At CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas, Yahoo unveiled three new cell phone apps that have been cooking in Yahoo's kitchen. We got a taste of all of them. There's Yahoo oneSearch 2.0 (hands-on review), which has debuted on selective BlackBerrys with a new feature to search for any term you speak or type.
Then there's a dynamic bookmarking feature, Yahoo onePlace, which focuses on managing your interests. In addition to bookmarking search results, like a flight number, it will also import sites you've previously starred on GoogleReader and Digg, and will develop a predictive search that adapts to your search preferences. My favorite feature lets you sort links into collections, for instance, all links pertaining to an upcoming trip or birthday party.
Taking a detour from search-related items is oneConnect, which, similar to Digsby, puts your instant messenger, Twitter, and social network contacts into one place, but on your cell phone. The integration of SMS and e-mail capabilities from your smartphone makes it possible to seamlessly carry on conversations when a buddy's logged off IM.
Yahoo expects to release all three products as widgets for its all-in-one mobile content app, Yahoo Go 3 (reviewed) over the next few months, but each should also be available as a standalone app for users who prefer their Yahoo a la carte.
Yahoo is on a mobile roll.
The Internet company on Tuesday unveiled a new bookmarking tool for cell phones that lets people keep track of favorite Web content--news feeds, search results, Web sites--from one place on their handheld. The technology, called Yahoo OnePlace, will be available in the second quarter of 2008, according to Yahoo.
The tool builds on other new mobile applications from Yahoo. Those include OneConnect, a tool to update social-networking messaging on the phone (announced in February), and OneSearch, which aggregates news, weather, financial data, photos, and Web links based on search queries.
Users will be able to create and access social bookmarks on their phones with OnePlace.
(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)Yahoo has heavy competition in mobile. Earlier Tuesday at Germany's annual CeBit conference, Google demonstrated Google Gears, an open-source browser extension for mobile phones that lets developers create Web applications that can run offline. For now, Google Gears supports Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 phones, but not Apple's iPhone or other smart phones running Opera browsers.
Last month, Opera also switched out Yahoo and made Google the default search engine for its Opera Mobile and Opera Mini Web browsers designed for handheld devices.
Still, Yahoo's aim is to become the default access point for mobile-phone users accessing the Web. The idea behind OnePlace is to let people bookmark any piece of Web content--news feeds, sites, videos, images, e-mails, search queries--and put that material into a topic category such as travel or "trip to Paris." That material will be automatically updated and accessible from the phone. People can sort their bookmarks by local relevance or popularity with friends; and they can organize the material in any way they like.
"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," Marco Boerries, Yahoo's executive vice president of "connected life," said in a statement.
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