India is among top priorities of Yahoo!

India is one of Yahoo!'s top priorities, according to co-founder Mr David Filo, who visited the firm's India development centre on Wednesday.

Commending the leadership, innovation and proficiency of the engineers employed in India, who number a thousand, Mr Filo said that India would now be the hub for developing products for markets such as Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Our City

Launching Our City (in.ourcity.yahoo.com), a site that provides city information such as weather, photos, videos, maps and news, Mr Filo said that it was an example of the talent in the country.

"If Our City is successful in India, we will take it to the world," he added.

Our City started as an idea submitted by an employee during the Hack Day event held by the company last year. It is now a full-fledged online tool for tourists and travellers. It aggregates both editorial and user generated content and offers a dynamically updated view of Indian cities to visitors.

Launches Maps

Yahoo! India also launched Maps, developed in association with CE Infosystems, the company behind India's first map portal mapmyindia.com (in 2004).

This is an AJAX version of the product offered to US netizens. It covers 170 cities, 4,785 towns and 2.2 lakh villages across the sub-continent. It includes features developed in the Bangalore centre such as geocoding, annotations and panning, that could be adapted to the global version, said Mr Venkat Panchapakesan, Head (Audience Group Engineering).

Management revamp

The company has also announced the restructuring of its management, with the appointment of Mr Sharad Sharma as CEO of Yahoo! India R&D.

A new facility that seats 1,600 will be inaugurated by Mr Filo on Thursday.

Mr Filo said that the rollout of the firm's new search marketing model will happen in India in the third quarter of the year