Do you 'Yahoo!' In Indonesian?

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 03/27/2006 8:58 AM  |  Life

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta, vmahmud@yahoo.com

We all need to be ready for another dot.com wave, as leading global Internet company Yahoo! recently launched a new local front page site for Southeast Asian users, including Indonesia.

Now available in a number of regional languages, Internet users within ASEAN can go to their national portals and immediately access news and internet applications that are more applicable to them. In addition to the new sites for the Philippines (www.yahoo.com.ph) and Vietnam (www.yahoo.com.vn), Indonesian users can access www.yahoo.co.id for customized front pages in their own language.

""Yahoo!'s investment in developing localized services aims to make the Internet more relevant for the 60 million internet users in Southeast Asia, as well as the millions of new Internet users that come online each year in the region,"" said Reza Behnam, Managing Director, Yahoo! Southeast Asia.

""Instead of adopting a ""one site"" or a ""one-service"" fits all approach, Yahoo! provides the necessary local relevance that can encourage Internet access and adoption for all users in Southeast Asia,"" he said.

While some people online would huff ""so what?"" or ""too late,"" Yahoo's Indonesian front page entry denotes its confidence of a country that has historically poor internet, and even computer, penetration. The company sees promising growth in the region, especially as local governments continue to encourage information and communications technology (ICT) adoption for citizens.

""The next billion Internet users will come from non-English speaking countries, including Southeast Asia,"" says Jason Coates, Communications Manager for Yahoo! Southeast Asia. ""Internet content (desktop and mobile) and services will need to be delivered and packaged with local language in mind,"" he said.

Yahoo!'s strategy in Southeast Asia aims to localize and integrate services under its four strategic pillars -- Search, Content, Community and Personalization. As such, the company created local language versions of Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Entertainment and Sports to provide users in Southeast Asia with the information they want, when they want it, how they want it and on any device.

In Yahoo! News, a partnership with Kompas Cyber Media (www.kompas.com) is apparent, although for the moment all news links are redirected to the KCM internet portal instead of being integrated within the Yahoo! News site, complete with Yahoo! links and applications.

With Yahoo! Mobile, cellular phone users can access SMS alerts, WAP-enabled Yahoo! services and content for Yahoo! users on the go. At the moment, only Telkomsel and Excelcom are the Indonesian telecom operator partners. However, for a country with nearly 50 million mobile phones, this service would definitely give Yahoo! a leg up on competitor Google.

""Yahoo! is focused on extending its key services to mobile devices in order to provide easy access to the essential products and services that users know and love,"" noted Coates. ""For example, one could get their Yahoo! email forwarded on a mobile phone and even get an SMS alert, for incoming emails -- yes, in Indonesia and it is that easy. Also, if you have a camera phone, you can take photos and blog it right away and even share it with your community on Yahoo! Photos.""

This can perhaps be Yahoo!'s ultimate answer to Friendster, the social networking website that is popular in Indonesia. The Yahoo! 360 personalized website, currently still in beta form, is located at 360.yahoo.com and offers blogs, photo sharing, friend testimonials, e-mail access and other services.

The difference is that Indonesian Yahoo! users can access more features to user accounts via their mobile phones than any other website. As such, they would not need a computer to get on the World Wide Web. This would also be a telecommunications operator's dream, driving subscribers towards using their facilities.

Not everything at Yahoo.co.id has been translated to Indonesian yet, such as the games, mobile, photos, 360 and education sections. And Yahoo! is also working hard to speed up the user experience for Indonesia, as it is rather sluggish compared to local websites, hoping to work more closely with ISP partners to enhance their services.

However, the company continues to offer a one-stop platform for Indonesian Internet users to communicate, learn and play in the virtual world. Yahoo!'s new local site would also give Indonesian advertisers a chance to peddle their wares online at a captive virtual community. But they should remember that people always want to be informed, not marketed.

With this latest introduction of local languages, it is hoped that new users to the Internet would be able to participate effectively in the global conversation. The more voices, the more we can understand each other. So now, do you yahoo?

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