City major base for cutting-edge online tech

Yahoo busts spam from city
Amazon searches books, Google rigs new tech

Bangalore: Yahoo deals with about 2 billion e-mails per day. Of this 75-80% (about 1.6 billion e-mails) are spam. Even if one per cent (1.6 million) manages to get through the system, it is a huge lapse. In case you are wondering what’s the connection with Bangalore, then here goes — the Bangalore R&D team has played a big role to put in place anti-spam technology for Yahoo.

The next time you buy your favourite book at Amazon.com, bear in mind that in all probability, the job of finding your exact requirement from the huge repository is done by software built in Bangalore. This is the job of Amazon’s A9 unit, which deals with innovation in the search space.

If Bangalore has created a name for itself in the services space, these online majors are set to give it a new twist by making it their base camp for research and innovation in India.

Besides Bangalore, Amazon’s only other A9 unit is located in Palo Alto, California. To them, the choice of Bangalore is paying off when it comes to developing missioncritical products. The story is no different for its famous rivals like Google or Yahoo.

Google Bangalore is the company first R&D centre outside of the US. This division’s charter calls for innovation, implementation and launch new Google technologies and products to a global audience.

Late entrant Amazon came to Bangalore only about 12 months back and is about 70-strong today. Going by the high quality output at the Bangalore centre, one can expect a lot more action, says Bharat Vijay, MD, Amazon.com, development centre, India.

According to him, “All that we do circles around enhancing customer experience and bring the exact information he wants. We focus on end-toend product development and the teams own the ideas from the very beginning.’’

In Yahoo’s case, the Bangalore unit is one of its kind after Sunnyvale and is definitely one of the growth engines.

“Until over a year ago, the Bangalore unit had an indirect impact on Yahoo’s revenues as it offered engineering services. Today, we have changed to an extent where all our work will have a direct impact on the revenues of the company,” says Prasad Ram, CTO, Yahoo! R&D India.
Its research unit in Bangalore is about 400-strong and is the only centre outside the US to have a bigger range of capabilities.