Yahoo! India teamed up with Hutchison Whampoa's Indian mobile phone service partner on Tuesday to enable Yahoo! users to access their e-mail via short message services (SMS). India is the first country where Yahoo! Inc is kicking off this service, the Internet media giant said in a statement.
Yahoo! users can now access their e-mails via SMS through Hutchison's services -- Orange in Bombay, Essar in New Delhi, Command in Calcutta and Celforce in Gujarat, the statement said. "E-mail is the most popular application on the Internet and currently accounts for 50 percent of the Internet usage time in India," said Deepak Chandnani, country head of Yahoo! India. "Yahoo's alliance with Orange offers mobility to our 18 million user registrations on the Yahoo! network from India," he said. The launch comes three months after Yahoo! India tied up with Hutchison Whampoa's local mobile partners to offer its chat service Yahoo! Messenger through the fast-growing SMS service.
Yahoo! India officials, quoting internal reports, said about 70 percent of all e-mail users in India were using Yahoo! Mail. "This marks another mobile Internet product that gives the user freedom from his personal computer," said Sandip Das, chief executive offer of Orange.
Hutchison, through its Indian affiliates, is among the country's top three mobile opeartors alongside local telecoms group Bharti Enterprises and the Birla-AT&T-Tata-BPL combine. Bureau Report