(26 April 2007 9:00 pm)

BANGALORE: The US had Maps in the US in the Flash version, now the Indian edition with superior feature in Ajax was launched by Yahoo in Bangalore today, along with a totally new product conceived and launched in India first – Yahoo! India Our City beta, a Web 2.0 application, which currently features data of twenty cities in India, with a lot more to follow shortly.

Yahoo plan to provide a ‘rich and dynamically updated perspective of a city as seen and experienced by people at large’. Users could browse OU City to explore photos, videos, events, news, weather, blogs etc. besides sharing information, and there’s a regional language version too. This product aggregates both editorial and user generated content.

Yahoo! India Maps is an offering akin to the one in the US and provides street level search functionality along with street map, satellite map and additional features of hybrid maps. 170 cities, 4785 towns and over 220,000 villages have reportedly been covered by Yahoo!, with the map data having been provided by CE Info Systems. Some of the features include finding a place using it’s old names or the most popular one if there are multiple places with the same name.

Besides the above Yahoo! Co- founder David Filo also announced major restructuring in the Yahoo for the Research & Development Center in Bangalore. As part of the global reorganization at Yahoo!, the International group has been structured into 3 regions – Asia, Europe & Emerging Markets. Yahoo! sees India and Emerging Markets as the next big opportunity. A release says that the India team is well-positioned to leverage this opportunity as they enjoy the advantages of the location in relation to time zones (Bangalore); critical mass of talent accumulated over the years; ability to produce end to end products; and the fact that India is one of Yahoo!’s top priorities.

While speaking with Indiantelevision.com’s Tarachand Wanvari on the sideline of the press conference, Filo revealed Yahoo! initiatives in the mobile space. ”Mobile in general is one of the areas as a company we are very focused on. Though, first we are focused on building a lot of PC applications, mobile is very important to us. We have Yahoo! Go and we have recently launched ‘One Search’ which is search on mobile devices. In general we have a very a very strong market share in mobile applications, both in the US and in other markets including India and we continue doing whatever is necessary.” Added Filo” Today we are focusing around the ‘Yahoo! Go’ effort and every aspect of that, everything like search to things like flickr, to news, to sports, to finance, to applications like email and messaging. Those are all the areas we’re focused on today. We certainly are looking further on at things like video and TV but that depends on networks having bandwidth and capacity. We are exploring that space”

Filo also revealed that Yahoo was working on IPTV and how Yahoo! would aggregate content. “One of the things that we have done over the years, is that we’ve built a lot of relationships across the board, whether it’s movie studios, music labels or television networks, we pretty much have relationships with all of them and that’s something that we’ve built over all these years through our music property, through television. We are one the biggest today, we stream more video than anyone else and it’s all legal. People like U-tube and stuff that are using user generated stuff, a lot of which is illegal, but you look at all our relationships, all our content – it’s all legal that we’ve agreements with the studios. We can leverage all those relationships, and when we start IPTV which we’ve been working on, we can get the content legally, share revenue with them.”

Filo said that Japan and Korea were the only two countries where Yahoo was really experimenting with IPTV since both these countries had had high speed internet access for the consumer, the technology was still in the nascent stage even in the US.