In-Brief: A deep-dive into this week’s announcements PLUS a Q&A with Yahoo’s Adam Taggart.

Reams have been written about onePlace, a service designed from the ground-up to bring our pick of web content together so we can access it ALL through a mobile browser or PC (or any other Internet-connected device for that matter). The tool builds on other new mobile applications from Yahoo. Specifically, oneConnect, a tool to update social-networking and messaging on one mobile platform (which Yahoo announced in February); and OneSearch, which aggregates news, weather, financial data, photos and Web links based on search queries.

For the record: Yahoo plans to roll out oneConnect, along with onePlace, in the second quarter as part of Yahoo Go 3.0, an all-in-one mobile offering it introduced in January and now plans to launch across Europe. Basically, the Yahoo Go 3.0 mobile Internet platform is Yahoo Go 2.0 on steroids and much more open, allowing users to personalize the start page – even if that means replacing a Yahoo service from the carousel with their favorite Internet brands via a third-party widget. In the U.S., users can download Yahoo Go 3.0 on 30 mobile devices from major manufacturers. Over the coming months, Yahoo Go 3.0 is expected to be available on hundreds of devices worldwide, the company says.

Hmmm….onePlace, oneConnect, oneSearch, and a mobile Internet platform that covers the bases to be the premiere starting point for our journey across the mobile Internet. That’s a lot of emphasis on “one” – and kudos to ADOTAS for figuring out (as I stress in my Q&A further down) that “Yahoo is clearly trying to reposition itself as a major player in the online/mobile search and advertising universe – a domain that Google currently rules.”

To play, you have to be an all-encompassing destination/platform allowing people to organize, experience and interact with all things digital; to win, you have to offer choice and cultivate a close relationship with the customer (at least close enough to glean some personal data provided by delighted users).

Yahoo “gets it” and Adam Taggart, director of product marketing, Yahoo Mobile, kindly agreed to an impromptu Q&A/briefing to connect the dots.

This excerpt says it all.

Q: Go 3.0, oneSearch, onePlace, oneConnect. What’s the interplay between these offers?

A: At CES this year, we made a couple of announcements that repaint the picture. We sort of redefined our mobile mission, which is to create and grow a mobile ecosystem that will openly support billions of consumers by providing indispensable services to key members of that ecosystem. Key members are developers, publishers and advertisers.

The fact that I mentioned billions of consumers is important because it distinguishes our strategy from the other players in this space. A big problem of the mobile industry today is that it is so fragmented from a technology standpoint. With all these different solutions out there – thousands of different device types, different operating systems, different browser types and different networks – players begin to specialize and, in our space, [companies] generally take either a device specific route or an operating system’s optimized route.

A good example of a device optimized route would be Apple with the iPhone, and a good example of the operating system’s optimized route would be Windows Mobile or Google announcing the Android operating system. Those are very good strategies in and of themselves. But they are also limited because they only focus on a slice of the pie. iPhone just sold their four millionth phone, which is great. On a relative basis, they’re making progess. But there are 2.5 billion other phones out there that aren’t iPhones.

Because we’re Yahoo, our brand promise is all about ubiquity; we’re really all about providing the best mobile internet experience for your phone -for as many phones as possible. Yahoo services run on many hundreds of devices around the world in our clients offerings, and then through the vast majority of mobile browsers around the world.

So when we now roll out a new Yahoo service, we write it to our mobile platform once and it instantly runs across all the device types that Yahoo services are available through. We also know that to be successful in the mobile space, because the user has such limited real estate on the mobile device and they have such limited time, every pixel of the experience has to be personally relevant for that user for them to want to continue to use the services.

So to that end, we have focused the resources we have on the mission-critical or what we call indispensable apps. We’ll call them mobile-first services, which are critical to providing an excellent mobile experience and, no surprise, those services are search, communications, and content consumption. That’s at the core of today’s announcement.

Q: That’s the consumers. What about publishers who have to cope with fragmentation?

