AOL launches Hindi and Tamil language versions of its Internet portal in India today. It’s one step in their expansion strategy, in which they plan to conquer 30 regions by the end of next year. Video search will also be enabled in 8 regions: France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Some might recall that this video search is (at least partly) based on the remnants of SingingFish, a popular audio/video search web site acquired by AOL but killed off earlier this year.
The launch of the local Indian sites coincides with Fortune Global Forum conferences in that region this week, hosted by Time Inc.
This expansion comes on the heels of AOL’s restructuring, which saw them selling their internet service providing business outside of the States and focusing on creating free Internet portals which mostly make revenue from advertising. Recently, AOL launched localized versions of its portal in Sweden, Spain and Italy. We’ll see how well will they fare after the expansion, since their second quarter online advertising revenues rose only 16 percent, in contrast to 40 percent growth in the previous four quarters.
[via]
Visit here to subscribe to these commentsUser comment: By: Nick SchmidtTroll Comment: Didn't one of the Hindi politicians or some Indian politician get pushed over a balcony by monkeys and died? Seriously.. Sometime this month??? Maybe it was just trolls, dressed up as monkeys? I wonder if AOL India is covering that!!
R|mail.