Yahoo revamps mobile web strategy

Yahoo announced the beta launch of its revamped flagship mobile offering Yahoo Go 3.0, promising an upgraded and feature-rich user interface, start-page personalization and customizable access to web brands and services via third-party widgets. Among the new wrinkles is a mobile web gateway Home widget featuring e-mail access, calendar and Flickr photo applications as well as a customizable collection of mobile snippets--i.e., personalized mobile web previews--spotlighting news, weather and related content. The Home widget also enables direct access to Yahoo oneSearch. In the days ahead, the Yahoo Widget Gallery will introduce widgets from eBay, MySpace and MTV.

In addition, the Yahoo Go 3.0 beta client launches a new mobile advertising initiative, which the Internet giant calls the first in a series mobile monetization tools and services planned over the course of 2008. Yahoo presently offers mobile display advertising in 21 countries, with search marketing live in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. Yahoo's Mobile Developer Platform also introduced a one-stop solution enabling third-party developers to create mobile-optimized 3.0 widgets, providing tools to write code once and publish their content across the device ecosystem.

"Yahoo's ultimate goal is to bring the best possible Internet experience to the billions of mobile consumers around the globe," said Yahoo Connected Life executive vice president Marco Boerries in a prepared statement. "We believe that to succeed on such a scale, the best strategy is to open up our mobile platform in order to tap the innovation and talent of the world's developers and publishers. Together, we'll be able to offer the wide selection of content and services that will allow individual consumers to choose their own ideal mobile Internet experiences."

For more on Yahoo's mobile web efforts:
- read this release

Related articles:
Yahoo's Panama ad platform going mobile
Yahoo, America Movil ink mobile search deal
Yahoo: Mobile web to overtake PCs in next decade
Yahoo mobile search expands across Asia Pacific
Yahoo announces revamped mobile search
Yahoo expands OneSearch to mobile web