Yahoo! has termed India as the "next big opportunity". Yahoo! India is gearing up for competition after its traditional US rival AOL launched India operations last month.

On the eve of launch of AOL.in, Yahoo! India announced two new service offerings and some organizational initiatives. Yahoo! officially launched beta versions of Yahoo! Our City and Yahoo! India Maps.

Yahoo! Our City is a portal that profiles 20 cities in India using user-generated content and editorial content. The portal provides news, photos, videos, podcasts, event information, blogs and maps of each of these cities in English as well as local languages.

Yahoo! India Maps is an interactive map service that has a searchable database of 170 cities, 4,785 towns and 220,000 lakh villages in India. It provides also search for important services like banks, hospitals, ATMs and police stations.

Yahoo! co-founder David Filo also announced the opening of its new R&D facility in Bangalore. Sharad Sharma has been appointed CEO of R&D at Yahoo! India and Dr Jawahar Malhotra as the CTO. Yahoo! is making India its hub for product development, research and engineering services for emerging markets like Vietnam, the Philippines and Brazil.

Yahoo! India is big on local content; it launched seven Indian-language portals in February this year. Another Yahoo! service which serves India well is the recently launched mobile search service oneSearch.

According to one estimate, around 85 percent of India's 25 million Internet users visit the Yahoo! Web site every month. Yahoo! India's revenue tripled last year and it is among the top three online properties in terms of online ad revenues.

Yahoo! India MD George Zacharias said:

"Today, the Indian advertising market is around US$3 billion and growing at 20 percent. Of this, online advertising is US$60 million and growing at 50 percent annually".

After four years of local operations, Yahoo! has over 1,000 people in India, accounting for 20 percent of the company's global workforce.