Among internet’s big brothers Yahoo is the slowest to expend it’s presence to mobile market. Well it’s better late than never. Isn’t it? Now aiming to expand its presence in the emerging markets, Internet giant Yahoo announced Tuesday that it has acquired Indonesia’s location-based services startup Koprol.
This announcement came one day after announcing an expanded mobile partnership with Nokia. Yahoo said it will be leveraging the Jakarta-based startup’s user-generated community information to further localize its content for its products. How much Yahoo did spent for buying Koprol still unknown. Koprol was always the second choice for Yahoo, Foursquare which was its first choice probably asked for higher price than what yahoo had in mind (US$100 million-plus offers).
Koprol specializes in mobile networking, lets people make friends, share photos, and find popular nearby locations all on the go. This only indicates Internet giant’s rising interest in geo-location offerings, pledging to bring Nokia’s Navteq mapping service to Yahoo, and Yahoo’s email and instant-messaging technology to Nokia’s Ovi service.
With the Yahoo buyout, Koprol will maintain its base in Jakarta, Indonesia and all employees will be converted to the Yahoo team. Koprol noted in a blog post that many of its planned features will be rolled out sooner than expected because of the newly added resources.
Koprol obviously doesn’t have the charisma that other location-based social site, like Foursquare (Yahoo’s first choice). But location sharing is emerging market, so Koprol isn’t a bad choice for Yahoo either. Yahoo plans to expand the Koprol service beyond Indonesia, and launch a BlackBerry application. Only time will say if yahoo can truly utilize this new buyout, we don’t want see another upcoming.or or mybloglog tragedy, which happens to die out after yahoo’s acquires.
It is an Indonesian made social network the social network is so beneficial because it allows us to get references of new places in Jakarta and get new friends to hang out with ^_^ love it