Yahoo Labs, a scientific research lab that was once described as the secret weapon of former CEO Carol Bartz, definitely wants to take advantage of the great talent pool in India, according to Beverly Harrison, Director of Mobile Research at Yahoo Labs in California.
The online advertising giant established a research lab site in Bangalore in 2008, which specializes in the areas of mobile, search and Yahoo Answers.
“We finished one project with people in Bangalore last year…that was looking at gestural interactions for television interfaces, which was for Yahoo’s connected TV group. India has amazing schools, amazing technical schools and amazing graduates from those schools,” Dr. Harrison told this correspondent on Friday.
“From the Labs side we mostly hire PhDs and some number of engineering support staff. There’s such a great talent pool there [in India], and we want to take full advantage of that. I think India makes huge contributions and that’s why they are constant collaborators on many of our projects… hopefully that continues in the indefinite future,” she added.
Corporate research and development in India has been shaky over the last one year, partially due to cuts in spending by multi-national companies, with pharma major AstraZeneca’s Bangalore site being one of the more recent centres to shut down.
Dr. Harrison, who is based out of Sunnyvale and has spent the last twenty years in studying mobile user interface technologies, believes that speech-user interface has closely reaching a tipping point in terms of becoming mainstream.
“I’ve monitored speech technology for the last ten years, and there are some really promising indicators. As we are able to collect more data on users… it just opens the door to all potential ad formats,” she said.
