Kirthiga Reddy, head, Facebook India Photo: A . Prabhakar Rao
All those who have known Kirthiga Reddy since she joined Facebook in July 2010, will notice how both she and the company have changed in three and half years. The social networking giant turns 10 on Tuesday (February 4).
"There is an increasing shift from seeing Facebook as a community building platform to one that drives business objectives," Reddy, Facebook's India head and its first employee in the country, said during her last meeting with Business Today.
In her early days at Facebook, the focus was on building the India team. "We are working with users, developers and advertisers - our three crucial constituents on a global basis," she would tell newcomers joining the company, often welcoming them at the Hyderabad office entrance with a bouquet of flowers.
"For users, it is about making the operations safe and trusted, for developers, it is about fostering an eco-system and for advertisers, it is about helping them leverage the platform of Facebook to reach out and engage with the users.''
Since then, Facebook has grown from 8 million to 93 million monthly active users in India, the highest after the US, with 75 million of these accessing the site on the mobile. In terms of daily active users, it has 41 million in India and of these, 31 million on the mobile.
Mobile has become key for Facebook in India. "Mobile is where we are spending our time and energy and making our investments, be it at Facebook global or Facebook India ," Kirthiga Reddy told BT just before relocating to Mumbai, where she now leads Facebook's global marketing solutions teams in India and plays a key role in building and maintaining strategic relationships with agencies and clients.
An example of how Facebook is actively engaging with low-cost mobiles: in December 2012, it worked with telephone provider Nokia to introduce handsets with Facebook pre-installed on the devices. Called Nokia's Asha line of smartphones, these have been designed to give the user a smartphone like experience with low cost handsets. These are essentially feature phones and do not otherwise provide internet access, but Facebook is available. Nokia Asha 205 is the first Nokia phone that includes a dedicated Facebook button.
There have been times when important foreign visitors to the Facebook India office have been welcomed by presenting them with these low-cost phones with Facebook access, to drive home the point that to access Facebook, not even a smartphone is necessary.
For more news from Business Today, follow us on Twitter @bt_india and on Facebook at http://ift.tt/1jc98Lp
via Technology - Google News http://ift.tt/1fSCwmH
Put the internet to work for you.
0 comments:
Post a Comment