LAS VEGAS — Yahoo’s original game plan of being the starting point for all Internet users when it was still a start-up in 1994 continues today as the company makes inroads in the mobile market space while at the same time enriches the user desktop experience.
Jerry Yang, the 39-year-old co-founder and CEO of Yahoo, told those who came to hear his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show here last week that as the Web becomes more social and open, the more Yahoo will try to be the indispensable platform for both novice and veteran Internet users.
“We’re ready and excited about the next wave of the Internet and the changing face of users… Whatever device they use or content they access, our goal is to become their best starting point on the Internet. It’s clear the (online) world is more open and becoming more social and we want to make the Web more simple and efficient for our users. We call this life with an exclamation point,” said Yang.
With an estimated four billion mobile phone users worldwide by 2010, Yang’s visions for Yahoo include having rich mobile-optimized Web services such as the new Yahoo! Go 3.0 and a spruced up mobile homepage that were launched at the recent CES.
Marco Boerries, Yahoo executive vice president for Connected Life, noted that with Yahoo! Go 2.0, they have seen 10 times more user engagements as against those accessing Yahoo properties using their PCs.
With Yahoo! Go 3.0 made more intuitive, he expects it will be a bigger hit among the growing number of users who now come and go on the Internet using their mobile phones.
“Mobile Internet is becoming an everyday task because of solutions that make people use it. We won’t make our own device or our own mobile operating system… We are providing them a full mobile homepage as their starting point and we assembled applications that we believe people want to use and make them available in millions of devices,” Boerries added.
Yahoo! Go 3.0 is an “open” environment featuring an enhanced design, the new Yahoo! homepage and Yahoo!’s full selection of “mobile widgets” developed by third parties.
Yahoo! Go 3.0 builds on the success and popularity of the older 2.0 version. Instead of just providing a collection of Yahoo! services for mobile phones, the 3.0 version opens up the whole Internet to users.
Yahoo also previewed at CES its new Mobile Developer Platform, a one-stop solution for developers to create mobile applications that can become part of the broad selection of Yahoo! mobile widgets that users can subscribe to and add to their personalized gallery of mobile widgets.
In addition, Yahoo announced partnerships with eBay, MySpace and MTV, which are providing their mobile widgets for the Yahoo! Go 3.0.
“Some 300 devices supported the Yahoo! Go 2.0 version and we expect the number of devices for the latest version to ramp up in time. Any phone that connects to the Internet should be able to run it and we have devices from Motorola to LG that can already run it natively. The goal is to make Yahoo! Go 3.0 to run on all devices and give a solid platform for application developers to distribute and be accessed by potential users. No other platform does it like this,” Boerries said.
He added that the same developer platform has been extended to Yahoo! advertisers so they can make compelling advertising messages for the right devices and the right audience.
Smarter future
Yang’s vision for Yahoo extends to how mail will be reinvigorated by adding richer and smarter capabilities to it.
In the near future, Yahoo! could create a smarter inbox that prioritizes the most important messages from the most important people based on the number of connections the user has made in the past with a specific person or contact, Yang said. Another possibility is connecting Yahoo! Mail to other applications such as maps, blogs and other social tools to help users get more information relevant to them without opening up another browser.
“The Web is not just about content but also collaboration with people in our network that can help find answers to things we do daily,” said Yang.
David Filo, co-founder and Chief Yahoo!, briefly joined Yang onstage to confirm that the smarter online experience that Yang envisioned is within reach.
“The application programming interfaces for mailboxes and other things have been designed. We’re not far away from all that so stay tuned,” Filo said.