Yahoo! buys! obscure! Indonesian! geo! location! site!

Bartz tells reporter to 'f*ck off'

Yahoo! has bought a little-known Indonesian social media company for an undisclosed sum.

Koprol offers a geo-location service to its users, much in the same way as the more widely known Foursquare - which Yahoo! had also been pursuing in a $100m, seemingly doomed bout of kiss chase.

"Users are increasingly relying on mobile devices to communicate and access the internet and they are looking for seamless integration between those devices and PCs," said senior Asia region veep Rose Tsou. "This is especially true in many emerging markets where we are introducing the Yahoo! brand to many new-to-Net users."

"Koprol was uniquely designed for mobile phones and within a year has already built a strong user base. Yahoo! provides the global scale and technology to accelerate growth in Indonesia as well as introduce the service to new markets."

It’s not entirely clear why the web search has-been would consider Indonesia’s market to be of any particular significance. But the company is not averse to buying up web portals outside of its traditional comfort zone.

In August last year Yahoo! bought the biggest online community in the Arab world - Maktoob.com, which is based in Dubai. Financial terms of that deal were also kept secret.

Elsewhere on planet Yahoo!, the firm’s CEO Carol Bartz has been telling TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to “fuck off!”, which seems reasonable enough to us. The full exchange is here. ®