Earlier this morning, social networking giant Facebook announced on its blog that, one week after it said it would be opening an office in Austin, Texas, it will set up an additional support center in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, the capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh.
In the statement, the company says both offices will allow them to better serve its users, advertisers and developers. Facebook added that it is currently recruiting people to staff the online sales and operations teams for both office locations.
The India-based support center will not be Facebook’s first international office – it already established a presence in Dublin, Ireland, just over a year ago (PDF). Don Faul, director of global online operations at Facebook, in the blog post said that having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones helps Facebook provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support.
According to the company, seventy percent of the people using Facebook are now located outside the U.S. and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages. In India alone, Facebook says it has more than 8 million people actively connecting on Facebook
A quick glance on Wikipedia teaches us that Hyderabad houses many computer software companies and consulting firms, so much so that the city is sometimes referred to as “Cyberabad”. Microsoft apparently has established its largest R&D campus outside the US in the ‘City of Pearls’, and other names on the list of companies with one or multiple offices in Hyderabad include Google, Alcatel Lucent, Amazon, HP, Dell, IBM, Motorola, Oracle and Deloitte.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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