A: We’re saying for everything else: What we want to do is open up this ecosystem so that we can tap into the power of the collective talent and create a power – the world’s developer community – and enable the publishers of the world to bring their content to mobile so that we can create this explosion of choice for the customer and let them create hyper-personalized experiences. They can really build their own ideal internet experiences for their phones themselves.

There’s a ton of content out there that wants to go mobile but it’s just been so darn hard that if a publisher wanted to create a mobile site or mobile application, they had to go out and find a mobile developer. So what happens is only the largest publishers go through with it and, even then, they tend to target specific devices or segments – not everyone and not every device. By opening up our mobile platform, we’re now taking out some of the biggest hurdles developers and publishers face. So now anybody who knows XML can create using our tools, a pretty compelling mobile widget experience. And once it’s created and plugged into our platform, it instantly runs across all the devices that Yahoo services run on.

Q: It’s only been weeks since you introduced this. What are you seeing?

A: This is the beginning of what we expect to be a continuing avalanche of innovation and of content and services going mobile, as people now write to this platform. For consumers, it results in this ever-growing choice of all these different services out there, and they can again go in and custom-pick and decide which ones they want on their phone based on their own unique tastes and preferences. And all the while, the core services that need to be truly great to make this experience work as well as it can be – and that goes back to finding information, communicating with people, and consuming content – are the ones that we ourselves are going to be principles in; those three products that we’ve introduced.

That’s where Go comes into the mix. If you have a low-end phone, you can always enjoy all of these services that we offer through your browser. But if you have a phone that’s capable of running the client, we’re always going to be able to do more when we have software on your phone.

Q: Is Go 3.0 out there because Go 2.0 didn’t deliver?

A: Go 3.0 is a result of two things: One, it’s a visualization of really listening hard to our 2.0 user base and making the improvements that they’ve been asking for inside of a product. Two, it is the visualization of where we think the future of the mobile internet is going.

Starting at the launch of 3.0, you’re now really able to begin to custom design your own ideal Internet experience. Go had a fixed set of widgets in the carousel, and they were all Yahoo services. With 3.0, it’s completely open. So you can customize that carousel any way you want to. And you could imagine that the gallery of widgets gets bigger and bigger and bigger as it’s going to. Every individual person’s gallery is going to look different. It’s going to be their own unique fingerprint essentially.

Q: You’re giving me a platform on my terms to make my home base and personalize. I am volunteering information to you which would allow you to also deliver to me relevant messages or advertising…

A: First and foremost, we strongly believe that the mobile internet is going to be monetized in largely the same way as the PC-based Internet – so performance-based advertising like sponsored search, and then displayed advertising like banner ads. We have plenty of examples of both types of advertising throughout our mobile services. But this is another part of our business where huge focus is being placed.

Without going into too much detail, we’ll be employing a lot of the various demographic behavior-based targeting to advertisers on the mobile Web – the same as on the PC-based Web. And everything will be done as it is in the PC-based Web with the utmost respect and safeguards for user privacy.

But you can see by leveraging that type of data, much, much more advertising can be served which again benefits the advertiser in terms of higher yield. But it also benefits the consumer because if they’re going to be served an ad, you might as well be served an ad that’s going to be useful to you.

Q: You have eBay and other majors on board. What about the individual publisher?

A: For smaller publishers we have monetization tools that will be rolled out in the future. What you can get is discovery; distribution engagement with your existing users, as well as the ability to actually generate revenue on that by using the Yahoo platform. The same tools that we offer to advertisers, you’ll be able to access as you build your widget. You might say, ‘I want to monetize this part of my widget through display ads and over here actually and some special links would make better sense’ or nothing if you don’t want to serve any advertising when you’re out there. Totally up to the publisher.

You get a healthy revenue share of the revenue that’s generated on your widget; it’s your widget after all. You can gain free distribution to the tens of millions of mobile users who use Yahoo every month.

Q: And I’m indexed for your search engine – or should I say federated search?

A: You are discoverable. You’ll also eventually be able to index into our federated search. Say you create a wine widget and someone searches on fine wines or Chardonnay, whatever. If you’re popular enough amongst users, you’ll be surfaced there in the search results.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research, Mobile Social Networking, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.