Looks like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is winding up OurCity. The homepage now carries the following message, which also appears on top of every search page.

Yahoo! India Our City will be going off the air on 18th Feb 2009. We have incorporated successes within Our City, into our new offering Yahoo! India Local which provides information on services in your neighbourhood. Feel free to drop in at http://in.local.yahoo.com/

OurCity, a local search mashup, was launched by Yahoo co-founder David Filo when he opened a new Yahoo facility in Bangalore and designated India as the Centre of Excellence for Product Engineering for ‘Emerging Markets’. 

In the backdrop of the Open Hack Day ay Yahoo India’s Bangalore offices on Saturday, which saw participation of Filo, India R&D chief Sharad Sharma told Mint about how “India is being used as lab, a test market for the rest of the world”. Sharma cites Yahoo Glue, a search mash up that puts together news, blogs, RSS feeds, audio video and all multimedia content related to the search topic on one page. Glue, developed in Bangalore, was initially launched and tested in Yahoo India’s search pages before opening it upto users worldwide. Sharma doesn’t talk about ongoing lab experiments, but says similar experiments are on in local search utility OurCity and Yahoo Maps. Wonder what’s in store for Maps.

Mint Radio also has an interview with Yahoo’s editor-in-chief, Srinija Srinivasan, in which she talks about early day troubles in organizing the huge amount of information and issues of privacy as well as dealing with controversial content in times of conflict. The transcript is here.

Ad honchos starting up:

Business Standard points out that six top executives from leading agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Leo Burnett, DDB Mudra and Grey Worldwide have left in the past 45 days to set up their own ad startups, counting on the relationships they have built and betting that specialized services will bring them the clients even in these slowing times. The accounts of The Times of India and Mid Day have already moved from JWT to TapRoot, the startup of former JWT CEO Agnello Dias. An interesting aspect of these moves is the focus on emerging and digital media. Former Grey Worldwide executive creative director Brijesh Jacob has set up a digital agency called 22 Feet. TapRoot’s Dias and Santosh Padhi (former ECD at Leo Burnett) will set up another digital agency and former DDB Mudra ECD Jadish Acharya’s new venture, Cut The Crap, has tied up with Bangalore design shop Design Intersect for product and web design.

Comprehensive media code:

Business Standard also reports that the governent is considering setting up a commission to come up with guidelines encompassing all media. There has been a flurry of activity in media regulation post the coverage of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, but much of the scrutiny was on TV channels. It seems now there is a thinking within the government that “web-based and other electronic mediums” should not be left unregulated. While there has been talk about regulating news websites in the past, thankfully nothing concrete has taken shape so far.