Date:02/06/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/06/02/stories/2007060210910200.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Yahoo! becomes more city-savvy with `Our City'

Rasheed Kappan

The portal has data about 22 Indian cities

BANGALORE: Localisation is the flavour of every Internet major today, from Google to Yahoo! to MSN. Yahoo! has now taken the "Think global, browse local" mantra all the way down to the city level. Its highly interactive "Our City" portal captures 22 Indian cities, with Bangalore (http://ourcity.yahoo.in/bangalore) right on top, replete with news, photographs, maps, city events, podcasts, videos, weather and even a section called "Kannada World".

User generated

Every content except the news on the site is generated by the user. "The blogs, the pictures and videos are all created by the users themselves.

The objective behind `Our City' was to put together this data in a city-specific interface," says Sameer Sangawar, Senior Software Engineer, Our City, based at Yahoo! India's R & D Centre in Bangalore.

Currently available only for Yahoo! India users, "Our City" strikes the first-time viewer with a panoramic view of the city's landmarks. For instance, the Bangalore portal grips the user with visuals of the Vidhana Soudha, High Court and Visvesvaraya Towers.

But more arresting is the user-generated photographic montage linked to the site from Yahoo's own "Flickr.com" photosite. Events, a map and Wikipedia-supplied description of Bangalore completes the home page.

Bilingual approach

Localisation will look incomplete without the local language. The Yahoo! team has incorporated the "Kannada World" section in its Bangalore portal and "Malayalam" in its Kochi page.

"We are trying to support more local languages through a bilingual approach. We see a lot of potential in the vernacular," says Mr. Sangawar.

The "Kannada World" section has news sourced from Kannada newspapers and other sites, blogs in Kannada and even "Kannada podcasts."

Apparently, Karnataka is high on Yahoo! India's radar, with separate "Our City" sites for Mangalore, Mysore and now Hubli, the latest entrant.

To keep the site's look and feel fresh, news is updated every two hours. Flickr images are automatically refreshed for every site visit.

As Mr. Sangawar puts it, "We don't want users who login in the morning to see the same stuff, say, in the afternoon."

Interactive maps

The interactive map page allows the user to zoom in and search for restaurants, movie halls, pubs and bars, hospitals, tourist spots, ATMs, hotels and shopping malls.

But the clincher should be the "Travel" page. A complete stranger to Bangalore can get a crash course about the city, the trip plans and what to expect here, directly from Bangaloreans. If that is not localisation, what is!