Yahoo! onePlace Revolutionizes Mobile Content

Hannover, Germany — Yahoo Inc., still fending off a $41 billion takeover bid by Microsoft Corp., hoping to allow its customers the ability to better ‘manage’ the wide selection of content available across the Internet, Yahoo on Tuesday unveiled onePlace,” a content and services management tool that lets users keep up with their favorite topics using dynamic bookmarks.

Yahoo’s forthcoming onePlace enables mobile users to manage content in a single, instantly organized, constantly-updated spot on their phones.”

Unveiled at the CeBIT 2008 technology show in Hannover, Germany, and which is set to launch in the second financial quarter of this year — will enable a hyper-personalized” mobile Web experience.

The new tool is designed to help mobile users organize and make sense of the sheer amount of content now available to mobile phone users by pulling it together in an instantly-organized, highly personalized, and constantly-updated place.

Yahoo’s goal is to become the starting point for the most users” of the mobile Internet, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Life business.

With the introduction of Yahoo onePlace, we are announcing the next essential component to our mobile product line up,” said Boerries, in a statement.

Yahoo onePlace is where users will be able to find what matters to them the most, no matter where their interests, passions, and information come from. Yahoo onePlace will provide mobile users with a rich and dynamic content experience,” he added.

onePlace’s bookmarking tools will enable users who access the Internet from smartphones and other handheld devices to automatically organize content they seek out while on the go, Yahoo said. onePlace organizes content into categories that reduce the number of clicks a user needs to perform in order to find their most often visited Web sites and services.

onePlace will leverage bookmarks, a technology millions of Web users are already familiar with. Regardless of where on the Web the content is stored, users can bookmark it back into onePlace categories, where it will be dynamically updated.

As Yahoo envisions it, a person planning a trip to Paris could create a collection of bookmarks, or links, to information such as a weather site, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotels, walking maps, etc. OnePlace includes a mobile RSS reader, so people can subscribe to content feeds to stay on top of the latest information.

Users also can create links to personalized content on the Yahoo network, including MyYahoo home pages or on other Yahoo sites, such as the Flickr photo-sharing network and the Del.icio.us Web content tagging site and third-party sites such as Digg and Yelp.

Bookmarking tools are not new Yahoo’s del.icio.us is one — but Yahoo says it has reinvented bookmarking for phones, given their small screens and different user requirements, with placeholders linked to updated info instead of a fixed page.

You have something that is always changing. You could always just bookmark a site as a placeholder but now it is alive,” Boerries, who is leading Yahoo’s mobile drive, said in an interview at the CeBIT IT fair in Hanover, Germany.

Yahoo is racing to leapfrog Google Inc.’s clear lead in computer search and advertising by custom-building services for cell phones and forming alliances with carriers that already give it access to 600 million mobile phone users.

Yahoo aims to reach 750 million users this year by adding to a partner list that includes Telefonica, AT&T Inc and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile.

onePlace is Yahoo’s fourth major mobile Web tool. Last month Yahoo introduced oneConnect,” a communications aggregation tool that combines e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and social networking on one mobile platform.

One of the more impressive features of oneConnect is a socially connected address book, which will allow users to transfer activities from social networks, professional networks, and communities to their address book. For example, users will be able to stay on top of when a contact updates their status or uploads a photo to their profile.

onePlace also leans on two other Yahoo mobile services — oneSearch and oneConnect — by tailoring the content behind the bookmarks to match the location of users and the preferences and activities of friends and contacts who use the service.

We are not reinventing forms of mobile content or getting into the content business but there are places where you have stuff that you care about, that you are passionate about, that you follow,” Boerries said.

While the new tool relies on bookmarks, it can be thought of as a customized home page similar to the iGoogle or My Yahoo sites used on the Web, said Sterling Market Intelligence Principal Analyst Greg Sterling.

With those services, users can leverage technology such as RSS (really simple syndication) to have content from other sites fed to a single page. Having such a central repository of information is even more important on the mobile Web, said Sterling.

Because searching on mobile devices is a cumbersome, painstaking process, bookmarks or other tools for shortcutting that process will be important,” he said.

Users will be able to gather their favorite Web places either by choosing them on their PC and then synchronizing with their cell phone, or directly on the mobile phone itself.

As with oneSearch, actual information will be shown rather than Web links, often awkward to navigate on a cell phone. Users would be able to get the service either through carriers who have Yahoo deals or download it from Yahoo, Boerries said.

Yahoo already has an award winning mobile product portfolio, which consists of products like Yahoo! Go 3.0, Yahoo!’s new mobile homepage and Yahoo! oneSearch. The company plans to make Yahoo! onePlace available across hundreds of devices and mobile browsers around the world after its release.

Earlier this year, Jerry Yang, Yahoo!’s co-founder and chief executive officer, reiterated the company’s goal of becoming the internet’s indispensable starting point” during the Consumer Electronics Show in the US.

The latest mobile moves come as the drama of the possible takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft continues to play itself out. Microsoft this week rolled out its Silverlight mobile browser plug-in for Nokia smartphones, a tool that enables the phones to retrieve and play Web video.

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