Yahoo announced three new mobile applications Tuesday as the company continues to focus more on developing specific applications for the iPhone and other select smartphones like the BlackBerry.
The most widely publicized application to be announced Tuesday is Flickr for Mobile. This application is only available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. It's free from the iTunes App Store. And it allows users to upload, share, and tag photos and videos. Flickr already has a browser-based mobile app at M.flickr.com.
The official Flickr app for iPhone and iPod Touch offers search, browse, and upload features.
Yahoo also created two new mobile applications for a few BlackBerry models.
Yahoo Finance for Mobile works on the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the BlackBerry Bold, Tour and 8900 series. This free application allows users to track companies, market indices, and news. It also lets users drill down into specific companies for more data. Yahoo already has a browser-based version of the application.
Yahoo also announced Yahoo Fantasy Football for Mobile. This application is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry Bold, Tour and 8900 series. Using this application, football fans can manage their teams from their phones, add and drop players, view match-ups and player stats, and get news and expert advice.
These new applications, which are specifically designed for the iPhone and a handful of BlackBerry devices, are part of the company's latest strategy to address the mobile market. Earlier this year, Yahoo shifted its mobile strategy to focus more on developing separate and distinct applications instead of creating services that fell into an all-encompassing Yahoo application.
"Before we had a one-size-fits-all approach to the application market," said Sandeep Gupta, senior director of mobile applications for Yahoo. "But the iPhone changed how consumers accessed applications. Now, they want to search for and download point applications. And we thought it was better for us to fit into this world."
Yahoo's primary goal with the strategy shift is to bring Yahoo's PC-based services to mobile phones. And in order to do this, Yahoo executives said they needed to develop and distribute applications like other developers, which meant adopting the iPhone model.
To execute this strategy, Yahoo is taking a two-pronged approach. It is offering browser-based applications for its more general properties, such as travel, personals, or some of its entertainment sites. But for more frequently visited sites, such as Flickr and Finance, Yahoo is creating native applications.
"Yahoo has a huge set of properties that we want to bring to all mobile users," Gupta said. "But we can't have customized application experiences for all of them. It's too much work. So we have created a broad experience for a whole host of sites. And we're creating a more customized app experience with a richer experience for certain vertical sites."
In February, the company announced the newly revamped Yahoo Mobile service, which combines all the organizational elements of Yahoo OneSearch, OnePlace, and OneConnect together in a single application. The redesigned service is a scrollable mashup of search, news, e-mail, social networking, finance, weather, sports scores, and other RSS feeds.
The company decided to offer the service to more than 400 mobile devices as a browser-based application. But it also built a version specifically for the iPhone. The app is free to download and is available on Apple's iTunes App Store.
Now, Yahoo has created three other native applications that have been customized for specific devices. Initially, these applications are only available on the iPhone and certain BlackBerry devices. The reason for this is simple. The iPhone and the BlackBerry currently have the most interactive mobile users, Gupta said. But he added that the company will eventually tailor these same applications for other smartphones, such as the Palm Pre and Google's Android phones.
"We're not waiting for these other devices to get popular," he said. "Work is going on. But it's a matter of priorities. There is a lot of investment needed to build these applications. And we have prioritized which devices have the most interactive users."
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.
(Credit:
Mobio)
GetMobio is a mobile lifestyle application that's trying to put your social life at your fingertips, literally.
The downloadable app helps you find places to go, get reservations, buy tickets, browse movie reviews and get directions--and it can all be done in very few clicks and with minimum data entry, according to Mobio, the company that created it.
The product is launching this week at Demo 07 in Palm Desert, CA, but the executive team dropped by the CNET offices last week to do a quick demo.
GetMobio is organized as a series of "collections," which is the company's way of saying "themes." Personally, I appreciate that almost every theme revolves around eating. Themes like "After Midnight," "Chilling Out" and "Urban Trekker" offer ideas for destinations--restaurants, clubs, lounges, shopping, cultural activities--and help you plan how to make it happen.
Mobio also has partnered with a few Web services for some feature applications, like Open Table Mobile, Mobile Flight Times and Mobile Movie Times.
The application definitely piqued my interest, but, of course, it helps that I occupy the midrange of their core demographic: 18- to 34-year-olds. To that end, GetMobio is optimized for use on a Motorola Razr, which is a good call, since according to The NPD Group, Motorola sold about 12 million of those phones last year. It will work best for Cingular/AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile users with all-you-can-eat data plans.
GetMobio is free to download, but expect to see ads running underneath the applications, sponsored business listings, and targeted offers like restaurant coupons.
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