By Anna Valmero
INQUIRER.NET
MANILA, Philippines – Yahoo! Philippines launched September 30 the Yahoo! Open Strategy to rewire itself and open up its assets to third-party developers and help drive innovation and differentiation in terms of its products and services.
Yahoo! Open Strategy product management Cody Simms on the Yahoo! developer blog that the new initiative is “Yahoo!’s big bet to deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers.”
Sau Sheong Chang, head of engineering of Yahoo! Southeast Asia explained during an interview with INQUIRER.net that the Y! Yahoo! Open Strategy “aims to marry the best of the Web with what Yahoo! has internally. This will provide a holistic and consolidated platform for developers to grow applications in the current Yahoo! backdrop.”
Currently, the Yahoo! developer group is very much US-centric but with this new initiative, the company aims to tap developers and grow strongly in many countries, including the Philippines.
This means a huge opportunity for the local developer community who can develop applications built on Yahoo!’s existing products. Chang said: “I think the Philippines has a very strong developer community. The skill set is very suitable to what is needed by Yahoo! and to what the company is providing to the community.”
Filipino developer Andrei Mariduqui Navarro proved this when he joined the Yahoo! Open Hack at Silicon Valley earlier this month. At the cradle of technology innovation, Navarro joined Web developers from around the world to develop APIs and Web services for Yahoo! With his experience at the event, Navarro believed that “Filipinos who have the passion for innovation can develop their ideas and present it in a global platform.” For him, technology is universal and is an open avenue for everyone with creative ideas for Web applications.
Though specifically targeted at open source developers, the Yahoo! Open Strategy is said to benefit users. “Yahoo! users can benefit by having more variety in the services available to them and within this singular ‘starting point’, they can access an Internet gateway to additional services and functions for other providers,” said Chang.
This singular starting point aims to provide users a more social, more customizable and personally relevant Yahoo! experience. This will also mean more local offerings to countries like the Philippines. Chang noted that these localized add-on feature to the Yahoo! services are currently in the works.
At present, the company’s top two applications in the Philippines are the Yahoo! Mail and the Yahoo! Messenger. Jojo Anonuevo, general manager of Yahoo! Philippine Operations, said the Philippines alone captures “about more than a quarter of the total mail traffic” generated by the six countries in the Southeast Asia. In terms of Yahoo! Messenger usage, the country ranks second in the region.
“Yahoo! does not have the monopoly of ideas for our Web services so we want users and developers using our products develop their great ideas to enhance the Yahoo user experience. Ultimately, this benefits the consumer,” said Chang.
The Southeast Asia Yahoo! Developer Network site can be accessed at http://developer.yahoo.com
