Born to be Wireless

I know this is not the focus of this blog, but since Yahoo is a great player in the mobile market and it has the single most-visited page on the Web (with 304 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), it deserves a note:



Anyone who access www.yahoo.com will see a box on the right side of the side calling the stockholders to vote against Carl Icahn. When you click on the box, you'll be redirect to a page that attacks Icahn credibility as an investor. At the top of this page, you'll see the quote:



my two cents: It feels like Yahoo is fighting the battle of its life and Jerry Yang is using all he can use in order to win the proxy battle on Aug 1st! And since I passionate about Yahoo for almost 10 years (the age of my Y!Mail account), I really wouldn't like to see it bought by Microsoft :-)

update: according to comScore monthly search report, Google lost 0.3% (total of 61.5%) market share on search, Y! gain 0.3% (total of 20.9%), Microsoft gain 0.7% (total of 9.2%), Ask lost 0.2% (total of 4.3%) and AOL lost 0.4% (total of 4.1%). This data is related to U.S. market

Labels: carl icahn, Yahoo

Yahoo! oneSearch is going live with T-Mobile, enabling Web’n’Walk subscribers to use the service across Europe. In the near future, T-Mobile will customise Yahoo! oneSearch specially for it's customers and integrate Yahoo! services such as Flickr, Messenger, Mail, Weather and Finance into its web’n’walk portal

The search service has mobile-specific features, for example, remembering the user’s location and adapting results to the smaller screen.

The partnership was announcement at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Labels: T-Mobile, Yahoo

Yahoo really are pushing forward with their mobile efforts — it really is gratifying to see.

Let’s hear from Marco Boerries, Exec VP of Yahoo’s Connected Life:

“Last year we set out to reinvent mobile search with Yahoo! oneSearch, and today with 29 operator partnerships around the world covering more than 600 million subscribers, we believe we have certainly succeeded,” said Marco. “Now, we intend to reinvent mobile communications through Yahoo! oneConnect, a revolutionary new mobile communications service that will combine integrated mobile messaging with a socially-connected address book.”

The architecutre is open — plus it’s aiming to offer an entirely connected experience, whether your friends are on Yahoo, MSN or beyond. Some of the key features of oneConnect include:

– Socially-connected address book - Provide users the capability to integrate activity from popular social networks, professional networks, and communities into their address book, keeping it always in sync. Consumers will be able to view status updates, photo uploads, and the recent activity (”pulse”) of contacts across all their networks.

– Integrated mobile messaging - Offer seamless integration of IM and SMS, including threaded conversations. Any messaging service will be able to use Yahoo! oneConnect’s open APIs to plug into the application’s messaging feature - enabling consumers to access a wide range of popular services, such as Yahoo! Messenger, Google(R) Talk, AOL(R) Instant Messenger and MSN(TM) Messenger.

– Status - Give consumers the capability to view their contacts by their most recent status updates on popular social networks, as well as update their own status on their favorite social networks - in one easy step - and automatically broadcast it to their friends.

– Pulse - Provide consumers the functionality to see a dynamic overview of what friends are up to, including recent photos, their status, profile updates, and recommendations based on their most recent actions on popular social networks.

– Favorites - Keep the people consumers interact with most at their fingertips. Users will be able to set up messaging shortcuts to make reaching out as quick as possible.

– Social contact card - Allow users to aggregate the most relevant information on any given contact, including archives of past communications, detailed pulse history, and one-click ways to initiate communication.

– Innovative location-sensing technology - Provide new ways to locate, chat with, and exchange contact information with nearby Yahoo! oneConnect users. Proximity alerts will notify consumers when a contact enters their vicinity.

– An open communications platform - Give users the functionality to communicate via multiple communications tools - such as IM, SMS, and social networks. Widgets will provide users the capability to access their email across major email providers, such as Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail(R), Gmail(R), and AOL(R) Mail. Additionally, Yahoo! is in discussions with DataViz(R), a company that allows mobile users to access their corporate Microsoft Exchange(TM) email accounts and Microsoft Office(TM), documents, to work together on widget versions of its industry-acclaimed RoadSynch(R) and Documents To Go(R) applications.

Labels: oneconnect, Yahoo

Yahoo Go, the mobile portal, is undergoing some major changes, resulting in what can only be called a relaunch to some degree. The service is currently down, as Yahoo works on getting the new mobile portal ready for the official launch tomorrow. Entitled Yahoo Go 3.0 Beta, the new features will include the obligatory new UI, which has been optimized for the mobile phone.

