Yahoo! focuses on innovation, mobile app space for growth

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Hyderabad: With the growing smartphone user fraternity in India, tech giants are banking heavily on this user base to tap the mobile app space.
As part of its mobile-first strategy, Yahoo! has introduced a set of mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Cricket, Weather and News that Hari Vasudeva, head, Yahoo! India, R&D, claims has won the company about 65 per cent of India’s mobile users.
According to IAMAI, India has about 87.1 million mobile Internet users and this is expected to touch 165 million by March 2015. “Yahoo!’s plans to focus on mobile apps and innovation. Given that India is seeing a rapid rise in smartphones, our focus on mobile apps development will help us better customer engagement and localise products,” Vasudeva told this correspondent. 
In this direction, Yahoo! held Hack, a 24-hour contest for mobile app developers based on the theme ‘Mobile and Personalisation’, in Hyderabad.
“We have shortlisted about 250 developers from 1,000 applications. Some apps may be incorporated into Yahoo!’s system or some developers may even be hired,” Vasudeva revealed.  The tech major is going to hold another Hack in Bengaluru this year. 
Meanwhile, Yahoo! has recently revamped its search engine in the United States by incorporating direct displays and adding new features to make it user-friendly. “This will be rolled out in a phased manner in India and other countries,” he said.
Given that Yahoo! has acquired about 11 firms including its $1.1 billion deal with microblogging site Tumblr, it is looking for acquisitions that will help the firms grow its presence in mobile technologies.
For Yahoo!, more than half of Tumblr’s visitors use its mobile apps and hence, it expects the acquisition of Tumblr to expand its audience by over 50 per cent to a billion monthly users and to grow traffic by nearly  20 per cent.  
This apart, Tumblr, which is very popular with younger demographics, those in the 18-34 age bracket, gives Yahoo! access to a customer base significantly younger.
Yahoo! has also upgraded its photo-sharing network Flickr and expanding the storage space to one Terabyte. Flickr has about 2.5 million users in India of the 80 million globally.
These changes have been made following Marissa Mayer’s takeover as the CEO of Yahoo! in July last year. Ms Mayer is said to have been pushing for focus on mobile and user personalisation.