In what appears to be a fairly important development for Yahoo India, Yahoo Inc has inked a global deal with chipset manufacturer MediaTek to embed Yahoo's services into MediaTek’s mobile platform solutions. A statement from the companies suggests that the product development roadmap covers MediaTek's MAUI Runtime Environment, widget capable ‘Smart Feature phones’ and the Android platform, and services included in the roadmap are Yahoo! Messenger, Mail, News, Weather, Finance, Cricket, Flickr and Answers; more may be added subsequently. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Why this is significant for Yahoo India? MediaTek powers the chipsets for many feature phones in the market - companies like MicroMax, Spice Mobiles, Lemon, Karbonn, Intex, Olive, Videocon, among several others - many of them import customized handsets from China which use the MediaTek chipset and platform. The partnership allows Yahoo to extend its presence across several handset manufacturers across the Indian market - a market which has fragmented significantly, and where MediaTek powered handsets are taking market share from incumbents like Nokia. For Yahoo India, this deal could lead to greater distribution of its services, and an increase in available advertising inventory on mobile. Feature phone handset manufacturers in India have, in the past, used applications to market their handsets - essentially smart phone and mobile Internet services, at low cost. That said, when I tried using such a phone (over a year ago), it was incredibly tedious: the applications would take 10-15 seconds to load, and almost as long…
