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.
Here at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, Calif., three companies pitched interesting concepts for reshaping the way users will interact with mobile applications and content.
Microsoft-backed Zumobi (previously ZenZui,) will be a free downloadable application featuring 16 tiles (application widgets) that zoom in with touch, tap, or button clicks. Users can customize tiles by picking from the device or Zumobi's online gallery. Zooming into a tile takes you into the always-on application, which contains multiple search functions and a banner ad. Developers, keep an eye out for the software developer's kit announcement. Users, keep an eye out for the upcoming beta.
Mobio lets users create a portal of Web applications on their mobile phones. Since the applications, currently totaling 40, are all provided by Mobio, they share a similar look and feel across all handsets and carriers. Mobio, as a platform, renders images and sizes so users will share an identical experience, regardless of handset and carrier differences. Here's the latest coverage from Webware.com.
FoneMine is one Web 2.0 company that's working to make the Internet more mobile-friendly by offering business partners an XMS-powered scalable platform to build mobile applications for consumer use. Businesses using FoneMine's integrated mobile services can quickly create Java applications using widgets, voice, data messaging, and social networking.
Las Vegas, or "Sin City"--24/7 gambling, drinking, food buffets and general round-the-clock fun. It's a great place to take tightly wired co-workers and get them unwired.
But that's not quite what Rob Veitch has in mind, when he attends Sybase's annual TechWave user conference in Las Vegas beginning Tuesday.
Veitch, senior director of business development for Sybase, touted his company's plans to unveil its unwired enterprise partnership with Taiwanese smart phone maker High Tech Computer (HTC) at the conference.
The HTC alliance is designed to bolster Sybase's mobility efforts, in getting corporate America and its customers unwired. HTC, which manufacturers smart phones and allows its customers to slap their own labels on the devices, is working with Sybase to bake its software into its smart phones early in the process.
Sybase and HTC, for example, are working on rolling out 500,000 PDAs for U.S. Census takers come the 2010 census. I personally can appreciate an electronic version of the census forms, given I was a pencil and paper census taker in college.
Besides getting unwired over the course of the week, Sybase users will also hear about the company's next-generation enterprise mobility platform. The goal is to broaden the functionality of Windows with a platform that can support custom mobile applications.
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