Yahoo launches Indian-language portals
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(InfoWorld) - YahooÂ has introduced portals in India in seven local languages, to cater to the hundreds of millions of Indians expected to come online in the next few years. With its English language portal in India, Yahoo can only address up to about 30 million users who are comfortable with English, George Zacharias, managing director of Yahoo India told reporters Thursday in Bangalore. About 85 percent of Indiaâs approximately 30 million online users now use at least one of Yahooâs services, according to Zacharias. Yahoo expects that the number of Indian Internet users will increase to 300 million to 400 million people over the next five years if there are applications in the local languages, and Internet access is improved. Indiaâs mobile phone users are also emerging as important Internet users, Zacharias said. Yahoo has introduced plug-in modules to its instant messenger, which allows users to chat in nine different regional languages and scripts. In the next quarter, the company is also introducing Indian languages versions of its e-mail service. "One of the first applications that a person looks for online is e-mail,â Zacharias said. Yahoo also plans to eventually add discussion groups, blogs, bulletin boards and other services to its Indian languages portals. The news and other content on these portals will be tailored to the requirements of various linguistic groups. A number of Internet companies are targeting Indiaâs online users with very specific products and services. The revenue opportunity from advertising is however not yet very large. Online advertising in India was about $50 million last year, as compared to close to $1 billion for television, but it is growing very fast, Zacharias said. The Indian language portals will be particularly attractive in second-tier cities where users are more comfortable using the local language, even if they know English. These are also cities with a growing middle class with significant disposable incomes, Zacharias said. A lot of advertisers would like to reach this audience, he added.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. will soon start to fulfill a promise it made to users several months ago to tie its new Web mail service with its instant messaging application. Starting Monday and continuing over the coming months, Yahoo will activate this feature for users of the new version of Yahoo Mail, which is in beta, or test, phase but available to all users of the service. Yahoo officials demonstrated the integration of the Yahoo Mail beta with Yahoo Messenger in November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The audience reacted enthusiastically to the plan. The new feature alerts Yahoo Mail beta users if their contacts are logged on to Yahoo Messenger and gives them the option of starting a text chat session from within the mail interface. If the user is composing an e-mail message but wants to chat instead, Yahoo Mail can grab the text and paste it into the text chat window. Likewise, the chat session can be automatically imported to an e-mail message form. This integration with Yahoo Messenger is the first of several tie-ups the company plans to implement in the ( Yahoo Mail beta ), because it wants the service to offer multiple communication options to its users, said John Kremer, Yahoo Mail's vice president. Although he declined to confirm future plans, he acknowledged it would make sense to let Yahoo Mail users launch voice conversations and to create links to the company's social networking service, Yahoo 360. Another likely development would be to extend Yahoo Messenger's interoperability with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live Messenger into the Yahoo Mail beta, he said. The beta version, a free service, offers a number of improvements over the current version, including a more agile interface based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that works like a desktop application. The beta was introduced in September 2005. Unlike typical Web mail services, it lets users drag and drop messages into folders, provides a pane to preview messages' content and offers the ability to have multiple message windows open.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo (Quote, Chart) expanded its search empire to the mobile arena with the launch of some additional services. The company was one of the original content providers for mobile devices running
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Internet media company Yahoo Inc.  on Wednesday launched its Web search service aimed at mobile phone users in the United States, opening a new front in its rivalry with Internet search leader Google Inc.
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Internet giant Yahoo unveiled a global project aimed at tapping into the vast market of Filipino overseas workers.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo plans to significantly expand the number of people with access to its next-generation Web mail service, which has been in test, or beta, mode for about one year. Until now, theÂ new Web mail serviceÂ has been available to a limited number of people in the U.S. and to all users in the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Canada, and South Korea. But starting Thursday, Yahoo will roll it out to all users in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Italy, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, and Taiwan. It will take about two weeks for Yahoo to complete this deployment, Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon said. Yahoo plans to remove the beta tag from the new service "in the coming months," she said. This new version is theÂ largest overhaulÂ of Yahoo's Web mail service since its introduction in 1997. Unlike the current version, it works like a desktop application, eliminating the delays found on many other Web-based applications. Among its features are the ability to drag and drop messages into folders, a pane to preview the content of messages, the ability to have multiple message windows open and keyboard shortcuts to, for example, delete or create messages. It also has an integrated RSS reader. The service's calendar tool can now present maps to appointments. This new version extends the traditional Web mail concept from a simple mailbox to a broader central information repository that not only handles e-mail messages, but integrates RSS management, calendaring and instant messaging, and this makes it a significant upgrade, said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst. Competition in the once languid Web mail market heated up in April 2004 when Google launched its Gmail service. Since then, Web mail providers such as Yahoo, Microsoft, andÂ AOL have been busy retooling their services, dramatically increasing storage capacity, sharpening spam, and e-mail filters and giving user interfaces extreme makeovers. Much is at stake in the Web mail wars, because the level of attachment users form with their e-mail accounts is much higher than with other online services. A strong Web mail service serves as a user-magnet for portals with other online services. Web mail services have also proved effective for advertising.