But the big announcement for Yahoo Go is the inclusion of Mobile Widget Platform, granting access to third-party widgets. These widgets will be accessible on both Yahoo Go and the regular Yahoo mobile page. So far, widget partners include eBay, MySpace and MTV. The mobile widget platform has also been opened up for developers who would like to create mobile widgets as well. The full-feature SDK for developers will be available in the next few weeks, and I’m rather anxious to see how developers will utilize the new mobile widget platform.

Yahoo does seem to be among the first of the major companies to come with third-party mobile widgets to this extent. Several mobile companies have adopted the heavy promotion of mobile widgets, including Nokia, for mobile portals because of their ability to package together a set of features in an easy access format.

Other new features include personal vitality and status updates, which gives you an at-a-glance view of what you missed: how many new emails do you have, how many Flickr photos have your friends added, what upcoming appointments are on your calendar, etc. The content for your mobile modules is also customizable, so you can choose what snippets (weather, news, etc.) you’d like on your home page.

The move to enhance the mobile start page, especially with the addition of mobile widgets, gives Yahoo a compelling usage of its mobile network, and a strike against other mobile startups hoping to gain traction from similar models for delivering content. Will the leveraging of your existing Yahoo content, such as email and friend updates, be a deciding factor for you, or do you avoid the mobile portal format all together?

The other interesting thing about Yahoo Go 3.0 Beta is the inclusion of interactive mobile ads, which will give you the option of calling businesses directly from the ads. This is similar to a format that AdMob has tried out with a region-specific advertising campaign with LandRover, which was also specific to iPhone users. This should be another interesting aspect to follow, as more mobile tools for search are launched (Ask.com, ChaCha), which advertisers will be more able to take advantage of as well.

source: http://mashable.com/2008/01/06/yahoo-go-30-beta/

Labels: widgets, Yahoo

Mobile Crunch has published an interview with Ojas Rege, Yahoo’s vice president of global mobile products. Great Job! Check it out.

Mobile Crunch: What impact, if any, will the iPhone have on the mobile market?

Rege: We’re thrilled. We’re convinced that it’s going to have an impact. When it comes down to it, it will drive consumer demand for wonderful, easy to use, cool services. It expands the art of the possible in the minds of consumers.

It makes all players in the industry say to themselves, “Hey, it’s absolutely possible to create compelling and intuitive applications.”

Mobile Crunch: Will its impact be lessened because of its high price point, i.e. would it have had a bigger impact at a lower SRP?

Rege: iPhone is a high end device right now. Over time, price points can change. We’ve seen this across the board in other technologies. It’s fair to say the price points will evolve. At Yahoo, we want to see these types of platforms going to as many people as possible.

Mobile Crunch: How will the iPhone affect mobile advertising? How will the iPhone’s unique Web browsing method affect the ads or types of ads Yahoo sells on its space?

Rege: There are three components to this.

1. Anything that drives people to mobile data services is good. That creates more critical mass to be able to sell advertising into.

2. At Yahoo, we don’t build the same experience for all phones. We optimize our services on different phone platforms. Anything that lets us do more stuff also opens the door for more advertisers.

3. The single most important thing is: You’ve gotta have the ability to make advertising relevant to the user. Simple ads with high relevance are highly effective.

Mobile Crunch: That’s a natural seque to Yahoo SmartAds.

Rege: The high level concept of SmartAds is: Use the stuff you know about the user to customize the ad. We’re using personalization to target ads more readily. Everything we’re doing in SmartAds for the PC platform is applicable to mobile–we’re not limited by media type.

In all our services, we’re moving towards personalization–that is, making sure we can provide services tailored for the user and the platform. Make sure the services actually matter to them.

Mobile Crunch: Can we look down the road and ask what kind of trends will we see in advertising or mobile two years or even a year from now? Or is technology moving too fast to make predictions like that?

Rege: New technology like the iPhone opens up the door to a lot of people to say, “Wow, I can do a lot of cool stuff on my phone; it’s more than just voice and text.” We’re going to see a transition as users realize this lifeline they have—the phone—is also relevant for a lot of the things they want to do in the world. As I mentioned before, it expands the art of the possible in the minds of consumers. That brings a lot of folks in and creates a lot more demand for advertising. This whole notion of increasing demand by expanding what users can do with the technology drives how we look to deliver our services.

Mobile Crunch: How is measuring mobile advertising metrics different from standard Internet ad reporting and measurement?

Rege: When you’re an advertiser creating a mobile campaign, do you want it a brand extension of what you’re doing on the PC? People are experimenting. This is very early market. The standard metrics: impressions, conversion—these are applicable to mobile. The core metrics will be the same but the expanded metrics will be different. Mobile is ripe for experimentation.

Mobile Crunch: Do you expect the user metrics to change as mobile technologies become accessible to more people?

