Yahoo Introduces New Mobile Services

I’m at a Consumer Electronics Show lunch event at the Las Vegas Hilton, where Yahoo (YHOO) is introducing the new version of its mobile service, Yahoo! Go for Mobile, and its new search engine for mobile devices, called oneSearch. This is a bit of a rerun; the announcement is coming from Marco Boerries, SVP of Connected Life at Yahoo, who announced a lot of the same stuff at the Motorola (MOT) keynote earlier today.

I’m going to bullet some of the key points; sorry for not being a bit more coherent. Here we go.

Some interesting data on proliferation of mobile phones compared with PCs. Worldwide, phones outnumber PCs 12-1. In the U.S., 4 to 1. In Asia/Pacific, 17 to 1. In Europe, 9-to-1.

What consumers want on the mobile phone is: experience optimized for the phone; fast results, easy to navigate; location relevant results.

What they don’t want: PC search transferred to mobile (60% say they expect different experience than Pc; 91% say mobile search is same or worse experience than PC.)

Boerries: “Today we announced Yahoo! go, our very very beautiful mobile user experience.” Beautiful?

They have a completely implemented version of Flickr as part of Yahoo Go.

They will make complete version of Yahoo Go for any mobile browser.

However, Yahoo Go is not a browser; it is an interactive mobile application.

Let me just interrupt all of this to say that this really suggests how little Motorola had to say today; their big news was actually Yahoo’s big news.

Support over 70-plus devices today; 400-plus end of the day.

List of operators includes Rogers Wireless, and Taiwan Mobile, and various others, but none of the U.S. majors (I made this point earlier in the post on Zander’s keynote.

It boils down to bringing the Internet to the phone

All services will be ad-supported and free to the users.

They are now doing a demo. The interface is icon driven, with a ribbon at the bottom of the page, which you can navigate from left to right; there are icons for news, sports, weather, finance, search and others.

Finance tied to Yahoo Finance on PC; ties into your portfolios created their. One can subscribe to news sources that cover stocks that you care about. One can also add to the watch list by stock symbols.

In entertainment, search results get news, photos, news groups.

Flickr demo of easy uploading from your phone.

Another interruption: I really could be doing something else now, since he said all this during Zander’s speech. Sigh.

Q&A session now. Question on why more carriers have not signed up. He is not quite answering the question, actually.

Question on paid inclusion. He says they will make the distinction clear to the user.

Question on pay-per-call. He says it= is part of the general pay for performance marketplace.