Yahoo! has just stretched out its service. For users who want to stay connected with their family and friends, The company has acquired Koprol to fan out its social, mobile and local contribution. Exclusively customized for mobile phones, Koprol allows users to socialize and share thoughts, knowledge information within their society.
Koprol will enable users to connect and share their photos, reviews and search other information using their mobile phone browser. It also offers a service where users can ‘check-in’ their current location and view others’ location to know what they are doing.
“Users are increasingly relying on mobile devices to communicate and access the Internet and they are looking for seamless integration between those devices and PCs. This is especially true in many emerging markets where we are introducing the Yahoo! brand to many new-to-Net users. Koprol was uniquely designed for mobile phones and within a year has already built a strong user base. Yahoo! provides the global scale and technology to accelerate growth in Indonesia as well as introduce the service to new markets,” commented Rose Tsou, senior vice president, Asia Region at Yahoo! Inc.
In addition, Koprol’s service allows users to find local businesses like popular eateries and shops based on their rating. ‘Thumbs-Up’ feature that lists favorite hotspots in a ranking list makes the application fun to use. Users can now start or join discussion about particular locations, invite friends to participate, and create a unique city-based social mobile community resource.
“We are excited to join Yahoo! and look forward to the opportunities being part of a global Internet leader presents. From the beginning, we have leveraged Yahoo!’s open technologies to help build our business, and it was just six months ago when we were showcased at the Yahoo! Hack Day held in Indonesia. This is a great success story for the online community in Indonesia and demonstrates that innovation is recognized wherever it occurs,” remarked Fajar Budiprasetyo, CEO and co-founder of Koprol.
Yahoo! aims to offer significant content to its global users on multiple devices and access points. Koprol will thus help to combine a database of locations, created by its communities to help users find their friends, family, new businesses and neighborhood resources. Besides, Yahoo! plans to empower the rich community of information generated by Koprol users to make its properties and applications, including its homepage and media and communications products even more appropriate.
Yahoo! will continue to support Koprol’s service, such as the new BlackBerry application announced recently. In the future, Yahoo! expects to come up with new mobile applications for both local and global mobile platforms.
Financial terms of the transactions have not received any official word yet.