US-based Cyanogen , the developer of an open-source mobile operating system, will open an office in India within the next three months, and plans to acquire startups, according to a senior company executive."India is very attractive. It is one of the hyper-growth markets for mobile today," said Vikram Natarajan, senior vice-president of global partnerships and distribution at Cyanogen, the latest in a list of companies wanting more skin in the Indian mobile phone story.According to research firm eMarketer, India is poised to overtake US as the fastest-growing smartphone market in 2016 with 204 million mobile phones.Cyanogen's India team, which is expected to be 50-member strong in about a year's time, will represent a third of the company's current employee base, Natarajan said. CyanogenMod started off as an open source project that tinkered with the Android in 2009. It now has about 9,000 contributing members. The founders " Kirt McMaster and Steve Kondik " spun out a commercial entity, Cyanogen, in 2013. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto.The company is headquartered in a historical building in Palo Alto, just beside the office of Survey Monkey, a maker of survey-related software.Cyanogen said it will invest a part of the latest $80 million financing it received from Premji Invest, Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm and others, into acquiring smaller companies and teams, mostly for talent in India. “Premji Invest is a big investor...and that was a deliberate decision, as India a big market for us,” said Natarajan, a former employee of chipset maker Mediatek.The Indian team, which will be based either in Bengaluru or Delhi, will work on products, bring in local flavors to the operating system, along with doing testing and quality assurance, said Natarajan.“What we strongly believe that global giants don't is that any country with a large population will have the rise of a local ecosystem. We're going to start seeing that in India,” he said.(The writer was in the US on a trip sponsored by EMC)