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Microsoft has tailored its Windows XP Starter Edition for the Indian market, giving it a Hindi interface, as well as help and training resources in that language.
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Adobe and Yahoo are launching a new Internet toolbar that will provide users with access to Yahoo products -- including Anti-Spy, Pop-Up Blocker and Yahoo Search -- as well as Adobe products, such as Create Adobe PDF Online.
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Company says e-mail, calendar and instant messaging will be offered, along with Web search services on future Web portal applications.
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Yahoo has acquired a stake in Indian Internet advertising company Tyroo MediaÂ to help it capture more of the country's fast-growing online ad market.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo apologized on Thursday after recipes from the blog of an Indian housewife were used without permission on Yahoo India's new Malayalam-language Web portal. The reproduction of the recipes, which were taken from a blog in Malayalam run by a housewife in Kerala, in Southern India, sparked an online protest among bloggers. A Yahoo spokeswoman said the reproduction of the content was inadvertent and blamed the incident on a company it hired to develop content for its Web site, Webdunia.com (India). Yahoo asked the content provider to remove the recipes when it learned of the incident and Webdunia has been in contact with the woman to apologize, the spokeswoman said. Bloggers, however, were also demanding an apology from Yahoo. The company planned to post a statement on its Malayalam Web site later Thursday, the spokeswoman said, which reads, in part: "Yahoo respects the blogging community and the etiquette followed by bloggers. We regret any inconvenience caused by the inadvertent posting of the recipe without attribution." The content is provided to Yahoo with the understanding that Webdunia holds all necessary rights to its use, the company said. The blogger was not immediately available for comment. Her blog now features a graphic urging "stop plagiarism" As Internet use picks up in India, the number of news and entertainment portals has increased, but many have had difficult getting quality content in local languages. Yahoo introduced portals in several local Indian languages in February, including the Malayalam site. Malayam is spoken predominantly in the state of Kerala.
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Yahoo Inc. plans a new integrated  marketing campaign in U.S. and overseas markets that includes  television, radio, cinema and online advertising, the Internet  media company said on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge. Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways. An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said. Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources. "Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night. While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site. The initial response from observers has been enthusiastic. "Yahoo's new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the Internet," Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media Inc., wrote on his blog . "While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the Web into a programmable environment for everyone." The Pipes Web site, available throughout this morning, was nonetheless down at press time, displaying the message: "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
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AOL has added two languages for its India portal and localized its video search site for another eight countries.
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Yahoo, Inc., world-class leader in online search queries, announced its plans to reveal desktop search feature in January, which will go through testing in the designated month.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo will upgrade its free software suite for mobile phones, improving such capabilities as search, mapping, e-mail, and photo management, theÂ company announced on Tuesday. Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, which has been in test mode since its introduction in the U.S. in January, will shed its test tag on Friday. That day, Yahoo will also launch beta versions of the suite in 13 other countries. Those versions will be "localized," meaning their user interface will be in the countries' local languages and that other default data will reflect local settings for things like weather and time. In related news, Yahoo plans to announce on Wednesday at the CommunicAsia conference in Singapore that six mobile operators in the Asia-Pacific region have agreed to make its oneSearch the exclusive search engine of their mobile Web portals. The deal gives Yahoo access to a combined universe of almost 100 million mobile subscribers in those markets. The operators are Globe Telecom in the Philippines, Idea Cellular in India, LG Telecom in Korea, Maxis Communications Berhad in Malaysia, PT Telekomunikasi Selular "Telkomsel" in Indonesia, and Taiwan Mobile. Yahoo, like other major Internet players, is busy porting its software and online services for mobile devices, which are fast becoming the preferred Internet access vehicle for millions of people around the world thanks to improvements in mobile bandwidth and hardware. In the U.S. and the other 13 countries, the Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 suite, which is free to download, will be available for more than 200 different mobile phones by the end of July and for more than 400 by the end of the year, according to Yahoo. It will also be preloaded on some new devices from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, Research In Motion, and High Tech ComputerÂ that will ship later this year, saving those handset owners from downloading the software. The new version of Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 operates faster than its predecessor with lower page loading times, including in its Flickr photo management service. Its Yahoo Mail capabilities have been expanded as well. Previously, it could open plain text and image attachments, but the new version adds the ability to open Adobe's PDF files and Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. Also new is the ability to access Yahoo Mail folders. The Yahoo Maps/Local service now shows satellite image maps, as well as so-called hybrid maps, which combine the satellite images with the traditional cartographic representations. Also new is the display of real-time traffic conditions on the maps and better overall performance for the service. It also provides GPS services on some devices. The suite's new version also makes it easier for users to search contacts in their Yahoo Address Book and initiate calls or get driving directions from that interface. Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 also has the oneSearch service and mobile versions of other Yahoo services like Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Weather. The 13 countries getting beta versions of the suite are Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, the U.K., Thailand, and Vietnam. These beta versions will have "much of the functionality" available to U.S. users, according to Yahoo. More information about the Yahoo Go suite can be found on this Web site.
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A new Yahoo service called Pipes will let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups."