Zynga bound for Bangalore
News on 17 Feb 2010
News on 17 Feb 2010
The San Francisco-based online social networking games specialist Zynga has big plans for Bangalore in India, where within the next three years Internet usage will top 81 million individuals, many of whom are into the online social networking scene.
Zynga Games Network has already made major inroads into the global social networking games market with massively popular games like FarmVille, Zynga Texas Hold Em Poker, and others.
The company has now focused its attention on India, opening a development centre in Bangalore to complement the development activities of two State-side centres in Baltimore and Los Angeles.
Company spokesmen said this week that the Indian operations will initially focus on setting up a significant infrastructure in Bangalore for game development, hiring some 100 IT scientists and engineers to support the delivery of Zynga games to millions of Internet users in the country.
Colleen McCreary, a vice president of Zynga Games Network said India offers some of the world’s most sophisticated and rich technical talent bases. “We are thrilled to have a local presence now. We shall also look into localizing games in terms of language and culture from here,” she said.
By 2013, it has been predicted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India that the country will be the third largest online market after China and USA. India has 41 percent of active Internet users who played online games in 2008, up 89 percent from the previous year. Currently the country has an Internet penetration of 36 million users.
Zynga has grown rapidly since it was founded only two-and-a-half-years ago, and currently boasts over 250 million monthly active users playing its games, available on massive social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, MSN Games, Tagged, Yahoo! and the iPhone.
Shan Kadavil has been appointed country manager of Zynga India and said this week that he would be recruiting talent with background in cloud computing and open source network and in building scalable infrastructure capable of handling more than 70 million daily users.
