Facebook Hires Executive With India Ties for Messenger App Push
19 September 2016 - 7:20PM
Dow Jones News
NEW DELHI—Facebook Inc. is hiring a high-profile technology
executive with expertise in Silicon Valley and India to help
develop strategies for its Messenger app, an increasingly important
platform for the social-media giant.
Anand Chandrasekaran, a former senior executive at Yahoo Inc.,
will assume a global leadership role working on strategies and
partnerships for Facebook's billion-user-strong texting service,
according to people familiar with the situation.
It wasn't immediately clear whether Mr. Chandrasekaran would be
based in the U.S. or India.
An announcement could be made as soon as Tuesday, one of the
people said. Facebook representatives didn't immediately respond to
requests for comment.
After working at Yahoo, Mr. Chandrasekaran served as chief
product officer at Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest cellular
company, where he launched Airtel's mobile application and a
popular music streaming app.
Last year, he joined New Delhi-based Snapdeal, one of India's
major e-commerce startups, as chief product officer. He departed
the company in recent months.
With global users increasingly flocking to messaging platforms
such as Facebook's own WhatsApp and Chinese internet major Tencent
Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, the Menlo Park, Calif., company is eager to
transform Messenger into a hub for activities such as
e-commerce.
In April, Facebook emphasized its focus on the app at its annual
F8 conference in San Francisco, showing developers how to create
so-called chatbots for the service. These automated services can
interact with consumers in real time to answer questions about the
prices of goods, for example.
"Messenger is going to be the next big platform for sharing
privately," Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said during
his keynote remarks at the event. Facebook said in July that more
than one billion people use Messenger every month. WhatsApp in
February said it had passed that milestone.
With Facebook locked out of China because the government doesn't
allow its citizens to use the service, India is a crucial market
for the U.S. company's growth, with hundreds of millions of people
yet to come online. It is already the company's second-biggest
market, after the U.S., in terms of Facebook users.
But India is also a sensitive market for Facebook. In February,
India's telecommunications regulator effectively banned its
controversial Free Basics service, which Facebook said was designed
to get unconnected users online via sites and apps without paying
for mobile data.
Critics argued that Free Basics, formerly called Internet.org,
violated the principles of net neutrality, which call for equal
treatment of all traffic on the internet, and amounted to a cynical
ploy to gain new users for Facebook's platform.
Facebook countered that while it was disappointed with the
regulator's decision, it was committed to helping connect the
unconnected, and that doing so helps economic development. Free
Basics operates in dozens of countries globally.
Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco contributed to this
article
Write to Newley Purnell at newley.purnell @wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 19, 2016 05:05 ET (09:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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