New Yahoo onePlace completes mobile trilogy

By Giselle Abramovich

March 5, 2008

OnePlace – the last piece of the Yahoo Mobile trilogy

Microsoft or not, Yahoo is clearly on a mission to grow the mobile ecosystem. The unveiling of mobile content management tool Yahoo onePlace is evidence of that mobile focus.

Yahoo has already cemented itself as one of the early adopters of mobile with achievements in mobile search and communications. Now, the Internet giant is offering users “onePlace” to help better manage the large array of content available across the Internet.

“Yahoo Mobile has re-declared its mobile mission,” said Adam Taggart, director of product marketing at Yahoo Mobile, Santa Monica, CA. “Our mission is to create and foster a mobile ecosystem that will serve billons of mobile consumers through indispensible mobile products for advertisers, publishers and users.

“There are some services that are completely core to providing a good mobile experience for users,” he said. “There is a pattern in our announcements, starting with search and finding information, then communications and connecting people and now with content managing.

"With onePlace we have completed the Yahoo Mobile trilogy, getting everything you care about all in one place, to aggregate and manage what you care about on your phone.”

Will onePlace become the only place?

Yahoo onePlace will bring together a consumer’s interests, passions and important information into a single location – creating a personalized experience. OnePlace is basically the mobile version of Yahoo’s existing My Yahoo – a customizable Web page with news, stock quotes, weather and many other features.

With onePlace, all of the user’s preferences and interests are instantly organized, kept current and served the way a user prefers.

Yahoo onePlace has been designed as simple to use because it is based on a familiar process of using bookmarks to instantly link to any piece of content from the Internet. It lets users set up personalized views, collections, categories, stream updates, favorites, dynamic updates and a mobile RSS reader.

Yahoo onePlace will launch, along with Yahoo oneConnect, in the second quarter.

European expansion
Meanwhile, Yahoo announced the upcoming availability of Yahoo Go 3.0 for users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain, as well as several new European-based widgets that will be accessible across Yahoo’s mobile browser and client-based offerings.

“Millions of users use Yahoo Go and it’s the best Internet experience, with fully localized versions for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Connected Life at Yahoo, at the CeBIT conference in Germany.

“We want to make sure people can get whatever service they want from one starting point, whether it’s a Yahoo service or not. We are in the business of creating a best-user experience.” 

Within the next two months, Europeans in the selected countries will have access to localized services from new mobile widget development partners such as Eurosport, XING, eBay, MySpace and Dopplr.

Yahoo Mobile Widgets will be accessible via devices that support the new Yahoo Go 3.0 client or the recently redesigned Yahoo mobile home page, available at http://mobile.yahoo.com.

During the coming months, the number of compatible devices is expected to expand substantially and begin to roll out internationally.

So what is Yahoo’s mobile strategy?

“There are a few key elements of our overall mobile strategy,” Mr. Taggart said. “The mobile space is very fragmented from a tech perspective. There are too many browser types and various carrier networks and it’s hard to pour mobile services across all of that.

“Mostly companies have been rolling out products that are carrier- or device-optimized,” he said. “We want our services to run well on all devices, all the billions of devices. We have been using a lot of resources to leap forward in mobile.

"When we launch a new Yahoo Mobile service, it instantly runs on all devices that Yahoo’s stuff runs on. The whole open nature of our open platform is Yahoo’s strategy going forward.”