in with Hindi publishers
Jagran Group for news and current affairs content) which will add significant numbers
of new Yahoo! users to the current 30 million now accessing the English-language site;
• Yahoo! India Our City user-generated “mashup” portals providing views of 20 Indian
cities from the perspective of locals, including news, weather, photos, event listings,
blogs, and other shared information;
• Yahoo! India Maps, offering online street and satellite maps of 170 cities, 4,800 towns,
and 220,000 rural villages across India, in partnership with CE Infosystems; and
• Yahoo! Avatars personalized animated representations of users for virtual social
networking.
In April 2007, Yahoo! opened an expanded, 220,000-square foot, five-story R&D center in
Bangalore, with capacity for a workforce of 1,600. In March 2008, it launched Yahoo! Labs
Bangalore, a center of excellence and advanced research facility whose mission is to globally
recruit an initial team of 100 scientists and engineers to work on next-generation search and
multimedia retrieval technologies. The sixth such lab for Yahoo! worldwide, and the first in
Asia, is under the corporate direction of Yahoo! senior vice president and head of research Dr.
Prabhakar Raghavan, an IIT-Chennai graduate who received his PhD in computer science from
UC Berkeley and is a consulting professor at Stanford.
Shortly after the Yahoo! Labs announcement, the company unveiled a new collaboration with
the Tata Group’s Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to do advanced research on cloud
computing. CRL’s EKA supercomputer, the world’s fourth fastest, is the only such computer
that is privately owned and available for commercial use.
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