Yahoo’s David Filo On India, Mobile Phones and Emerging Markets
By kamla bhatt • Feb 14th, 2009Category: Bangalore, Business & Tech, Entertainment, Featured, Ideas, India, Internet & Telecom, San Francisco/Silicon Valley
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Yahoo’s Hackday India is currently underway at the Taj Residency in Bangalore, India. There are two types of folks attending the events: the hackers and the info geeks, who are not particiapants but are there to attend the various technology seminars.
There are 303 hackers and about 60 infogeeks participating at this 2-day hackday India event. An interesting trend this year is an increase in the number of women participating in the event.
The winners of hackday India will be announced tomorrow, February 15, 2009 by David Filo, who is currently in Bangalore.
David was also present during Yahoo’s first hackday in Bangalore, India in 2007. He spent most of his time hanging around with the hackers and coders talking to them and observing what the various teams were building. Many of the developers were pleasantly surprised to discover how accessible David was during the event.
I caught up with David to talk about the early days of Yahoo!, coding, Bangalore, mobile phones and emerging markets.
In this episode David talks about their plans for India and the emerging markets. India is the hub for developing new applications and features for emerging markets like Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Philippines.
David also talks about Yahoo’s mobile strategy in India. Besides business, we also talk about David’s favorite Indian dish and what kind of Indian music he prefers to listen. What about Bollywood films? Does he like watching them? Tune in to find out what David has to say.
Here are the links just in case you missed out listening to Part-1 and Part-2 of the interview with David Filo.
This interview was recorded in Bangalore in October 2007 during Yahoo’s first hackday in India.
Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of an Internet Radio show where listeners can find stories about the new and emerging India and the global Indian community. As a pioneer of 'internet radio' format in India Kamla started her first show News about India, followed by TalkNewsIndia in 2005. In 2006 she premiered her new show: The Kamla Bhatt Show: Life, People and Ideas. 
[...] This past year I have been in and out of India about three times for varying lengths of time. These trips helped me understand the broad trends and themes that I spotted in various meetings with CEOs, VCs and decision makers. What struck me in these various conversation are the consistent themes. These observations led me to infer that there might be a huge rebranding exercise underway and the message is: India is a hub for Research and Development for various IT and pharma companies. I have captured how India is emerging as an R&D hub in various interviews like for instance Microsoft’s Kentaro Toyama, Yahoo’s David Filo, John Chambers of Cisco and many others. I have an interview with Kiran Karnik head of NASSCOM where I explore this topic with him. The interview with Kiran should be up in the next couple of days. [...]
[...] On a visit to Bangalore, David Filo co-founder of Yahoo said: “We are really looking at India to develop centres of excellence around products and services for markets like Vietnam, Philippines etc.†Of course, Filo also mentions that India was a big market for Yahoo! specially in the mobile area. [...]
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[...] can listen to a longer version Part-2 and Part-3 of the interview with David. Tagged as: David Filo, Early days of Yahoo!, Internet, Silicon [...]
[...] case you missed, you might want to check out Part-1 and Part-3 of the interview with David [...]
[...] case you missed, you might want to check out Part-1 and Part-3 of the interview with David [...]