At the recent Comsnet 2009 conference in India, Sumant Vepa, a Business Product Manager for Yahoo, hinted that the company will be seriously looking into location-based services in India. It’s currently a big topic of discussion in Yahoo’s incubator for new products and service, suitably dubbed Yahoo Incubator.
Vepa had the following to say at the conference. From MediaNama:
Problems with LBS in India currently
“Data quality is an issue, because GIS information is not quite accurate in a dynamic environment. There’s a paucity of data that can be overlaid on top of what is already available. These are interesting applications that can be built upon it. For example, no one knows where Vertu Road is in Bangalore, but if you say it’s behind old-Madras road, that is contextual.
This contextual information needs to be sourced…crowd sourced. There are opportunities in news gathering, serendipitous deals, which are possible to monetize. Charging the consumers is not an option, these services have to be free for monetization. Are there ways of monetizing other than advertising. People who come up with such ideas are easy to plug into the Yahoo ecosystem, including mobile payments.”
On Indian LBS investments
“(T)hese will take a long time to develop. Right now what we’re doing is looking at business plans – there are lots of interesting services on offer, but monetization is an issue. Volumes are a problem right now, but we don’t think that will always be the case.”
It’s tough to say how long Yahoo’s plans to enter Indian LBS could take to pan out if it does indeed happen. India is a highly populated country where I’m sure we’ll see some big innovations and infrastructural development take place, especially in mobile, over the next few years. In fact, in the past year we’ve come across a couple of India-based startups that are already trying to latch onto mobile’s potential and take advantage of location. Yulop, based in Bangalore, uses cell tower triangulation to help people find points of interest and SatNav Technologies is busy crowdsourcing a POI database. NAVTEQ and Google have also made in-roads into mapping India in 2008, a potential problem for smaller Indian startups.
The potential is definitely there, but if Yahoo wants a piece of the Indian LBS piece, it better stop incubating and act. It’ll be a few years before we hear too much about LBS in India, but I’m sure it’s coming.
(Image Credit: Paul Chenoweth, Candle Tree, Kaushal Karkhanis)
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