Rege: As mobile usage becomes more mass market, the nature of things people do will change. Our mobile offerings are global. Each country is in a different stage of evolution. In the United States, we have so many different ways of connecting: high broadband penetration, high PC penetration. A lot of countries in Southeast Asia don’t have those options. In many areas, people don’t have another option to do them. We have to have a product that doesn’t rely on a user having access to a PC. We have to provide service in a mobile-first context.

Mobile Crunch: Are we moving towards a standardization in the way mobile gadgets view the web? Or is the speed of technology moving companies in different directions?

Rege: There might be some day when we have true standardization, but I’m not sure how old I will be. We’re not going to hold our breath. We believe the world will continue to be fragmented on the OS and browser side.

Mobile Crunch: What does Yahoo see as the biggest challenge in the mobile marketplace?
Rege: Helping users figure out what’s possible. Sometimes this industry gets too caught up in technology. The key is finding simple, compelling applications.

If I had one wish about driving usage to the mobile platform, it would be to come up with great ways for users to understand what they can do on the phone and provide services to them in a way that is not complicated.

Labels: Yahoo

Great tool to compare mobile search. Go and check it.

Labels: google, mobile, search, Yahoo

Yahoo has expanded its oneSearch service (launched in January this year) to the mobile web—meaning that you don’t have to download the Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 app to use it, just go to m.yahoo.com and there’ll be a link to it there. The move is designed to make the service available to a much wider audience: Around 85 percent of handsets in the US have some kind of internet browsing capability.

At the moment the service is only “available” in the US. Anyone with an internet-enabled phone can surf into the site, but since it’s optimized to give results local to the searcher the experience isn’t going to be as good. Over the coming months oneSearch will roll out in additional country and language versions, although GPS-enabled handsets aren’t nearly as common outside the US, so the consumers will have to input their locations.

Labels: onesearch, wap, Yahoo

Yahoo! Go for Mobile is now available — in gamma version — for Windows Mobile devices. This version includes everything the Symbian folks are already crowing about including email, oneSearch (Yahoo’s mobile search product), photo sharing, and RSS/news ticker-type feeds. Check Yahoo’s mobile site for more information on compatibility.

Product Page

Labels: Go, mobile, windows, Yahoo

Yahoo! today launched a new gamma version of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, a month after the popular new service initially launched in beta. The new gamma version features the ability for consumers to search directly from maps and share oneSearch(TM) results, news articles and the service directly with friends. The launch of this new version expands on Yahoo!'s mobile Internet leadership.
Yahoo! Go 2.0 is an innovative new application that redefines the mobile Internet experience for consumers through a unique product design, ability to personalize with content from the entire Internet and a reinvention of mobile search. The service will be supported by more than 100 mobile phones. Yahoo! Go 2.0 has generated more than 400,000 requests to receive the download from consumers around the world in the first month, demonstrating the strong consumer interest in this new service.
Key features of Yahoo! Go 2.0 include:

• Search reinvented for mobile consumers - oneSearch recognizes the intent of a search term and presents relevant content - not just a list of web links to PC sites - on the results page. Results are grouped by subject making it easy to read through and drill down to get more details.
• Be local, no matter where you are - The Local & Maps widget gives consumers quick access to comprehensive local directory information for businesses across the US, enhanced with ratings and reviews from the millions-strong Yahoo! community. Interactive maps feature the ability to directly search for local businesses, get driving directions and real time traffic updates.
• Rich, highly personalizable content from millions of sources - Current headlines and a breaking news ticker in the News, Sports, Entertainment, Weather and Finance widgets keep consumers connected to the information that matters to them. Consumers can customize to receive content from the millions of sources on the Web that publish in RSS.
• Photo sharing keeps consumers connected to their community - The Flickr(TM) widget integrates one of the Web's most innovative and prolific photo-sharing communities, making it easy for consumers to upload(1) and manage images from their camera phone. Consumers can also easily share photos, view their friends' pictures and browse or search the millions of images.
• Streamlined e-mail keeps consumers in sync - The E-mail widget allows consumers to quickly respond to, delete or compose new messages or view attachments with a single click - all automatically synchronized with their Yahoo! Mail account in real time.

The new gamma version of Yahoo! Go 2.0 also includes display ads from major global advertisers. The advertisements will run in several of the Widgets, near the top of the page. Consumers will be able to click on these interactive ads to directly call the advertiser or to learn more information about the advertiser's offer.
For more information on Yahoo! Go 2.0, including the mobile phones that are currently supported, go to: http://go.yahoo.com. Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the next generation of the service that launched for Symbian and Windows Mobile phones in 2006.

Note: I downloaded, installed in my N93 but the application still do not work (The beta did not worked too). The message that i am receiving this time is:

An error occurred. The last widget used has been disabled. Please restart if you want to try again

Frustating...

Labels: Go, mobile, N93, Yahoo