Yahoo! steps up the pace in India, Google offers local search via SMS
Rating: Vindaloo
After Google forged an exclusive tie-up with Bharti Airtel and Microsoft’s MSN entered into a similar partnership with Vodafone in India, Yahoo! was looking lost. Yesterday it signed what it called ‘strategic’ deals with three telcos simultaneously. State-owned BSNL, BPL Mobile and Aircel are Yahoo!’s new best friends and between them have 60 million subscribers.
In addition, Google and Yahoo! have also launched operator-independent, SMS-based search services. Customers have to have Internet-enabled phones (which make up about 40% to 45% of India’s handset market) to use Yahoo’s SMS-based service, but Google SMS allows phones without GPRS to search for local information from cinemas and places to eat, to the weather, calculations, currency conversion and dictionary.
A year ago, GPS was going to be the thing that finally kicked location-orientated services into the mainstream. Between its SMS-based local search and this week’s beta launch of the My Location app for Google Mobile Maps, turns out GPS is nice-to-have, not essential.
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